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178. Abuse Survivor Delivered from Fear and Unforgiveness: Personal Story with Stormie Omartian

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

As part of the OCD Personal Story Summer Series, Carrie shares a special re-airing of her powerful conversation with bestselling author Stormie Omartian—beloved for The Power of a Praying Wife, Parent, Husband, and other transformative books on prayer. While this isn’t a traditional OCD story, it speaks deeply to anyone who’s carried the weight of trauma, emotional pain, or the lasting impact of growing up with a parent battling severe mental illness. Stormie’s testimony is a powerful reminder that healing is possible—even from the deepest wounds.

Episode Highlights: 

  • How childhood trauma and a parent’s mental illness can impact long-term emotional and mental health
  • The connection between anxiety, depression, and unresolved pain from the past
  • Why healing is often a layered process that unfolds over time
  • The role of prayer, fasting, and faith in emotional and spiritual healing
  • Why support, prayer, and connection are vital when you feel stuck

Episode Summary: 

If you’ve been following along with our summer personal story series, this episode takes a slightly different path—but it’s one I believe will touch your heart in a profound way. I’m re-airing a conversation I had with bestselling author Stormie Omartian.

You probably know her from her bestselling books like The Power of a Praying Wife or The Power of a Praying Parent. What you might not know is that behind her powerful words is a deeply personal journey through fear, trauma, and healing that most would never guess.

In our conversation, Stormie opens up about growing up in a home marked by severe mental illness and abuse, her early struggles with anxiety and depression, and the years she spent searching for peace in all the wrong places. Her story is raw, real, and filled with grace.

We talk about the intersection of Christian faith and mental health—how healing doesn’t always come overnight, and how even after salvation, the work of forgiveness and emotional freedom is often a long and layered process. If you’ve ever wrestled with OCD, fear, shame, or deep emotional wounds, you are not alone.

Stormie’s testimony reminded me that God’s healing is not just possible—it’s personal. And it doesn’t always look the way we expect.

There’s so much more to her story—moments that will move you, challenge you, and encourage you to press deeper into God’s love and freedom.

Tune in to the full episode to hear how God met Stormie in the depths of despair and led her into a life of peace, purpose, and prayer. I truly believe her journey will give you the hope you need today.

Related Links and Resources:

stormieomartian.com

111. Using Humor with ERP with Judy Lair, LPCC

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

This week, Carrie is joined by Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor specializing in OCD therapy, to explore how to use humor in ERP therapy and how laughter and creativity can be powerful tools in overcoming challenges on the journey to healing from OCD.

Episode Highlights:

The use of humor and creativity as powerful tools in overcoming anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

Customizing ERP techniques based on individual interests and strengths.

Strategies for incorporating creativity to confront OCD challenges.

Insights into the sanctification process and the choice between living in faith or seeking constant certainty in managing OCD.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 111 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, I’m thrilled to have Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor, with us to delve into the use of humor in ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) therapy.

Judy’s journey into specializing in OCD began from her own experiences with anxiety and a background as a litigation paralegal. After a transformative period working with a psychiatrist and discovering her passion for counseling, she transitioned to working in OCD therapy. Judy’s approach incorporates humor as a tool to help clients navigate the challenges of ERP therapy.

In this episode, Judy shares how she uses analogies, like the haunted house, to help clients understand and manage their OCD. By embracing humor and creativity, she empowers clients to face their fears in a more light-hearted and less intimidating way.

Judy also discusses the importance of recognizing OCD’s inaccurate threat levels, likening it to a malware virus that skews our perception of danger. Her innovative methods, including using personal interests and humorous visualizations, make ERP more accessible and less daunting for those struggling with OCD.

Tune in to gain valuable insights into integrating humor into ERP and how it can make a significant difference in the therapy process. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review!

Related Links and Resources

www.treatmyocd.com/therapists/76492/judy.lair
Jusy Lair’s Books on Amazon

Explore related episodes:

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

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 111. Today on the show, I have with me Judy Lair, who is a licensed professional clinical counselor, here to talk with us about using humor in ERP therapy. We had a previous episode on ERP that you can go back and listen to; we’ll link that episode in the show notes for you, where we did just a brief overview of what it was. It was also a personal story from Stacy Quick, sharing some of her experiences with OCD and how she became an ERP therapist. Stacy was a therapist we met through NoCD, and we talked about that on that episode. Judy also works with NoCD. 

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Carrie: I’m  happy to have you here today on the show.

Judy: Hi, Carrie. I’m glad to be here. Even with this not being my real voice, I think I can still talk.

Carrie: Yes, she is recovering from a cold here, so thank you for bearing with us on that one. I heard you speak at the AACC conference. That was how we met, and it was exciting to see how many Christian therapists were there interested in a presentation on OCD. That’s not something often covered or has been covered, I guess, at that conference.

How did you specialize in OCD? How did you get that to be a specialty?

Judy: I’ve had a lot of different types of jobs in my life, but one of the things was when I was on the other side of the couch, working through my anxiety and such for about a year, talking to me like, “You can do this, you can be on the other side of the couch.” I’m like, “No, here’s a whole bunch of reasons why, no, it’s not going to be me.” I was never one of those people that everybody came to for advice and stuff; that’s not me. Much more cognitive, I’m much more thinking about thinking, planning, strategic types of things. It’s my forte and stuff. So I’ve worked in a number of areas in different things, especially I was a litigation paralegal in a law firm for a bunch of years.

That was really my background. Then I started working in a doc psychiatrist’s office, and that’s when I kind of got that message from God about, “You really could do this.” So I went back to grad school quite late in life to do that. I found that was my niche, that was the thing I was doing all along; I just didn’t know it. Being a paralegal, educating, and helping people through, I did when people got injured and hurt and helped them through that. That was the start of me counseling. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Carrie: Yes, there’s so many overlaps, I think, between counseling and education and problem-solving. I’m sure that there were things that problem-solving that you had encountered, so I could see how all of the skills would be beneficial.

Judy: Right. I had finished grad school, and I was disappointed because I wanted to work in a Christian counseling agency. Once you spend the time and the money to get your degree, you have to spend extra hours to be able to get your independent licensure. That’s where, at least where I was living, they all wanted independent licensure, and I’m like, “How do I get that if I can’t get that?” It was a quandary. I still worked at the law firm that I was looking at for a bunch of years, and I opened this out of my house. I did evening counseling out of my house. Shortly after I started, there was this woman who came to me and said, “Well, I know I have OCD. I was diagnosed with it years ago. I’ve had treatment at some of the well-known facilities. I now live in my area. So do you think you can help me?” She explained her obsessions and compulsions, and I’m like, “Fascinating. Okay, so when you do this and you do this, then it ends up like this. If you do this instead of this, does it go like this?” She’s like, “Oh my gosh, I have never heard anybody get it who did not have OCD themselves.” I could just get it. It was definitely a gifting from God too. I understand the logic of OCD, which has a lot of logic in and of itself if you understand the root part of it. Once she recommended that, and I started working with her, then I read Jonathan Grayson’s Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m doing everything in the book; I already organically knew what to do and how to walk people through that, which was really exciting. I found my path away. So I eventually took the International OCD Foundation’s Behavioral B2BI training. I spoke at one of their Annual conventions, gave continuing education conferences in Columbus where I was at the time. It just really happened from my niche in my area. Now, 22 years in January, that has been my specialty.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I always used to tell counselors that I was supervising, your specialty kind of finds you; you don’t really find it. I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to be working in the areas that I’m working in now, but I’m happy that God has brought me along this path. Mine kind of branched out of working with anxiety, and once you see enough people with anxiety, you’re going to eventually run into some people with OCD, and it looks a little different.  You have to kind of readjust the toolbox and reexamine some of the things that you’re doing. We talked on that previous episode about creating hierarchies in ERP, the idea behind it that you’re exposing yourself to some things that are uncomfortable, starting with some smaller things and then gradually building up to the scarier stuff. You use a helpful analogy with your clients about a haunted house. Will you go through that with us? Just kind of like you would tell a client.

Judy: ERP, exposure response prevention, seems like anybody who’s heard about it has horror stories that it’s going to be so hard, so scary. But using the framework, thinking about a haunted house, if you’ve ever been to an actual haunted house, there are two things that you know to begin with. 

Number one, you know that nothing in the haunted house is designed to physically harm you. You walk in with that kind of knowledge. Second, the reason why people go to haunted houses is they like the uncertainty. They like the thrill that you get when somebody bumps out, and you don’t know or a noise, and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You get this feeling, this anxiety. I call it anxiety because it would make me have anxiety, but other people are like, “That’s a thrill.” They get this thrill going on. The first time you walk through a haunted house, it’s full of uncertainty. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to walk all the way through and get out the back door. 

The good news for us is that God created a program in our brains called the habituation program. I like to call it Pac-Man. I just like the visual. So you’ve got OCD going, “Scary!” and then we’ve got a big old Pac-Man coming up, and we want to close scary down organically by inside, not us internally doing compulsions or something, but letting Pac-Man do that. The way that happens is if you walk through a haunted house the first time, it’s the scariest because you don’t know what to expect. You walk out the back door, come around the front, you walk through the same haunted house three times; you’re not going to be as scared by the 10th time. Pac-Man’s closing it down, closing down the anxiety to the accurate threat level, which generally is zero. But it closes it down so by the 10th time; it’ll be pretty funny. You walk through it; “Oh, the guy with the fair is going to show up. Yeah, then they’re going to dangle these things and go, ‘Boo!'” You can make fun of it, even if there’s still some level of nervousness in there. If we use humor in that way, like, “Oh, this is going to be silly, funny, scary,” it allows your brain to have that Pac-Man to start readjusting what is true about the threat level and close down the feeling, that adrenaline surge that you get, that feeling of anxiety.

Carrie: Talk about that a little bit more, just the inaccurate threat level related to OCD. Like OCD is telling you that something is going to be super scary, horrible, awful, but like your brain is malfunctioning there.

Judy: Yes, and that is key to OCD versus generalized anxiety disorder. With GAD and other anxieties, there’s still a thought where, “Oh, what if?” kind of thing to it, but your brain is able to quickly, if you use some logic, use some cognitive behavioral stuff, kind of, “Is it really true? Is that really that scary? Has that happened before in the past?” If you use some of those CBT kinds of things, generalized anxiety, your brain is like, “Oh yeah, that’s not really true. Calm down,” but when it’s OCD, it’s like, “No, maybe not that one, but another one and another one and another, and they pop up all over the place like that.” So the key, in terms of understanding if you have OCD, is the inaccurate thread. I call it a malware virus program in your brain. 

If you think of your brain like a supercomputer that God made that always has this underlying operating system running, just like your technology, you’ve always got an operating system running underneath in our brain; that operating system is currently using our senses. What we see, taste, touch, hear, smell. It’s looking for data. Internally, the data it’s looking for are thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and observations. The way it was designed is that if we get one of those pieces of data that pops up, it’s a neutral piece of data initially that brings it to the first program in your brain in the frontal cortex. That program’s design is to say, “Is this piece of data a threat or not a threat?” Definition of threat is jumping out of a plane without a parachute. That is the only definition. There is no other definition that goes with threat. Anything less than that is on a continuum scale of something that don’t really like, gross, that’s really terrible, but none of those are threats. That’s where the malware virus program of OCD gets in there and cherry-picks and hijacks the things that matter to us and skyrockets the threat and says, “Oh, there’s definitely going to be a threat here.” Then it starts pushing those buttons with adrenaline and neurotransmitters, makes you feel like there’s something going on. 

The urgency of now, we have to do it now, we have to figure it out now, know it now. All of that works together to combine to keep the threat being imminent, urgent, right now. That’s the part that with OCD there is no factual evidence that is what is actually true right now. You just think it and feel it, and therefore you feel like you must. Do something to fix it right now, going over and over because you do, you respond to it as if it actually is a threat. Then you create those neural pathways saying this is always a threat.

Carrie: That’s a really great explanation. Originally when I went to a two-day training in ERP with some people from Rogers and I got. Nothing against Rogers, by the way, it was just the training specifically really turned me off to ERP because there were a lot of extremes just we’re going to ban this behavior. You’re not going to be allowed to wash your hands at all, or you’re not going to be allowed to pray because you’re confessing too much to God.  I walked away just feeling not only was this very rigid, but I felt like I was being asked to torture people. And I’m curious, what you’ve done is kind of taken some of these principles and used the scientific evidence of what you’ve learned and yet added humor and made it more fun or let’s laugh at OCD or make fun of it. Tell me about some of those things that you incorporate with your clients.

Judy: I feel like that ERP, if you understand from a faith-based perspective, you know, how God made us and the interaction, learning how to do ERP is very much the same sanctification journey that we want to do in life anyway. We’re always those concepts, the broader concepts of struggling with our fleshly nature. Paul was talking about doing the things he doesn’t want to do and can’t do the things that he wants to do. That sounds very much like doing ERP to me, always has. That’s why I view it in that way. I’m looking at what is the root issue here. And the root issue is that the malware virus is scaring me. That’s something that matters to me is really big and scary. It tells me I should take care of it. I should do it on my own, which is the opposite of what we want to do in a faith-based journey. Yes. In a faith-based journey, we always want to bring God into things. We want to wait on God. We want to hear the truth that God gives us rather than us going ahead and trying to fix things or do it all on our own. So to me, that always made sense in terms of how I do ERP. 

I honestly don’t ever care if somebody who’s afraid of germs is able to reach out, grab a doorknob, and open the door. I really don’t care if they do it with their hand or paper towel. What I do care about is actually finding the courage to get through the door to find out. That really was their brain just scaring them about something and then they’re like, Well, I’m gonna let you do that to my life. I don’t need a paper towel. I’m just gonna keep on moving through. So attitude, that’s the attitude is one of the things that I feel like helps move us through things when we’re nervous and anxious and scared, kind of thing. That way of, let’s go, Jesus, the Rodney staff is with me, let’s go, let’s move it on, get to the banqueting table on the other side. That’s what I’m looking for, is the ability to have somebody be empowered to walk it out. 

Humor and creativity is one of the things I see in the Bible so much. Think about, there’s some amazing, interesting things that, how God does things in the Bible. The biggest one to me is Jericho. Seeing how they won Jericho. That worship band is out front, and all the people are behind singing and worshiping God, and then the walls fall down, like, oh my gosh. 

There’s other things, and I see other stories about how God used different people or situations. We’re very creative that we’re not the norm of how you do that. And that’s what works because God is showing that there’s all of these interesting creative ways of doing things. What I found is humor is really helpful if we can look at OCD. I have people come up with separating OCD as a separate entity and making a Fred Flintstone or one of the funny cartoon characters so that you can like, Fred, I don’t know anything about this thing, germs, or my relationship thing here, Fred Flintstone, what now? Um, and even though inside they’re going to feel like all of this, if you can make fun of OCD in that way and get your family member to say, you leave my wife alone, and then they’re both laughing and the laughter brings that level of urgency and oh no, and oh, it brings it down because you’re like laughing at it. Like you are ridiculous. You just think and think, or “Honey, I think you do,” Yes, you’re the worst thing in the world, being dramatic or silly or whatever. Doing it in these creative, silly ways really helps us as people to move towards something scary long enough for our brain to figure out, like, close it down. It’s not really actually that scary.

Carrie: Yes, I think of the two guys in the Muppets that are up in the balcony, and they’re just yapping around or somebody that’s heckling a comedian, you have that internal heckler, and sometimes it’s helpful to, like you said, create that separation, because it all feels like reality when you’re in what they call the OCD spiral, it just feels like everything’s so real now, but if you’re able to step back and even say, OCD is telling me that I’m going to get sick and die if I don’t do this, or if I go out in public and do these things, Then that helps you kind of create some of that mental separation. I think mindfulness and other activities that we teach clients thought diffusion helps with those things as well.

Judy: It’s really important how God made us and that’s one of the things that I always look for is something that’s sort of organic to how God made us rather than something so rigid and like you said extreme that they’re not, we actually have OCD or not we’re like, that sounds way too far. I would never do that kind of thing. I just feel like that people lost. That’s a little bit too much of the traditional ERP and that makes me sad in terms of understanding that if you work with somebody and with the way we were designed, that it actually helps us to go with the flow. One of the things that when I customize ERP for each client, I always want to find out about their background, things they’re interested in, who they are, if somebody is competitive, say in sports or something. 

I had a teenage client that was like a volleyball player. I’m having her visualize and practice spiking the ball into OCD’s face when it’s trying to give her a hard time because that’s a natural thing that she does and she can use it quickly to say I still feel all of this but I’m going to picture OCD standing there and I’m going to slam this ball in his face. If you’re a sports fan like me and you have your rival teams and you’re like, Oh, that rival team is not going to beat me. No, come on, buddy. You can’t beat me at all. I become animated and silly on purpose so that I can show my client that they can be animated and silly in terms of that. 

We use whatever types of things in that person’s life that they can use as a strength and empowerment strength to stand firm and be able to give some sass and give some, like, you are not the boss of me, give that one to kids a lot. You’re not the boss of me, which they love because they can’t tell that to their parents. They can tell that to OCD.

Carrie: Yes, I love it. I could see my daughter getting in on that if she had all those words right now. She would probably say that. “You’re not the boss of me.”

As far as like traditional ERP versus using humor and creativity, a lot of times I’ll have people just kind of sit and wait it out, right? Like, let’s wait for this anxiety where you’re trying to make the anxiety board, I guess, traditionally kind of wait it out. So you’re using some visualizations with people or. Some other, like, creative techniques where they can visualize and imagine themselves overcoming OCD in that process.

Judy: When you’re just waiting in the midst of it, you’re white knuckling. I hope it goes away soon. I hope it goes away. How long is it going to be? Is it done yet? Is it still here? When is it going to go away? That does not facilitate habituation, that doesn’t give the room for Pac-Man to go and close things down. We have to approach it, even kind of fake it till you make it, in a more empowered kind of stance. So that’s where, come up with a bunch of different ways that somebody can be active, but active exposing themselves and going towards OCD, and active while you’re waiting for that Pac-Man to do its job, rather than just sitting there and white knuckling. and stuff. 

One of the ways that you can do it is that you can say, “Oh OCD, I’m so glad you showed up. You’re such a good guy. I’m glad you’re showing up today. Let’s watch some TV. Do you want some popcorn? I’m not going to talk about what you want to talk about. Talk about TV. Let’s just look here. Oh yeah. You want to talk about this? Eh, don’t really want to talk about that. You can hang around all day you want, but not going to talk about that. Let’s talk about making sandwiches. What kind of meat do you like on your sandwich? What kind of pizza toppings do you like? No, I’m not going to talk about what you want me to talk about. Let’s talk about ice cream flavors or something.”  That is a more just calm, peaceful way for folks that like to be just kind of chill, calm, peaceful. 

You’re accepting that OCD is there. You’re just refusing to talk about what it wants to talk about. You can move it on to being something like I said before, kind of dramatic, real dramatic. This is such an important thing. “Oh my gosh, you are so helpful, OCD. Tell me every little thing. I don’t quite understand how you know. Do you have a question? It’s a hotline to find. Are you on the psychic hotline? Maybe you’re on the psychic hotline. Maybe I didn’t know that you knew all of those things.”

 Some of this like making fun of it, talking about what you’re not gonna take me on, you’re the opposite team. Any of these kinds of ways where you’re active, you’re active in doing ERP, which means you’re keeping your focus on OCD is there, um, looking at your OCD, I’m talking to you, but I am not talking about the topic that you want me to talk about because that thick is your inaccurate threat level on something, I’m not going to go there, you don’t have a driver’s license. You don’t have legs, and you don’t have arms, and you don’t have a face, and you don’t know how to drive. And kind of make it sort of funny that way. You’re being active while you’re waiting for the habituation to happen.

Carrie: You had talked about in your training singing silly songs like Old MacDonald or just other goofy songs.

Judy: I always have to make sure the clients understand there is, any school can be used as a compulsion, so anything you say or do can be a compulsion. Of course, the definition of a compulsion is doing something to make you feel better to avoid and get away from the anxiety, but anything can be an ERP tool as well. 

There are some people that are very behavioral that say you can never sing a silly song or you can never talk about pizza to things. Because it’s always a compulsion, and I disagree, you can use anything to say, “I’m going to look you in the eye, and I’m going to talk about that instead, because I get to talk about what I’m going to talk about.  This is my brain, this is my body, I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about”, and such. You’re using it to expose yourself, where OCD is trying to pull you to its topic, and you’re like, no, not going there. I feel it, not going there. That’s the key, the habituation. It’s not to have your hand on the doorknob for 24 hours without washing your hands. I guess maybe that eventually gets there. But it’s this struggle, this fleshly nature struggle, that where we choose to live by faith in that way, I’m not giving in to our feelings and our thoughts and our worries. As we do that, and we’re an intentional participant, that’s what makes that work better.

Carrie: Yes, I love that verse that talks about working out your salvation with fear and trembling because it’s God that works within you because we have a part and God has a part. One of the things that you and I run into in working with Christian clients is we’ll have people ask us or say things like, I’m praying, I’m waiting for God to take this away, and we’ve talked a lot about healing on the show. We’ve talked about various theologies and prayer and different aspects, but I love what you talk about with this being part of the sanctification process, because whether you have OCD or not, we’re in a struggle with our own minds on a day to day basis regarding are we going to be focused on the things of God and what God wants us to do? Are we going to be focused on sin and self and what other things that are negative? It really kind of fits in line with that sanctification process. What would you say to someone who says, “I just don’t understand. I’ve prayed and why hasn’t God just healed me from this yet? Or Why isn’t he helping me more through this process?”

Judy: What I’d say is that has to go back to our understanding of our role in God’s role and who he is. We have to broaden that picture too.  The Bible is very clear. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. We do not have the understanding, whether it’s about something in our personal life, or why God allows terrible things in the world, and such. It has to go back to, we always make the choice of, are we going to be the ones trying to figure it out and try to get God to answer to us about things that we don’t understand and figure out or if we understand the parental way of doing things. 

If you’re a parent, you understand that there are things that you say you can do with your child that they won’t get. They don’t understand because their age, their developmental age, or they haven’t walked through something yet. We know why we’re asking them to do or not do something, and they just think we’re being mean and they don’t get it and they don’t understand. To me, that’s parallel. “I don’t understand why you don’t take this away from me. I don’t understand why you allow things in the world. That causes me in my immaturity, that’s where I think that comes into our immaturity, back to sort of childishness of like, “I want to understand, I’m going to demand that I have to understand. I demand that you explain it to me”, whatever that might be, which includes that, “why haven’t you healed me” kind of thing, then our immaturity comes out and that’s what I think some of that’s a design to show that coming to the surface again, our fleshly nature is coming to the surface rather than saying, I choose to believe God is my heavenly father, who’s created me and loves me unconditionally therefore, everything he does is for my good. Even though it doesn’t feel like that and they don’t see it that way, I choose in faith to trust that and just walk out. I need to walk out day by day because that’s how I get to a healthier place that God wants me to be. That’s now how we get maturity is choosing to walk it out in faith even when we don’t see that may or may not change at any point in time.

Carrie: How do you work with clients dealing with scrupulosity, who are having some of these difficulties with trusting God, with the uncertainties of our faith and life?

Judy: I have a lot of folks who are like, what if, what I’m thinking or feeling, or even the thoughts that I have are sinful and if I’m not pushing them away, talking about not pushing away the scary thoughts or I’m not reacting to them, then that means, in their mind, that means I’m not faithful, I’m sinning because I’m not trying to push things away.

I go back to the broader concept. We talk about what is their view of God. How do they see God as in a punitive way, as their Heavenly Father? If they’re parents, well, if your child thought this about you, would that be accurate? That kind of thing. Have them understand that this one area that they are worried about doesn’t overshadow all the other things that they actually believe about who God is and how God loves and cares for them.

It’s just out of their fear and anxiety that they want to go out that they want to get certainty and know for sure but nobody has that nobody has that we’re humans and so we don’t have 100 percent certainty of anything honestly about God this side of heaven we really don’t we would like to say we do and folks with especially scrupulosity but let’s see they feel like but my friends or my family say they know what’s Certainty that God loves them or they’re going to have it or whatever they are so certain, well, yes, but no. Nobody has actual sexual certainty and our feelings about anything. If you ask that family member and you track their feeling of certainty from our, to our day to day, year to year, that would change too. It’s just a, a way of speaking at any given time about where we are. feelings but feelings do not equal truth. I broaden it back to how do they want to live out their faith? Do they want to live it out as a faith based journey where they’re walking you know and taking risks in faith or do they want to be the one that trusts in chariots and their own manpower and their own knowledge and their own understanding?

I always bring people back to which one of those two do you want to live out? Well, right now you’re trying to live out your own understanding and getting answer knowing for certain and such and nobody has that, so you can keep doing that if you want your life to keep feeling like this versus choosing to take this risk.

Carrie: I think that normalization of doubts and normalization of uncertainty is huge because in certain faith circles, there are things said like, do you know that you know that you know that you know that you’re a Christian and do you know, you know, you know you’re saved and that’s probably like the worst thing that you could say to someone with OCD because we all have to live with a certain level of uncertainty and unanswered prayers and not knowing. We’re not going to know everything, like you said, and we have to accept that, that we’re in the child space in our relationship with God, and we may not know all the ins and outs and the whys and so forth.

I think this episode is going to be really great and helpful for people who are dealing with all different kinds of OCD and maybe some people that are even in ERP therapy that can utilize some of these strategies that you’ve talked about to help them create a little bit more lightheartedness about it and not have to engage with it in such a serious, like you said, scared manner.

People are scared to engage with this type of therapy sometime. I think your presentation and dealing with other mentors that I’ve had have kind of helped me soften a little bit towards my ERP initial standoff ed ness that I had at the beginning of learning about it, I thought, this maybe, I don’t know that I can really do this, but it just kind of opens a doorway for me to be able to integrate some of these things with the clients that I’m working with.

Judy: Yes, at the beginning, the first couple of years, I had somebody, again, not to nullify Rogers, but who was in the Rogers program, and they contacted me for follow up care, and what they wanted me to do was come to their house, time them taking a shower, make sure they got out of the shower on time, and then time them when they were washing their hands to make sure that they got out of it because that’s what they did at Rogers. I did that for a couple weeks and I’m like, this, I can’t, no, I don’t believe in this. I don’t think this is going to help you long term. Have a babysitter stand there and watch you do these things. That’s not how you’re going to learn. You need to learn how to underline. I don’t want this for my life.  I’m not going to let you OCD do this for my life. So I’m going to find some way to give you some sassiness. And some silliness because I don’t want to live this way. That’s what I can provide to people and that has made such a difference. I am so blessed. I feel so blessed and thankful to God that every day I help people get out of these terrible places, these prisons, these torment place because I can help show them the pathway is that God designed this already that there is a way to get there and that you can do it. There is hope. That’s what we bring to folks is the hope that life can change, things can change and God already has it in your head. Let’s go use what God gave you to be able to get you out of this terrible place.

Carrie: Awesome. Well, we’ll put a link to your NoCD profile in the show notes. And I know you’re licensed in several states so people can. Look you up and see you as a option if they’re in one of those states, so that would be awesome too.

Judy: Not bragging, but I have written some books, so if you want to go on Amazon and my name is Judy Lair. I have a series called “Freedom from Fear.” There’s a specific book on OCD. There’s also one in Generalized Anxiety Disorder and one on stress and worry because men do not have anxiety, they might have stress and worry and then have a big one that talks about my journey with anxiety. It also talks about OCD and, and how I’ve come through all of that in the background I came through, how I got here. That talks about my faith and looking at faith in terms of that. You can go on Amazon and find those things if those are helpful resources.

Carrie: Yes, that’s awesome too. I forgot you were an author, so it’s good to put that in at the end. All right, thanks for your time today. 

Judy: All right, Carrie.Thanks!

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Carrie: I wanted to let you all know that we have a new freebie on our website called How to Handle Difficult Thoughts. You can find this at www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. We have several different free downloads that you can benefit from there, but this download specifically is to help give you a little bit of a taste of our mindfulness course coming up.

This is to give you a little taste of “Reclaiming the Mind: Learning to be Present.” One issue that a lot of clients talk to me about is having racing thoughts, not being able to know how to slow their mind down. Mindfulness is a great way to do that, so this course will be launching soon, and if you get our emails, you’ll be finding out all about it. I Can’t wait to share it with you. 

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 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
Transcript

Transcript

Welcome to the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast. I am your host, Carrie Bock. This is episode 104. We are here with Greg Atkinson, who is a speaker, author, and educator on mental health issues and entrepreneur.

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Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Greg: Thank you for having me.

Carrie: You wrote a book recently called “The Secret Power of Kindness.” In the first part of the book, you talked a little bit about your story. Can you tell us what caused you to want to open up about that or tell us a little bit about how you got to this point?

Greg: I had a desire to write a book that anybody could pick up and read, and my previous books were written to pastors and church leaders, which is a very small niche. I knew that the average or typical reader, if they weren’t in the church pastor world, you may not know who I am. I wanted to open up with here’s who I am, here’s what I’ve been through, here’s why I wrote the book, here’s why I hope you will want to read this book. I had a mentor here in Charlotte who passed away a few years ago, but he told me when he first started mentoring me and he mentors men, he said, “Greg, every man has a father wound and a church wound.” I believe that’s true for women as well, but he was specifically focused on discipling men and mentoring men. I wanted to open the book with a chapter on forgiveness and talk about my father wound and my church wound because I have both and I have found since this book came out. That a lot of people can relate to it and a lot of people have been encouraged by my story.

I talk about issues I went through growing up with sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse. And then I talk about mental health and being diagnosed with anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder. And then I share a situation of even being fired from a job due to disclosing that I had a mental illness. I had no performance issues.

I’d worked there two and a half years, but when I finally felt comfortable enough to tell my boss, then he fired me the purpose of the chapter. The whole focus was forgiveness. It’s that I have forgiven my boss. I’ve forgiven my dad. I have forgiven those that have hurt me. And it’s not a quick and easy thing.

This is a process of years and thousands of hours of therapy and thousands of dollars worth of therapy. Just a lot of individual therapy, group therapy. I talk about in the book going to on site in Tennessee and I have been through everything you could go through to deal with my father when in my church when I just wanted to read her to know that I have wrestled with forgiveness and I found that I was able to forgive those that have hurt me or wrong me, and that as the 1st chapter of 10 keys in the book, 10 keys to unlocking kindness.

This allows me to lead a kinder life because people that struggle with unforgiveness and are hurt and angry and bitter and have anger under the surface, they could snap at people or be rude or gruff and come across as unkind. It’s the opposite of kindness. So I wanted to start with a lot of people have said a very deep chapter, for a first chapter and just share my story and say, here’s what I’ve gone through to be in a place where I could respond with kindness and treat people kindly, but it has been a long journey.

Carrie: We have had a lot of guests talk about forgiveness, and I appreciate the perspective, too, that it’s a process because I think sometimes when we learn about it in church, we think it’s supposed to be just some kind of instantaneous thing, like, “Okay, I forgive this person” but it’s almost like a journey and a lifestyle that you have to adopt between you and the Lord to say like, okay, I’m recognizing when this anger comes up. I’m recognizing when this bitterness comes up and I choose not to go down that path.

Greg: Absolutely. It is a process. And that’s what they say at onsite, trust the process. They have coffee mugs that say, trust the process, but yeah, it is definitely a process and it’s been a lifelong journey with several therapists that are trained in different skills to get to the point where I am now.

Carrie: How long did it take you from when you first started showing symptoms until you got a mental health diagnosis?

Greg: Great question. I think when I look back on my teenage years and my 20s, it was obvious there was something going on, but I actually did not get diagnosed until I was 30 years old. Which is later than a lot of people, but when I got diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and bipolar, I was 30 years old now that I know what they are and what the symptoms are and what things to look for, I can totally see it in my twenties.

Even in my teenage years. I just had no words for it, I was truly ignorant. I thought everything was spiritual and you just pray and it’ll go away and pray more and do a devotional and have a quiet time and you’ll never get depressed and everything will be fine. And I was super ignorant and I did not know anything about mental health or mental illness.

Now, as an advocate and somebody that writes and speaks about mental health. I’m trying to educate those in power and leadership to be careful with their words because they may not realize that you can’t just pray it away and that some people like myself need to take medicine when I speak out and when I talk, I tell people if you need medicine, it’s totally okay.

It’s not anti Bible, anti spiritual. If you need medicine, just like if you had diabetes and you had to take insulin, If you have something going on with the chemistry in your brain, and you need to take a mood stabilizer or something to help with anxiety, whatever your doctor thinks is right for you. I have tried to educate pastors to not shame people for needing medicine or for struggling with anxiety.

I was just flipping through social media 3 days ago. And a pastor had uploaded a reel where he was preaching and he referred to anxiety and depression as sin. And so pastor that I love and respect and know, and I followed him for a reason, but he had talked about going through a season of depression and anxiety, but he referred to it as he had overcome it and he had got the victory. And that kind of made it sound like he was sitting when he was depressed and he was sitting when he was anxious. For somebody like me that has a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, I know that those words from a person on the pulpit can be very dangerous.

Carrie: Yes, and I think unless they’ve experienced mental health disorders or have that self awareness, pastors and ministry leaders, they may not understand what it’s like to deal with anxiety or what it’s like to wake up and not want to get out of bed in the morning. Really giving them these types of personal stories and insights, I think is really helpful and It goes to show you, too, that we’ve come a long way in the church in some ways, but we still have a long way to go, and we still have people that are giving these messages about anxiety is only a spiritual problem instead of it’s a physical, emotional, spiritual problem.

Greg: As s you know, mental illness is often hereditary, and often you have relatives that have that. When I was in my early twenties, I knew that my cousin and my aunt had bipolar. I knew they struggled with depression, but I was ignorant. I was super ignorant. And I remember saying to my wife, if they would just pray more, if they would just have a devotional life and a quiet time, they would be fine. And then when I was 23, right in the prime of my life, and used to be super athletic, I had three ruptured discs and had to have major back surgery, and I was flat on my back in a hospital bed for two months, and I wanted to die for the first time in my life. I experienced true depression. It was the first time ever, but I remember telling my wife, depression is real.

It’s a real thing. I want to die right now. I was 23 years old, laying in a bed for two months. And when I did get up to go to the bathroom, I had to use a walker and I was, all my muscles had atrophied and then I went from a walker to a cane and then I had to go to physical therapy and it was a long journey back and recovery from back surgery, major back surgery.

It was almost like God opened my eyes of depression is real. This is what it feels like. I asked for forgiveness from God for how things I had said about relatives and my perspective of thinking if they would just pray it away, it would be okay. Now, as I have loved ones that struggle with depression, I am very aware that it’s real. And like you said, sometimes you don’t want to get out of bed. Super aware of that now, I don’t struggle as much with depression, but I do struggle with anxiety and take medicine for that. So I’m very aware that you could be fine with God. You could be having a devotional life and praying and worshiping and you and God are great and still you get anxiety or depression. That became real to me at the age of 23.

Carrie: How does anxiety affect you today?

Greg: There’s sometimes physical symptoms like I may be holding a cup or opening something and my wife will say your hands are shaking and I’ll notice there’s like a physical symptom of a tremor or something, which could be a side effect of the medicine, or it could be just how my anxiety manifests.

There’s also a lot of mental games that I go through of thinking worst case scenarios. Thinking about death. I have pain in my back. Is that pain cancer? I have a pain in my head. Is that a brain tumor with my anxiety? I think worst case scenario. I also at the age of 21, as I talked about in the book, my dad died, just dropped out of a massive heart attack.

I experienced a close death very young at 21 years old, and my kids are older than that now. When I was younger than them, I had lost my dad. When I have indigestion or heartburn and I feel my chest hurt, I think worst case scenario, am I having a heart attack like my dad? Am I going to die young like my dad?

When I look back on losing my dad at the age of 21, that’s when my anxiety kicked in, and that’s where my fear of death really came from. I’m sure there’s chemical issues as well and brain issues, but as far as the mental gymnastics that I go through to try to calm myself, everything became more intensified after experiencing a death of someone so close at such a young age.

I will oftentimes feel a symptom or wonder something, and I will think worst case scenario, or my counselor calls it sense of impending doom. You think that you’re going to die, and thank God my wife is a nurse and has talked me out of multiple ER visits of, no, you’re fine, stay home. But I still have those moments where I’ll go to the ER because I’ll think, no, my chest is hurting.

I’m pretty sure this is a heart attack. And I have had numerous EKGs where they say it’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with your heart. It’s just heartburn. Go home. But like I said, I have loved ones that struggle with depression. I really struggle with anxiety and it is exhausting. The medicine can help chill you a little, but the way the mind can race and the way the mind can think of worst case scenarios is exhausting.

My heart goes out to anyone that struggles with anxiety, and I know you addressed that on this podcast. I can very much relate to it. And as I have opened up to others, I’ll hear from people. Oh, my sister has anxiety or my mom has anxiety. I have found that there are so many people that struggle with mental health issues, but we’re just not aware of each other.

One of the tactics of the enemy is isolation, thinking we’re alone and we’re the only one that goes through it. Whereas, on any given Sunday, when a pastor stands up to preach, at least one fourth of the congregation has some type of mental illness. They say 25 percent or more. When they’re standing up to speak, a fourth of the congregation is struggling with something and it could be anxiety. My heart goes out to them.

Carrie: I’ve heard from some pastors too, who have been really vulnerable and I think that makes a huge difference to see a spiritual leader get up there and say, Hey, I’ve been to therapy or I hit a rough patch in the road and I needed to go talk to somebody or I needed to look at medication as an option.

We had a pastor on here not too long ago who talked about how he started having panic attacks and developing anxiety in his process. Of working through that. It’s always helpful for us. We’re scared, I think, sometimes to be vulnerable and share our story, but it blesses other people in the body of Christ when we have the courage to do that and to open up.

I appreciate you sharing your story here and also in your book. Why a book about kindness?

Greg: Well, it’s no secret, we live in a divided world, and there’s a lot of hatred online. There’s a lot of device in this. There’s a lot of anger and tearing people down instead of building people up. And, as you know, kindness is a fruit of the spirit. And I thought if this is what the Bible teaches that Christians should be known for, then we as the church have got to do a better job. I met with my publisher who I’ve known for 20 years. He flew to my house, met with me in person. I had shown him some thoughts I wrote down four years ago. He said, “I love talking about a fruit of the spirit.” He said, “I think you need to go all in on kindness and write about the power of kindness.” I adapted what was a previous book proposal that the subtitle was “The Power of Kindness,” and then we went all in on it and made the title, “The Secret Power of Kindness.” I start the book with a sentence, “Imagine a world where everyone is kind to one another,” and I end the book with that.

That’s kind of my dream of no matter who picks up my book and no matter what faith background they have, if we could treat one another with kindness, what I have found and what I talk about in the book is that kindness is contagious, and kindness unlocks kindness. I’m kind to you, and you’re kind to me, and we’re kind to others. We can change the world.

When I talk about kindness being contagious, I share a story of my youngest daughter when she worked the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts. She had a day where somebody paid for the car behind them, and that went on for 27 cars, like paying it back or forward or whatever it is—they kept paying for the car behind them 27 times. And I have had times where I arrived at Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ Donuts, and I get to the window, and they said, “The person ahead of you paid for yours,” and it made my day. That’s what I talk about in my definition of kindness.

I had written it down at like 1:00 A.M., one night, but in the preface, I wrote, “The secret power of kindness is the self-awareness to know that you have the power to make or break someone else’s day and eventually change the world.” That kindness being contagious when somebody bought my meal, I just lit up and just made my day because it was surprising. And when somebody reacts to us in a harsh way or a critical way or a mean way and we respond with kindness, it surprises them and kind of catches them off guard, and they’re like, “Oh, wow, I thought you would bite my head off.” They don’t expect you to respond with kindness.

What I am proposing is a kindness movement, where kindness is contagious, kindness unlocks kindness, and together we are kind to those that we come into contact with, realizing that we do have the power to make or break someone’s day. And I share personal stories in there of how I’ve done that with servers over the years, waiters and waitresses and people that I’ve come across where I just try to make them smile. I try to make their day.

I was literally having a business meeting with my designer last night at 11:30 PM at Waffle House. And we blessed the waitress there, and she is amazing. And I’m going to go back to see her again because it was the first time I’d been to this particular Waffle House. And then before that, I had another business dinner with a friend at my favorite Mexican restaurant, and my favorite waitress Wendy came over, and she loves when I come in because my goal is to make them smile, to lighten their load. I share real stories of that in the book, of things that I’ve done over the years ever since college to build relationships with people in the community.

But, there are stories that go back 30 years of trying to live a life of kindness. And the first chapter is important because I did not receive kindness from my dad, and I never heard, “I love you,” from my dad when I became an adult and left the house. I decided that I’m going to end the cycle, that this stops with me. And I am going to tell my kids I love them, and I am going to be nice to people. My dad used to make waitresses cry in a restaurant. He was very mean, very harsh, is what one of my friends from high school just recently described him when I told him about my book. He said, “Oh, your dad was a harsh man.” And I remember him making waitresses cry. He was just brutal. I remember family dinners around the kitchen table of crying because he just ruined the whole dinner. And I just, when they decided this ends with me, my kids are not going to grow up in a dysfunctional home. They’re not going to go through this, and I choose kindness.

There’s a lot to it that I dive into the book about abiding with Christ and developing a relationship with Christ so that those fruit of the spirit come out of me naturally and I don’t have to force it. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to be kind. I’m going to be kind. I’m going to be kind.” It’s another thing to have it come out naturally as a fruit of the spirit. There’s a quote I share in the book of when the toothpaste gets squeezed, whatever is in there is what comes out. The Bible talks about your heart being revealed, out of the overflow of your mouth, the heart speaks.

I want to spend time with God in such a meaningful way that when my toothpaste gets squeezed, what comes out is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. So the fruit of the spirit comes out naturally. And I don’t always get it right. I’m not perfect. I’m not the kindness expert. But I talked about things that I’ve learned. One for me that was very important was learning to forgive so that I would not hold onto anger and bitterness. Another chapter in the book that was super practical that came from my therapist in life was about the importance of sleep and rest.

There’s a whole chapter for me with bipolar and with anxiety disorder. I really wrestle with sleep and my therapist had given me a worksheet on sleep hygiene and how to get a better night’s sleep and things I can do to set myself up to succeed and to win when it comes to getting proper rest. There’s a whole chapter in the book that addresses rest because if we are not well-rested, then we’re going to snap at somebody, and we’ll again come across as the opposite of kind, and our heart may be that we want to be kind. We want to be known for kindness but we’re so tired and exhausted that we’re snapping at people. That’s a very practical chapter right in the middle of the book of this is something you can do to be at your best.

We’ve all seen the examples of the toddlers that are throwing a fit and fussing and whining and having a mental breakdown in the middle of a store. You hear the mom say, “Somebody needs a nap.” A lot of time it just comes back to something as simple as rest and vacation and days off and a sabbatical if needed, but taking the time to be properly rested and sleep is a battle for me. It’s a battle for one of my daughters. I often say sleep eludes me. It is so hard to get good sleep when you have certain types of mental illness. 

I wanted to talk about things that I have learned and tried and do and practice to get a good night’s sleep because I am not at my best if I am short on sleep. As much as I want to be known for kindness, if I had three hours sleep, I am not going to be in a good mood. And I found that that’s pretty universal. Everybody can relate to that. So that’s a little bit about why I wrote about that.

Carrie: That’s really good. We’ve had a couple of episodes on sleep on the show, one from a spiritual perspective and one from a mental perspective and kind of behavioral change perspective. It’s been good conversations about those things. 

You reminded me of a story that I wanted to share with you. I was just about 2015. I was going through a divorce. My husband was up and left, and I was trying to work, and I just couldn’t even think straight really sometimes. I went into this gas station. They had these refillable cups and if you take the cup back, you get a discount or whatever it is. You don’t have to pay the full price for the drink. So I’m in there in the gas station, and I’m struggling with this lid. For some reason, the plastic lid that I had would not fit on there very well. And this guy comes over, and he said, “You know, you can get another lid. It’s okay. Try this other lid.” It was just such a kind moment for me that someone would step in when I couldn’t even think straight and kind of solve what is a relatively simple problem, but I just remember that moment. It’s almost like bookmarked in my mind of that guy really did make my day that day because it was just tough going through that grief process and him being able to do something so simple. He has no idea how much that affected me.

Greg: That’s where the title came from. You experienced the power of kindness. I went to my barber a few days ago, and she had just opened up a new salon, new suite, and she had a framed picture up that said “The Power of Kindness.” I had already given her a copy of my book and she said, “Look what I got.” And she pointed to this picture that said “The Power of Kindness.” She had read my book, but that is something like you said, that is landmarked in your mind. It made such an impression that you’ve never forgotten it. And that is the secret power of kindness—to make someone’s day and thus change our world.

Carrie: The Bible talks about loving our neighbors as ourselves. And how does being kind to ourselves help us be kind to others? Because I truly believe this and what I’ve seen in my own life and the lives of my clients.

Greg: I write about this in the book. I have a whole chapter on love, which is also a fruit of the spirit. I talk about loving yourself so that you can love others. I talk about being kind to yourself so that you can be kind to others. I talk about forgiving yourself so that you can forgive others, but it all starts with us and self-reflection. I talk about meditation. I talk about journaling. There’s so much that has helped me in a therapeutic way from journaling, and my devotional and anxiety that I wrote came from journaling. It came from writing about what God was showing me in scripture.

I have found that oftentimes, and this was new to me, about a decade ago, I had learned and was taught, and then as a pastor taught, the great commandment poorly. We had bumper stickers at my church that said, “Love God, love people.” And I always taught love God, love others, love God, love people. And it was a two-prong approach. And then the last church I was on staff at, nine years ago, the pastor talked upward, inward, outward, love God, love yourself so that you can love others. It was a three-pronged approach, and that’s exactly what scripture says. Love God, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I have found that oftentimes when we talk about loving ourselves, we cut ourselves out of the equation. And we exhaust ourselves by saying, “Well, and I know the Bible says to love God and love others. So I’m going to try to do it with all my might.” But if we haven’t stopped to love ourselves, we’re not properly able to love others. We won’t have the strength and the resilience to do it. In this book, I do a deep dive into love and the great commandment. And one of the most beautiful and healthy things that you can do is to love yourself, to forgive yourself, to be kind to yourself. And the byproduct of that is you’ll love others, be kind to others, forgive others. It’s a win-win scenario, but it starts with loving yourself.

Carrie: Right. I think one of the things that we do, especially in trauma work, is people will be very shameful or angry regarding things that they’ve done in the past as a teenager, as a young adult, or just a really low time in their life where they made some bad choices and went down the wrong path. And really helping that person gain empathy for that younger self, like, did they have the knowledge? Did they have the skills to act differently? Did they know how to regulate their emotions? And once you’re able to kind of go through all that, it’s like, “Oh, wow, no, I was completely ill-equipped, and I was acting out of my woundedness.” It didn’t make it right or okay, but I can have compassion towards my younger self, understanding how I got to where I was.

That’s often like just a really breakthrough, beautiful moment for someone that helps them also be compassionate towards other people who are acting out of their own woundedness and their own hurt. I think sometimes when we encounter people that are maybe a little bit prickly, we forget, well, maybe they’re really hurting right now, or maybe they have their own struggles they’re going through that we can’t see or we don’t know about.

Greg: I talk about that in the book. There’s a quote that somebody said that I referenced in the book of when somebody is harsh to you, critical of you, or rude to you, or just comes at you in a hard way, oftentimes we want to respond with, “What’s wrong with you?” instead of “What happened to you?” Everybody’s got a story. Everybody has a background. Maybe they were abused as a child, maybe they just went through a divorce, maybe they had a bad night’s sleep. Instead of responding with “What’s wrong with you?” if we have the approach of, “I wonder what happened to them that led them to this point,” because everybody’s got a story. 

As I mentioned in the book, almost everybody I’ve come across has a father when there are things that have happened in our life and our childhood and our early adult life that bring us to a point where we are not acting like our character is and like we want to be known for.

There are things that people go through that lead them to maybe treat us poorly. And if we can start with compassion and realize that, wow, that person could have been through a whole lot in their life. I’m going to extend grace to them. I’m going to extend mercy to them. And grace is undeserved. It’s unmerited favor. People don’t have to deserve grace. It’s just something we give. It is not only my favorite word, I named my daughter Grace, my first child. 

Grace is unmerited favor. It’s undeserved. It is a gift, and a gift doesn’t have to be earned. It’s just given. When somebody comes at me in an attacking way or a rude or tough way, I can choose to extend grace to them, whether they deserve it or not. And just saying, maybe they’re having an off day today. I’m going to choose to be graceful.

Carrie: If you can go back and tell your younger self something that didn’t have the awareness that you have now about mental health issues or what you were struggling with, what would that be?

Greg: Great question. I think because it’s fresh on my mind, I probably have a new answer now. My oldest daughter, who has now gone off to grad school, she’s getting her Ph.D., and she was at the house visiting before she moved into her new apartment over the summer. And somehow we got to talking about Matt Damon or something. And I said, I know it was before your time, but have you ever heard of Good Will Hunting? And she said, Yeah, I guess I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it. I said, “Well, let’s watch it.” So we watched it and that scene where Robin Williams says to him, “It’s not your fault.” That’s what I would tell my younger self because I was abused, but it wasn’t my fault. I was molested, but it wasn’t my fault. My dad was terrible to me, but it wasn’t my fault. That’s what I would tell my younger self because I grew up with just terrible emotional pain because of all that I’ve been through. 

On-site, they do exercises where you speak to your younger self, and they walk you through all types of therapy where somebody stands in and you speak to another person in the group that is representing your younger self, and you address that person, but I think now, after freshly, after nearly 30 years, rewatching Good Will Hunting, I would just say to Little Greg, “It’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”

Carrie: Yes. I feel like we could have this conversation for hours. This has been really great. I hope that people will look into getting your book, “The Secret Power of Kindness.” Thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Greg: Thank you for having me.

_________________________

Carrie: I appreciated this episode so much because I know those that struggle with anxiety struggle to be kind to themselves and often can struggle to be kind to others as well. We all have opportunities to practice kindness every day. All the little acts of kindness do add up to make the world a better place and allow us to share Christ’s love with others. In a couple of weeks, Steve will be back to join me on the show as we talk about what we’ve learned in our third year of marriage. Thanks so much for listening. 

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. 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. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

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
Transcript

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 103. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, and we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today on the show, I have Donna Gibbs, who is a licensed clinical mental health counselor and supervisor in North Carolina.

She is going to be talking with us today about resilience, which I’m very excited to just kind of see where this conversation unfolds.

Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Donna: Thank you, Carrie.

Carrie: Resilience is sometimes described as the ability to bounce back from the difficult things that have happened in our lives. And how would you define resilience in your own words, and what does that mean to you personally?

Donna: I always think resilience gets a little overcomplicated in most places. I think we make it more challenging to understand than it really is. I just think of it as being able to move through hard struggles and trials of life and just keep moving where you don’t get stuck. I also, I think of images sometimes and I think we have talked about bounce back, bounce back. That term is used so often in regard to resilience. I don’t think it’s actually an accurate picture of it. It sounds more like a rubber band that just snaps back. Right. I think it’s actually probably more accurate like a bouncy ball that bounces but then ends up in a different place. I think that we bounce forward moving through struggles and trials with resilience rather than bouncing back because there are some things in life that we move through. And things will not be the same. We don’t bounce back. And so I just think it’s just moving forward through our struggles and not getting stuck. I think it’s that simple and that hard.

Carrie: Yes. How have you seen resilience play out in your own life?

Donna: Well, I mean, we all have stories. We all have our challenges. And again, I think it’s moving through trials and struggles. I remember one time, and I won’t get into the specifics of all the medical, I won’t bore you with all the details, but I remember one time on the first day of what turned out to be a three-month hospitalization. The physical battle of my life, and I remember my physician who is a dear friend.

Well, he grew to be my dear friend through that process. I didn’t know him really before then, but a godly man and an excellent physician. And I remember him coming by my bedside day 1 of that stay, and he delivered the news of what was happening and his recommendations. And what he said to me was, if things go well, you are going to be here for a really long time.

He said, if you were to get depressed, things may not go. Well, he looked at me and kind of leaning forward with that somber tone. He said, “Knowing what I do for a living, I need you to use every tool you’ve ever taught another person and you’re going to have to use it now because if you don’t, you’re going to get depressed and it may not end.”

When you move through a situation like that, things are never the same again. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t good again. That’s what I think about resilience, that it’s seasons like that, life that teach you amazing things that you don’t learn any other way.

You do not learn those things on a mountaintop. Again, when I think of resilience, I think bouncing forward. As a counselor, so many times walking someone through tragedies or trials of life, And sometimes, not always, but sometimes I will look at them in the beginning of that process, and I’m kind of the cheerleader saying, I will hold the hope for you, but I will say there will be a day when you won’t necessarily be grateful that you went through this, but you will be grateful for all that comes out of it. And that’s that, as we move forward, going to bring some things that.

Carrie: I think that’s excellent. That’s very excellent. There is so much truth to that in the sense that our whole identity has to change when you go through a hard time like that, that God uses those situations to build character and to build things like perseverance, that’s what the scripture teaches us.

Do you feel like resilience is a trait maybe that some people have more of than others? Like maybe it’s more innate or is it something that can be learned and developed over time?

Donna: I don’t know if you recall, it’s a couple of years ago, I remembered seeing some announcements or whatever you’d call it. A type R personality trait. Do you remember seeing something like that coming out? It was something that caught my eye because I’ve been studying resilience and just noticing what’s going on in the lives of my clients and it’s close to me. I thought that type R stands for resilience. One of the things they talked about is that this personality trait, they see it as being those who have a type R personality trait are more successful than someone with a type A personality trait.

We think of those type A as being very driven people, very competent, very achievement-oriented, ambitious, but those who have resilience actually are more successful so there are mysteries, I think that remain as to whether someone is born with the leaning towards resilience. I do think that there’s different personality types and traits that lend one more easily to adapt to change and to trials and situations.

I also know, I’ve done this so long, worked with so many clients over the years, and so I’ve watched someone maybe who has been stuck for decades, and I’ve watched as they learn, and as they implement some strategies that build some resilience. I think of resilience as something that we become, not necessarily who were planted as being who has God given us all the ability to move through those suffering moments? Absolutely. But I think there are some mysteries that remain in that whole innate piece. I don’t know.

Carrie: It’s a good process and it’s always good to know that we can learn things even if we feel like we’re more bent towards type A or we’re more of a perfectionist. A lot of times people really struggle when life doesn’t turn out the way their mind had planned it turning out, for sure. That can be just absolutely devastating and wrecking, whether that’s a death, a divorce, a serious illness, a mental health issue coming up. It sounds like for you that happened, like there was a crossroads of like, okay, this could either go really good. Even when it goes really good, it’s going to still be hard orr it could go, your doctor was concerned about your mental health essentially affecting your physical health.

Donna: We know that it does. A legitimate concern. I think about what you’re describing to expectations. We all necessarily attend to, but we have certain expectations as to how things will go life and how things will go, how conversations will go different things when they don’t those unmet expectations, unrealistic or not, those unmet expectations can really throw us for a loop. And our tendency is to try so hard to just get back bounce back to what we think that things would be right. That’s part of what gets us stuck and prevents the resilience.

Carrie: Not being able to pivot, I guess, is maybe a word in the midst of your circumstance. Like, okay, I’m just trying to make situation A work out. Situation A is obviously I have to come to the acceptance. There’s a part of that grief and loss acceptance piece that comes that my life is not going to look like path A, but I still can have path B that’s also good, and that God really works in the midst of all of those situations, I think, that people go through for our good, based on what we’re told in Romans, and it’s really, really hard sometimes, though, for us to wrap our mind around that.

It really takes faith to believe that, okay, there is something good on the other side of this life-changing diagnosis. I definitely have seen that in my own life and the lives of others as well. Obviously, you shared a little bit with us about your experience. Was there anything else that led you towards writing this devotional that you’ve been working on, Bounce, a 60 day devotional to jumpstart your resilience?

Donna: Yes. I mean, personally, all of us have a list of things where messiness of resilience in it, but professionally speaking, I started noticing and I’m guessing 7, 8, 9 years ago, something like that. I started noticing a shift in my practice and my work with clients. And I started noticing that the types of trauma that were walking through the door, just more intense, more common.

I noticed that over a period of time, almost all of my caseload became those who were moving through or experiencing some tragedy, some traumatic, unthinkable life event. And I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be a difference. Between those who were stuck and maybe had been stuck for a short time, or maybe had been stuck for years, decades, versus those who not only were they not stuck, but they began to integrate this traumatic experience or this trial of life into life, and they ended up seemingly stronger than they were when they started.

That perpetuated for me a lot of reading and research because I wanted to know, how do I help the people who are in front of me? How do I help them the most? How can I encourage someone who has been stuck for so long to be able to relinquish the grips of that? For several years, I began writing more and in the realm of resilience and working more and more with clients who were almost exclusively traumatic cases.

COVID hit. You use the word pivot. When I think back on COVID, I think pivot was the key word. It defined organizations, businesses, that were able to survive COVID. It’s as though we’re not just shut down, and we’re not able to survive COVID. When we look at why bounce, I remember one day driving, I live in North Carolina, I was on a trip driving to Florida.

It’s a long trip for us. I was just praying about how to lead our practice effectively, how to pivot, and also how to minister to so many whose mental health symptoms had been exacerbated because here was now a trial, something unthinkable that was universally experienced. And was exacerbating the symptoms of many who had been struggling with whatever story they were dealing with at the time, whatever challenges, maybe marriage or family, or maybe just a history of anxiety or a trauma history or whatever it might be. But those symptoms were turned up some and many who had never ever experienced or were aware of experiencing mental health symptoms were experiencing brand new symptoms. Yes, they didn’t know what to do with it. And so what I felt got impressing is we have to find a way to help more than 1 person at a time and whole person resilience.

Just what we talked about what your mental health affects your physical health well, so does your spiritual health and your relational health, your emotional health. it all matters. It was then that I sensed God leading all had some of those conversations with God that were not an audible voice, but they didn’t have to be.

It was strong enough and just sensing him impressing a resource that will address the whole person that will provide some tools. Primarily taking them to the word, but in bite sized chunks so that it builds a rhythm of resilience.

Carrie: What are some of those traits or things that you teach people or exercises that people can use to strengthen their resilience?

Donna: I think awareness is key. Just being able to check in and just as I talked about that whole person resilience, being able to check in, what am I noticing physically? Is that kind of a body scan head to toe? Where do I notice symptoms of distress being able to take care of your body and to be aware of symptoms that you maybe have relationships being able to assess?

Where are my supports? How healthy are my relationships? Do I have some destructive relationships in my life? And, you know, just being able to check in with those things emotionally. What symptoms am I noticing? What are those symptoms telling me? If God created our emotions with purpose, and we have the capacity to experience them, then what are my emotions telling me? And so forth. But then the bottom line, is that rhythm of a spiritual, relationship with Jesus. And that’s why that’s the core of Bounce as a devotional versus just some other daily toolkit because that is where we get our refreshing. That is where we get the truth to be able to challenge thoughts that are distorted. That is through the Holy Spirit and all of the fruit that comes from that. So when I just think basic, basic things, I think just starting with that awareness, but from a whole person perspective, because we are whole people.

Carrie: Right. Absolutely. I was thinking as you were talking about how many different times in Scripture there’s evidence of self-examination.

I can’t remember if it was Paul or Peter that said like, “Examine yourself to see if you’re in the faith.” They’re in the Psalms, it talks about search my heart, know my thoughts, and how that connection between Us and the Holy Spirit really bringing some of those things to our awareness as we’re in that moment with the Lord, with scripture for the Holy Spirit to reveal certain things to our life. Like, Hey, this relationship is not going in a healthy place or Hey, you know you’re in an inappropriate relationship, maybe, for example, that you don’t need to be in, you need to put that out immediately, or maybe your relationship needs some boundaries. These are things that you need to do to refresh your life spiritually and emotionally. The spirit has the ability to reveal all of that to us. And a lot of times we’re just such in this hurried, crazy whirlwind pace that we don’t take the time really to sit with some of those things.

Donna: You’re exactly right. We really do. We are just constantly on to the next thing and rarely do we pause for the kind of awareness that the scriptures refer to and what we’re talking about when, you know, how do you assess whole person’s health? Unless you stop and most times we don’t because we’re just not that intent or just busy trying to survive whatever we’re dealing with. If it’s a hard spot in life that we’re facing. Great point.

Carrie: What has been your most significant lesson or insight that you’ve gained about resilience through your personal journey?

Donna: Personally, professionally, I always say, and truly one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me is the ability to have the job that I do. To sit across from people as they welcome me into a sacred space and I get to watch what God is faithful to do. I’ve seen that exact same echo in my own life. Ironically, the office that I’m in right now is in one of my colleagues because the Wi-Fi in mine is not working great right now. And when I came in and sat down, I remembered this picture that’s behind me. It was hand-painted on a pallet of wood from somebody on our team for my colleague who uses this office because she just lost her husband and she was a widow. Already been thinking about your question. And then I walked in. I was like, that is the exact same thing that I was pondering. This is one of my favorite quotes, Charles Spurgeon, who said, “I’ve learned to kiss the waves.”

Carrie: We had an internet glitch here that happened and Donna came back, but somehow we didn’t get the recording of the second half of the interview. I wanted to kind of just follow up on what she was saying and summarize what the rest of our conversation was about since you missed it. Donna was talking about this Charles Spurgeon quote, “I’ve learned to kiss the waves” that throw me against the rock of ages. How those hard times in our life push us towards God, how that process of building resilience is messy at times, how there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs that happen for us, but that ultimately, if we are abiding in Christ, we’re growing closer to him.

I had asked her about something that she would tell her younger self. Donna said that nothing is impossible with God. Just when you think this marriage may be over, or when you think there’s no way I’m going to come out of this situation, there’s nothing else that can be done. Medically, things are hopeless.

God has the ability to turn all of those situations around and we talked a little bit about how we’ve just seen that over and over in our counseling practices, just people coming and by the grace of God, they’re still there and that they made it through such hard things. Definitely. This is the first day of the AACC conference.

Donna is going to be here over the next few days and does actually have a book signing coming up. Look for her book, Bounce: A 60-day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience. It sounds like it would apply to a lot of our listeners who are really struggling through challenging times, either with their mental health or just life circumstances.

Thank you guys so much for listening and sorry for our technical glitch here at the end today. Despite some technical difficulties, this turned out to be a great episode. I’ve seen so many people get stuck in the grief and loss process because we are so focused on how things shouldn’t be this way that we don’t sit with the fact that things actually are that way.

Being resilient requires submitting yourself to God in the character transformation that he desires to do in your life. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Stay tuned for our next episode where we talk about kindness on the podcast. Kindness to ourselves and others.

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. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Summary:

In today’s episode of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I’m joined by Donna Cox Gibbs, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and author of Bounce: A 60-Day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience. We dive into the heart of what it truly means to be resilient—not just bouncing back from life’s struggles, but moving forward and growing stronger through them.

We address some common misconceptions about resilience, particularly the idea that it’s all about “bouncing back.” Donna explains that real resilience is about navigating life’s challenges without getting stuck, even when things don’t turn out the way we expected. It’s about bouncing forward, not back, and learning to thrive in the face of adversity.

Donna also shares her personal experience with resilience, especially during a major medical crisis, and how she learned to integrate trials into her life in a way that made her stronger. We talk about how resilience isn’t just an innate trait—though certain personality types may find it easier to adapt—it’s something we can all develop with the right tools and mindset.

We also explore how faith plays a central role in resilience. Donna explains that a strong spiritual foundation helps us persevere through tough times by deepening our trust in God’s ability to carry us through. She shares practical steps for building resilience, including self-awareness, emotional health, and nurturing healthy relationships.

Whether you’re facing a tough season or simply seeking to build emotional and spiritual resilience, this episode is packed with insights to help you move forward and grow through life’s challenges. Donna’s book, Bounce, offers a powerful 60-day devotional to jumpstart your own resilience journey.

Tune in to discover how you can embrace the power of resilience and begin your path toward healing and growth today.

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
Transcripot

Carrie: Welcome to Hopefor Anxiety and OCD episode 102. On our show, as most of you know, we talk about a variety of different topics related to anxiety and OCD, but we also talk about healthy relationships as we are striving to have healthier relationships with God and others.

Today on the show, I have Tammy Daughtry, who is the author of Co-Parenting Works, Helping Your Children Thrive After Divorce.

I know that this is something that I don’t have experience with, even though I went through a divorce several years ago. We did not share any children together. I thought it would be great, since this is a topic that a lot of our listeners probably are dealing with, co-parenting, and it can create a lot of distress and anxiety.

Thank you. I thought it would be good to do a show on this. Tammy, welcome to our conversation today.

Tammy: Thank you so much, Carrie. It’s a joy to be with you.

Carrie: Now, how did you get into divorce and co-parenting work?

Tammy: Well, this is a short show, so I’ll give you a summary. I am an adult child of divorce and my parents have been divided since I was age one and they’re both still alive, which is a beautiful thing. So I have lived decades in that space. And when I got married, my hope and dream was that I would get married once and forever. I would never be divorced. There was a lot of things, blessings and challenges from my childhood, but my goal was really to make it work forever.

I was in an almost eight-year marriage and found myself at a fork in the road. We had done four years of therapy with a marriage and family therapist, and yet we were still becoming co parents. And so we shared a daughter that was one at the time. And our divorce was final when she was two, and this was literally 22 years ago.

I was looking for hope-filled resources on co-parenting on single parenting on life after divorce. I couldn’t find anything honestly about co parenting that had a hope-filled lens. There were some books out on co parenting with a jerk or co parenting with a narcissist. And I didn’t want to pick those up because they just sounded angry.

I knew I’d learned a lot from being a kid in a divided family, honestly. And I knew what anger and toxic anger looked like. I was trying to find another path over time. I had been an event producer in that season of my life and I started producing events for divorced parents. I thought we need a place to come and gather and be able to have people address tough topics, but with strategies of hope and solution.

20 years ago this year, back in 03, I started Co-Parenting International with the goal of being a voice for children and helping co-parents have a roadmap. Eventually went off to grad school in a seven became a master’s in marriage and family to really study and understand deeper. How to help people in high conflict, learn to communicate.

We’ve been at this work a long time and it’s been a great delight. And I’ll say in my own personal journey, we launched a daughter who is now 23. She’s thriving. She’s actually got married. I wanted her always to believe that marriage mattered and that God’s plan for marriage was forever. I’m excited to say that precious girl who was the catalyst of all things co-parenting in my own life is now an adult and doing really well.

I did read Mary when she was nine. So now we’re in a blended family, which is a whole nother topic. We could tackle it another time, but I just walked into it and my own personal life and did not find any Christian faith-based resources back in the year of 2000. So decided to create some incredible, it’s been a great joy to walk with people.

Carrie: Yes. What are some of the challenges that parents who are co parenting most commonly deal with that you see?

Tammy: There are a lot. So many, but the one thing that I often, or always, try to help moms and dads with is what we call the handoff. How you handle a handoff. I really believe has a huge root in what a child experiences, whether they’ve got a broken home, or they have 2 parents in 2 houses that both love them that let them come and go freely.

I spend a lot of time with my clients on the handoff. And I would say a couple quick tips on that. First and foremost, I asked my clients to look through based on their calendar of transitions to look ahead and estimate how many times are we going to do this? Because what we have found children when there may be 1, 2, and 3.

You’re going to go through almost 500 to 600 handoffs and exchanges. Kids who maybe mom and dad divorced when they’re 12, 13, 14, they’re probably going to experience maybe 100 to 200. When we think about children and any life experience that they have, something that consistent. That shows up so many times is going to have a deep impact on them.

What I try to do when I’m working with two parents who do not like each other, is they’ve got a history of in and out of court, there’s pain points. They’re just struggling to communicate at all. I try to help shift the focus to their love for their child or how much they both deeply care about that little one or three and four kiddos, depending on their family structure and start to explain.

The emotional impact of that exchange and how they can each change that so that their child can have an emotional freedom going between them. And it takes a lot of intentionality. Three things I ask them to focus on is their body language, their facial expression. And their tone of voice, because in a 10-second narrative, you could quickly understand as a mom if I’m upset or I’m okay.

A child is always absorbing what the adults around them are doing and they absorb it and they observe it. I often role play with my clients what it sounds like for a mom to be getting a kid ready to go to dad’s house and she’s stressed and she has a lot of anxiety about it and she’s not happy to say goodbye to her child. But when they hear me role play, what it sounds like. Sometimes outside of themselves, it can help them realize, Oh, I probably do sound pretty stressed and angry and fearful or frustrated. Right? And then I role play what it might sound like if they’re watching them off with joy.

I love analogies. I’m a visual learner, and I’m also a storyteller. As you can tell, I will have a lot of words, but I always ask parents, you know, to remember the first day they took their child to kindergarten. For some families I’m working with, they are not there yet, but maybe it was the first day they took them to Sunday school, or they took them to a place where they had to say goodbye for a little while and empower their child to go and do something without them. Parents want their children to succeed at those things. If your child is getting dropped off at Sunday school and they’re clinging to you and they’re like, no, mommy, I don’t want to go or no, daddy, I don’t want to go. Well, the parents try to lovingly empower them.

With your tone of voice, your facial expression, your body language, comfort and help them know, Hey, buddy, you’re going to have so much fun. We talk about where they’re going, we talk about the activities they’re going to do. The people they are going to be with in a different context than a divorce or a divided family when a parent is.

It’s very much trying to be a loving parent. They choose words and phrases and facial expressions to help their child transition away from them. When I’m doing a role play at a seminar or something, I always just say, when you’ve got a little person, right, we bend down, we get down at their eye level. If we’re a young parent and we can get on one knee real quick, we might get on one knee and just look at them and say, hey.

You’re going to have so much fun and you’re going to go, let’s say it’s a camp experience this week. You’re going to get to play in the river and you’re going to fish and you’re going to be on the little boat and I think you’re going to have s’mores. We talk about those things eye to eye with joy and send them off to camp and we want them to know they are going to be okay when they’re away from us.

I try to pull back on that same narrative to parents who are saying goodbye to their kids. Sometimes it’s once a week. It’s sometimes 2 or 3 times a week. And to find a way to stay in that focus of helping their child have a healthy goodbye because if we can help our child have that healthy goodbye with us. And know it’s okay to go and enjoy that other household, then quite honestly, we have just given them 3, 4, 5, 600 gifts of freedom and joy to empower them, to not put an emotional hook in them and to send them off with joy. Now, part of the trick to that, though, Carrie is I also talked to clients about what are you going to do with your alone time?

When you’re a divorced parent, or maybe you’ve never married, right? You’ve got a child or 2. Maybe you live together for a season, that’s a rising tide in our culture. They want to be a family, but for a variety of reasons, they don’t legally get married and yet they divide. However, people find themselves there.

Part of the task of that is a lot of goodbyes and some alone time, especially for the single-parent journey. I try to talk to my clients about making healthy choices with their alone time because quite honestly, that has a big impact on the kind of experience your child has when they come back. I’m a high extrovert, so being left alone for a couple of days, or a couple of weeks in the visitation in the summer, those are tough.

High extroverts don’t like being alone ever. Now, my friends who are high introverts, they might not like saying goodbye to their children, but they have more tools and pure enjoyment in being alone, because that’s how they replenish. Two or three days without their children, Is still difficult for sure, but it might not have the same challenge that an extrovert has in being alone for that amount of time.

I try to tackle those topics of what are the healthy choices you can make while you’re alone schedule, some meaningful experiences, go hang out with a friend, go to a Bible study. There are so many Christmases or long holidays where we rotated those that I went and volunteered at the Nashville Rescue Mission to serve other people and to give my love and support to others.

I love old people. I went many times, especially pre-COVID to visit people at a nursing home, and take a couple dozen cookies. I don’t cook, Carrie, so unfortunately, I’m not that wonderful person in the kitchen who can just whip up this beautiful, joyous, five dozen beautiful cookies. I stopped by the grocery store, but still, the thought and the love is there to take cookies or something and go spend time with other people. That was part of my solution. Even before I was a therapist, I knew me and I knew I’ve got to have a fun plan when my daughter’s away from me so that I can thrive even alone. Those are some of the things I talked to parents about is how we handle the handoff and then what do we do with our alone time. Quite honestly, that can be a very tempting area. Maybe they haven’t had a lot of interest in drinking in the past. And yet there’s some curiosity about just numbing out to this feeling of loss and loneliness and sadness because sometimes those emotions have more space in our life when our kids are away, the temptation for maybe alcohol, or I don’t know how honest I can be on this, but just some of the things I’ve seen my clients struggle with, there are this thing we call the internet.

Sure, so many interesting attractions and some of them are great. You can learn to cook. You can garden, or you can watch reels of people climbing Everest and doing really cool stuff. The Internet has lots of other places people can go that are hurting and help them cope with that.

I always just try to empower my clients to figure out ahead of time, what do you need for your best self-care so that when your children are away, you’re working on you and doing things that matter to you and that are important that maybe when you’ve got your house full of your kids in the chaos, you don’t always have time to enjoy.

Those are two of the biggest areas that carry that they might sound like a small puzzle piece, but they’re huge, ongoing, growing puzzle piece that impacts children. A healthy goodbye and what do you do with your alone time? It seems like you would really have to put some of your own feelings aside, especially like you said, in contentious custody situations where Maybe you don’t feel like that other parent has your child’s best interest at heart, or maybe you really want more time with them and things aren’t quite going your way the way that you had hoped.

I think in order to create that safe space and regulation for your child, it requires a certain level of self-sacrifice from the parents to be able to manage their emotions in a different way. There’s a big word that is on paper has, I don’t know, five syllables, maybe, but compartmentalize is an experience and a choice that we might not know we need to do it until somebody, a friend comes along and helps us with it.

Someone like you or I, we sit with people and help them on a regular basis. But finding a way to compartmentalize the difference between the adult relationship, right, the ongoing frustration, the pain, it’s a trigger, quite honestly, every time you see your co-parent, because it represents a broken relationship or a relationship that ended.

It’s an important thing to carry, I think, in working with our clients to see. When relationships end, there’s often one leaving and one getting left, and the one leaving maybe has already began to compartmentalize and to process the idea of the relationship ending, still being parents, wanting to see their kids as often as they can, but they’re moving forward away from the marriage. That person may have felt like they got left during the marriage. There certainly was disappointment, loss, grief. For whatever reason, there is a thousand reasons that relationships end that person who is leaving. They also probably feel like they got left earlier, but they get to that final decision that this isn’t working.

I think we need to separate. I’m going to go file papers. That person has already maybe compartmentalized it and they are starting to move forward. There’s the one that’s getting left who maybe feels like, well, we didn’t even, we only went to two counseling sessions. We didn’t really even try, like, let’s not give up yet.

It’s a different starting point for those two people, but in both cases, there’s the journey of getting to the acceptance and then the compartmentalization of that adult relationship shifting from being intimate partners to parents. When we shift to a different perspective of looking forward, and I use my hands a lot, your listeners won’t see all this that I’m doing, but we do start out very close and connected. Then we shift to what I would say is more of like shoulder-to-shoulder going forward, and still we are connected for the rest of life because we share a child or children. The most important compartmentalization is to figure out how to help yourself accept and let go of the pain in the past, like the work you do, the work I do.

So many wonderful professionals are available to help people with those transitions and then really build a life moving forward at some point, hopefully seeing this person as your co-parent partner, your business partner, your teammate. As you said earlier, Carrie, sometimes parents have concerns about that other partner and their parenting. Maybe when they were a couple, that person was not involved. They weren’t very active as a parent or maybe they were really involved and we don’t like how they parent. They might be very harsh. They might be very rigid and, or they might be very distracted and they just let kids do whatever and there are no boundaries.

Either way, I would say there’s always the question, is the child safe emotionally, physically, and sexually? Those are three areas that even as a co-parent strategist who believes children need the freedom to love both, to have as much time with both as possible, research shows that children do thrive when they have, quite honestly, I like to suggest 50-50, if both partners are able to be active, healthy parents.

There’s a lot that goes with that. Sometimes it’s not possible. Children are 2 and they need a different transition schedule than children that are 12. So all of those age and stage of development issues also come into play, but if there’s ever concern for a safety issue in any of those 3 areas then I always suggest that parents take a child to a specialist who works with kids, right? To do some play therapy, to explore what’s happening in this child’s life. If they’re little preteens or adolescents connecting with a healthy, trusted professional who could do a little safe place for kids to talk, but also do a little checking in with this child to see what’s really happening when they’re away from their parents.

Sometimes kids come and go and they tell part of a story, but they don’t always have it in context. I work with kids as well, age six and up, and sometimes part of what they parcel out to parents can sound alarming, but really they’re okay. It’s just they’re telling part of a story, not the whole story, because they’re a 13-year-old who wants what they want, if they want a cell phone.

One parent is like, no, it goes away charges in my bedroom at 9 o’clock and they don’t like that. Well, the parent that bought it for them may hear a different story about what the rules and regulations are because they want something different than their adult parent. But on the flip side, there are times when kids are not being cared for in a healthy way and are not be attended to.

I think getting that professional involved so that they can help not only investigate, but to help give guidance and support to the child, who, if there really is a safety issue, then they can help the family figure out a game plan. Sometimes supervised visits are where parents have to start, because maybe they’ve made some really big mistakes.

Sometimes both parents need some co-parent help, honestly, so they can communicate, check in with each other when there are concerns about their child. I am a huge advocate of both parents being greatly involved with their children, having the freedom to love them and enjoy them, and especially for the child to come and go without loyalty.

Without adults adding on to that loyalty bind of talking negatively about each other, that kind of thing. But I also am 100% always wanting to be sure that these kids are safe and being cared for well in both homes. And I’m grateful, so grateful for so many wonderful specialists that work with children that can help a parent understand what’s really happening when my child’s not with me. Because that’s a scary thing to be thinking about when they’re away. There are ways to tackle that as well.

Carrie: I’m thinking for our listeners dealing with anxiety and OCD, they may struggle with some of that rumination about what if this is happening while my child is over there? What if that’s happening?

What if they don’t stick to maybe we have an agreement, the co-parenting agreement and what if they don’t stick to that? I think this is from a spiritual, emotional perspective and mental perspective. How do you help people let go of those things that they are not in control of? Essentially that’s what anxiety and OCD try to do. It’s like we try to grab on and try to control everything that we can, even though we’re, there’s quite a bit we’re not acknowledging we’re not in control of.

Tammy: Well, you just made me think of so many times. I know in my own childhood, I think my parents were really different. I think part of what comes out post-divorce or in a divided relationship is when you were a couple and you could have eyes on what was happening, right? That gives you the peace of mind that I see what’s happening here. And probably even in that time and space, you couldn’t control everything. But you could still see what was happening. So you knew, okay, my worst fear is not happening right now. Moving into that season, whether it’s a couple days a week or week on week off in the shared parenting, I think part of it is my hope would be that you could create a communication bridge with your co-parent.

That accusing the person, jumping to conclusions, you could have some kind of check in process with each other, because what I see happen with co parents, and no matter what levels of anxiety or other scenarios are part of the system, the two adults, when they move apart from one another, begin to parent as separated parents.

The differences in their personality come out stronger, the differences in their belief systems come out, a former couple that maybe at the time they were together, yes, we’re Christians, we go to church, it’s a high priority in our life. Well, after a divorce, sometimes 1 of those 2 partners may go through a short or long season where they wrestle with their faith and they wrestle with being mad at God for a variety of reasons or thinking God’s mad at them. Those what they thought was those common values and spiritual dynamics in raising their children. A lot of times those change and i’ve heard so many parents say I don’t even know who this person is. We used to go to church, we used to value the same things and now he or she has said they’re an atheist or they’re going to go a whole different direction to a whole different belief system.

That is really hard to figure out. Oh, no. Like, how’s our child going to be in a household that quite honestly, maybe they’re going to be Buddhist? The other one is still really conservative Christian, and then kids come and go from a very different world. The personality differences come out bigger.

Sometimes something around values changes drastically. I think if there’s a way to build a bridge of communication with your co-parent, try to find the things that you do agree on, and continue to honestly express some gratitude, to be able to say, thank you so much for whatever it is. For taking Johnny to baseball on your parenting time.

It’s so great that he gets to enjoy baseball when he’s with each of us find places to agree and give gratitude. And then if you have concerns on some other areas, what I try to point parents to is the idea of having a co parent meeting. So that there’s a compartmentalized time and space that parents either talk by phone or they meet in public.

Honestly, I often suggest they meet in public at a coffee shop or a McDonald’s because parents act more respectful in public. Most of them do. People feel a little safer in public. If I’m going to sit down across the table from this person who I have a lot of anxiety being around, regardless of the past, it’s stressful. It’s awkward. It’s triggering being in a public setting can bring some calm to that and or sometimes having a third party help or create on ramp to that experience. That’s a big part of what I do in my work. And I might not work with a family for years, but four to six sessions to help them figure out how do we begin to be co parent business partners and have co parent meetings, communicate more effectively?

How do we manage our interactions when we’re around each other at our children’s school or their extracurricular activities? So that’s a big part of what I actually do. And anybody listening that’s really struggling with that. I would love the opportunity to walk alongside your family and help you both or even just help you one person in the equation, because I do find carry quite often.

There is one person who is really wanting to be a healthy co-parent. They want to build a communication plan with that person. The other one is just the stonewall, they don’t respond, or they are just really vindictive and ugly. But what I remind my clients about your kids are having an experience with you in their childhood that they will remember forever.

They will look back and remember the story that was written with you, and the story that was written with all the other adults and people in their family. Well, your co parent, you can’t make them do the wrong or stop doing the wrong thing, start doing the right thing. You can’t control them, which again is another high level of frustration.

Some of the basic things that you would think and expect are appropriate for your co parent to do or not do. Well, you no longer have a say in that and you no longer get to have eyes on that. But what you can do is keep doing the best thing with the parenting time you have, the way you filter out information and not tell your children all the adult stuff.

That is one of the greatest gifts you can give your kids is not talking ugly about the other parent, not telling them the things that frustrate you about their other parent, talk to your best friend or your counselor or pastor, find an adult to lean into, but not your kids. Parents that kind of put that verbal filter on and decide this is hard, but when my daughter asked me a question and I want to jump to a negative comment about their other parent, I’m going to try to find a way to filter to still give my daughter a meaningful response, but without accusation and emotional angst about the other person.

All the things we do in the privacy of our life with our kids. When they’re with us on our parenting time, those moments matter and those choices really do matter. Going back to the idea of the co parent meeting, when I talked to earlier about the handoffs and how to kids absorb that experience, and it’s so important.

I forgot to mention that above all things in a handoff, that is never, ever, ever the appropriate place or time to have a business meeting as parents. It’s not the time to talk about child support or, ” Hey, we need to swap next Friday for Tuesday, or You owe me 200 of co pays, or, Hey, I want to take our kids on a 4th of July event in two weeks that just happened, or, Oh, my second aunt’s grandmother’s father’s cousin died and we want to make a trip to Arkansas.” Those are all real things to talk about with your co parent, changing the schedule, talking about finances. Addressing, if you’re in the middle of a school year and you get a call that your child’s struggling with science, well, it’d be ideal to pull your co parent into that to try to collaborate and support your child. None of those topics should be addressed at the handoff. The handoff should be simple and positive, upbeat, like I said, kind of like you’re sending them off to camp. Give them the tools to go and thrive and enjoy the time and then find another time to invite that other parent to a conversation. And there’s four words, Carrie, that people stop saying when they’re divorced and they’re real simple.

I always ask my clients to write these down on my handouts that I give them. It’s just a question. And that question is simply, what do you think? So many parents stop asking the other parent what they think. About issues connected to their children, because when they’re divided, they do stop their communication goes way down.

Again, coming back to your questions of concern and anxiety and trying to control the things we can, but set expectations for the things we can’t. I find that if parents can move towards, over time, a compartmentalized process of when we’ll communicate about the topics of parenting, and when we won’t, right, we won’t talk about them at the handoff, we won’t talk about them at the band concert or the volleyball game or cheerleading practice or dance recital. Those are not the time spaces. We’re going to have a parent meeting, but we will find a time and space for maybe 1 hour to talk by phone, talk by Zoom, meet at McDonald’s and just stay focused on 2 or 3 things that are relevant in the next 3 months and asking each other.

I need your input. I’d like to know what you think about this. I’m seeing that our daughter potty training of all the things that are so hard. If you’re divorced, when you’re potty training your child, the best thing for your child would be for you all to talk once in a while, compare notes, not to cast blame and assume the other person isn’t doing right. But to enlist the other partner as the one other human in the world that loves your child more than anybody else on the planet. And even though the adult relationship may have ended, it might have been very hurtful. It might be still very hurtful. Remember that the other parent of your child, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever met a parent that would ever want to hurt their child.

They share that same passion and concern, even though they might start seeing things different, making decisions that are surprising and different, they still love your child. And if you can find a way to build a communication bridge with them, where, hey, is there a way we can check in with each other once in a while, just to find out, our daughter says something that’s kind of confusing.

Can I check in with you and you check in with me the same? She’s with you on your parenting time and. She says something that seems out of bounds with something that you’d be surprised, you’d be like, “What’s going on at the other house? Check in with me. Let’s be in this together.”

The biggest expectation as co-parents is to remember that who you were as a couple in the past, where you might’ve had more agreements, you might’ve come to a neutral way to do things that you’re both satisfied, turning the dial way down on that moving forward, because you’re going to be different. And the beautiful thing is that Ron Deal has this story he tells about kids coming and going from two different countries.

They might live in the same zip code, but they’re still coming and going from two different countries, countries that have different customs, different schedules, different values. But kids can thrive and adjust into those countries back and forth. But the thing that’s hardest on them is if those two countries go to war.

If they’re exposed to that war verbally, emotionally, or if they witness arguments and frustration, or they hear negative words about the other country, then the loyalty bind, the confusion, the emotional stress for them rises way up. We want to remind parents that there’s going to be more differences now than ever moving forward as co-parents.

If you can find a way to check in and communicate so that you can both feel like it’s okay to ask my co parents some questions. But even the tone of voice that I take, I approach it with a positive assumption that I, I’m missing information and that I need their insight and that they’re fine to call me and check in and ask questions because if they hear something and they feel like they’re missing part of the information, I’m going to be honest and share with them.

Unfortunately, sometimes starts happening in those communication points is there’s an assumption that the other person is not doing it right. They did something wrong. And why would you do it that way? That’s not the way we’ve done it. That’s not what we said we do. Right? And people get quickly in less than 10 seconds into a hostile conversation.

Of course, nobody is going to want to parent with you, or be your partner so I think part of it is regulating ourselves when we do have fear. We have some topics that have come up that we’re really concerned about. We have self-regulation and then approaching our co-parent as a team member, somebody that we want to build a team with and try to speak into that in a positive way, and that takes a lot of emotional muscles that are pretty light when we first divorce, but they get stronger over time. Hopefully having a time to have a co parent meeting could be a touch point that maybe it happens once a quarter or at the beginning once a month, and then grows less time once a quarter, just so that you both have a time to talk and to approach each other, not in defensive mode, but in curiosity mode.

Again, remember to say, thank you, leading the way with gratitude. I have seen really be a powerful thing. When someone says thank you to their other parent, not because they are grateful for the adult dynamic between them, but for that person being a loving parent or doing something kind and loving for the child, that can change everything.

If we feel like we’re on the same team. And we’re being grateful or beginning to lead with gratitude, then the hard stuff is still hard, but the other party might be more open to walking alongside us instead of feeling like we’re putting up defenses and there’s a brick wall between us and don’t talk to me and call my lawyer. We don’t want that.

I think this is all very helpful and practical information. And so usually we wrap up our podcast with a story of hope, which is a time that you’ve received hope from God or another person.

Well, I’ll go back. My daughter’s 23 now. When she was about two and a half, I remember a night that I waved goodbye. It was a handoff for maybe a couple of days and I’m a high extrovert and coming into an empty home all by myself. I was really hurting. And I did a happy goodbye, but then I remember literally sitting on my couch and letting that wave of emotional pain, it just came up and I let myself cry for a while.

It was one of those gut-wrenching cries that it comes from inside somewhere that is hard. And I remember talking to the Lord and I was sitting on a couch at the beginning and ended up on kind of on my knees next to the couch at the end. And. Just crying out to God, like, this is not how it was supposed to be and yet I felt the Lord truly meet me there and almost in a sense, lift my head and say, Tammy, I am still here. And I was saying something about being alone. He’s like, you’re never alone. I am with you. I am with your baby girl. I love you. You are not alone. And it was like, literally felt a bit like a big warm hug from the Lord meeting me right there in that point of pain and letting me know that even when she’s away from me, he is with her. Not only was he expressing comfort and grace and support to me, but reminding me that he was her God too. There’s nothing that goes beyond his reach. And that day I remember just sitting there then with a different level of peace than I’d ever felt before.

I do think letting myself cry and feel it was healthy and then not being afraid to be wrong with God. That was one of those moments. I am kind of angry about this. Like, this is not what it was supposed to be. and yet, God came in there and he’s like, “Tammy, I am with you. I am with her. I will walk with you and you will never be alone.”

I can tell you 20 years later, absolutely true. Emotionally, financially, everything, the Lord has been so gracious to taking the next step. And I feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean about to go under and the Lord puts a rock under my foot. And he stabilizes me and then the next step, and then the next step, I was so grateful for his response to me and just being able to take the hard stuff, you know, to recognize that of all the times in my life here.

I am in the hardest season living alone and yet I had never and once I really let that sink in. It really did, it changed everything for me. I was grateful and continue to be grateful, obviously for getting in the word, but also getting with other people and regular meetings of Bible studies or small groups, or just finding fellowship with people.

I guess that’s my story of hope is that none of us are designed to go at any of these hard things alone. And I think the Lord designed the church and the big picture church to walk alongside together. And I’m grateful that along those years, the Lord placed other people in my life and let me be part of things that where I wasn’t alone and I was able to sit with other people and I can tell you divorce care was a great thing I went through.

It was very helpful and that’s something people can go online, find, put their zip code in divorce cares website, find a group near you. They’re all over the world and go once a week and sit with other people on a similar path. Learn and grow in a safe place and that helped me too. So I hope that that’s helpful for your listeners and they can certainly reach out to our website.

We do have a lot of free resources and handouts and tools that they can enjoy privately or they certainly want to get in touch and work on things directly. That’s also an option, but our website has a click through where you contact us and if you’re a parent or a professional. You click a few questions and then we’ll be there to walk with you and give you some great hope and some tools.

The last thing I do want to say that I forgot to say earlier, Carrie, one thing I didn’t know 22 years ago. Is there some brilliant software technologies out there called co parenting apps? Okay. And boy, howdy, I wish I would have had one. We have a handout on that with a lot of the cool co parent apps and tools digitally that help them organize life.

Google that phrase or come get that handout from us, but that one piece of a puzzle could have made everything a lot easier because those apps are brilliant tools for divided families. So, I’ll let you wrap up because I tend to talk so much, but thanks for your patience. And it’s been so fun to be with you today talking about these tough topics.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing. Appreciate that. I got to thinking about what Tammy was communicating to us about the handoff and how relevant this is for parents and children who are anxious, especially for parents that are anxious about dropping their child off and really trying to work through their own emotions and fears maybe about their anxious child going to school and how they’re going to do.

A lot of times, children who are anxious are really sensitive to adults emotions and can tell when adults are anxious. I thought maybe if any of you have an anxious child or teenager, you could apply some of those same things that she was talking about related to the handoff in terms of dealing with your child and dropping them off at school or camp or church or other places where they’re going to be away from you and might have that separation anxiety come up.

The timing of this conversation is interesting to me because I have a toddler who I am handing off to Mother’s Day Out programs this week and trying to just think in my own mind, why is it that she feels okay walking into these strange or new environments? And I think it’s just because I haven’t ever made a big deal about dropping her off places. I don’t know if that helps anyone or not. That sense that we can give our children that mom’s okay with it. And so then we can be okay with it too. If you need a daily dose of encouragement, you’re welcome to hang out with us on Instagram. You can find us at. At Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast.

We’re on Facebook as Hope for Anxiety and OCD, if you prefer that platform. And of course you can always contact us via our website at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

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. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Summary:

In this episode of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I chat with Tammy Daughtry, the author of Co-Parenting Works: Helping Your Children Thrive After Divorce. Tammy shares insights on navigating the challenges of co-parenting after divorce, focusing on ways to help kids thrive even in divided households. As an adult child of divorce and a co-parent herself, Tammy brings years of personal and professional experience to this discussion, offering guidance for those managing co-parenting dynamics and the anxiety that can often come with it.

We dive into key techniques for managing smooth transitions during “handoffs”—when children switch between parents’ homes—emphasizing the importance of body language, tone, and even facial expressions. Tammy explains how to create a secure space for children by fostering open communication, respecting parenting style differences, and keeping the focus on the child’s well-being rather than personal disagreements. These strategies provide emotional freedom for kids, which is essential for their mental health.

Tammy also highlights the importance of self-care for parents during their “alone time”—the periods when their children are with the other parent. By investing in activities that promote well-being, parents can not only care for themselves but also ensure they’re ready to welcome their children back with a positive attitude. This approach is crucial for creating stability and consistency, which can reduce anxiety for everyone involved.

For those struggling with anxiety or OCD, Tammy shares how compartmentalising feelings about the ex-partner can prevent those emotions from affecting the child. She encourages finding peace by focusing on what’s within your control, letting go of what isn’t, and seeking professional support if needed. If you’re navigating co-parenting or have loved ones who are, this episode is full of practical strategies and hope-filled guidance.

96. Theology of Suffering with Jon Seidl

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 96. Theology of Suffering with Jon Seidl

In this episode, Carrie is joined by Jon Seidl, author of “Finding Rest” and president of Veritas Creative. They explore the theology of suffering and delve into Jon’s personal journey with anxiety and OCD, emphasizing the need for a proper understanding of suffering.

Episode Highlights:

  • How suffering can serve a purpose in our lives.
  • The importance of empathy, understanding, and a proper theology of suffering in supporting individuals with anxiety and OCD.
  • The significance of finding rest amidst life’s challenges.
  • Valuable insights into the intersection of faith and mental health.
  • More about Pastor Jon Seidl’s book, “Finding Rest.”

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 96! I’m so excited about today’s show because I have a special guest, Jon Seidl, author of Finding Rest and president of Veritas Creative, a digital consulting firm. Jon was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, and after reading it, I realized many of the topics he touches on are things we often discuss here on the podcast.

Today, we’re diving deep into the theology of suffering, something that often gets overlooked in our Christian walk. Jon shares his personal journey with anxiety and OCD, what he’s learned from his struggles, and how suffering can actually serve a greater purpose in our lives. It’s so common to want to run away from suffering, but Jon helps us see its importance in our spiritual growth.

Jon opens up about his writing journey, where he eventually penned a powerful article revealing his struggle with anxiety and OCD. The response from readers, especially Christians who also felt silenced by their struggles, was overwhelming. Jon emphasizes that many people in the Christian community feel shame when it comes to mental health, often being told to “pray more” or “repent.” His own experience led him to write his book and begin challenging these negative messages within the faith community.

Related links and Resources:

www.jonseidl.com

Explore related episode:

95. Healthier Theology of Healing with Pastor Mark Smith

95. Healthier Theology of Healing with Pastor Mark Smith

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 96. I’m very excited about today’s episode. I have an interview with Jon Seidl who’s the author of Finding Rest and also the president of Veritas Creative, which is a digital consulting firm, Jon happened to send me a copy of his book, so I’ve been able to look at a lot of the topics he covers are things that we often talk about on the podcast.

We’re gonna take a little bit deeper dive in today on the Theology of Suffering and from his own personal story with anxiety and OCD, what he’s learned and the benefits to us suffering, because oftentimes we run from suffering, want to get away from it, and we don’t see how important it is as part of our Christian journey.

Carrie: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon: Thank you so much for having me, and I’m so excited to talk about this topic. 

Carrie: You are a writer, really, and have been writing thousands of articles in various formats, and various topics, and one day you just wrote an article and came out about your anxiety and OCD. Was that huge, like sharing that part of your story?

Jon: Yeah, it was one of those where it’s not like I woke up that morning and I said, okay, today’s the day. Right? But at the time, I was editor-in-chief of the non-profit. I’m second, and I was in charge of especially over all of the writing that went out from the organization and I needed an article for our blog.

We had just been dealing with a lot of heavy stuff recently on the blog. I just kind of got that prompting of like, okay, you know, you need an article. And everything that’s been published up to this point recently has been very vulnerable. I was was like, “What is that thing that I can be vulnerable about?” That kind like started welling up and I’m like, no, no, no, no. Anything but that, right? You just kind of step it down.

Carrie: “No, God no. Don’t let me know.”

Jon: Yes. As I went throughout the day, it was like, I need to write about this. It’s time. Then the title of the article ended up being It’s Time to Tell the World My Secret.

I literally just shut my office door and I sat down and it just poured out, and I was like, okay, all right, here we go. And so I published it and wow, the response was just incredible. Overarchingly, I mean, was positive towards the article, but what really took me aback was how many people said, you know what?

I am a Christian and I’ve been suffering in silence, or I’ve brought this to my pastor or my parents, and I’ve just been told to pray about it more, to have more faith to repent. Maybe there’s some sin in your past or maybe you just, you drank too much this past weekend or we’re a little too mean to this person, and so this is just what happens. That was similar to my upbringing and got this kind of righteous anger and just knew that, okay, I need to be talking about this more. That really started the journey and that was the impetus for the book. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s very similar to some righteous anger that I had before starting this podcast. You know, I’m tired of these negative messages towards Christians, and I wanna put out something more positive. That’s about reducing the shame and stigma, but also letting people know there’s help and there’s hope, and you don’t have to continue to suffer in the same way that you were suffering before. Not to say that we won’t continue to have struggles sometimes, but with the level of shame, at least that they were dealing with related to their mental health. 

Jon: So much that says, again, I don’t know if you guys have covered this, but yes, it’s just about believing more, right? 

Carrie: Having enough faith. 

Jon: Yes and I grew up in a very charismatic household that was subscribed to a kind of prosperity gospel-type teaching. Your father owns the cattle on a thousand hills. If you just want and claim victory in this area of your life, then it’s yours. And if it doesn’t happen, it’s a problem with you. What we’re gonna talk about today is that is not the proper theology of suffering that I came to learn as a result of my diagnosis.

Carrie: Did it take you a long time to get diagnosed with OCD specifically? 

Jon: Yes, only because of the way I was brought up. It was so taboo and so ingrained in me not to get medication, not to go to a doctor for mental health that it’s like I never really considered it growing up. I always knew there was something different about me. I just kind of figured I’m a little high-strung. That’s what I told myself. That’s the term I used. My grandma was high-strung. My mom was a little high-strung, my sister was high-strung, and I’m like, okay, I’m just wound a little tighter. When it finally came to a head, as many people may know, marriage has a way of revealing your blind spots.

Carrie: Absolutely.

Jon: About five years into my marriage, there was an incident and my wife just kind of said, okay, listen, I’m not going anywhere, but I can’t continue like this. You understand this and people listening to you will understand this. It was like the wrong sweetener was in my coffee. We went to a coffee shop.

I told her, “Hey, I’m going to the bathroom. I don’t like Splenda, so make sure that there’s sweet and low in it. I came back, took a sip of the coffee, and there was Splenda in it, and it just ruined our entire weekend. 

Carrie: Wow.

Jon: I could not stop ruminating on that. I think that when the person you love is broken down in front of you saying, this is not working, that’s when I finally decided to get help. That was in about 2014, I believe. I went through my whole life up until that point just thinking, eh, okay. It’s a little annoying. I’m a little high-strung like I said, but not thinking that anxiety in OCD.

Carrie: What was that journey like for you? I know you talked in the book about telling your mom like, Hey, I’m taking medication now, and there were some struggles there.

Jon: That was not a fun conversation and it wasn’t what my mom said because I think my family has gone through an evolution since the way that we were when I was younger. She didn’t say like, “Oh my gosh, you’re sinning. How dare you.” It was the dead silence on the other end of the phone. It was the, well, I just don’t know what I did to raise you kids wrong.

She started inter like, “Oh my gosh.” Again because there’s always someone at fault in that type of theology. It’s like, what did I do? Right? Then you get into things about generational curses and this is her. “Did I not pray hard enough for you?” I think I remember getting off the phone, I talked about this in the book, and I just cried like a baby in my wife’s arms.

I just wanted some acknowledgement and it just didn’t end well. I mean, since then, listen, my mom and I, it’s not like we had to reconcile because I think by God’s grace there was a grace that he gave me for her, but yet even in that grace, it can still be heartbreaking. We’re in a great place.

She had to sign a release from the publisher to be featured in the book. It’s nothing that she didn’t know was gonna be in there, but God has, like I said, not quite reconciled. I think that’s too dramatic of a word, but we’re in a great place. But it was still hard. 

Carrie: Talk to us because we have other people, like family members and friends who listen to the show as well, that are trying to help someone. What was it that you really wanted to hear, whether it was from your mom or somebody from the church?

Jon: I think for me, from my mom, even just more of the bare bones of, I’m so sorry you’re going through that. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Jon: Because of the theology and the way that we were raised, like her mind immediately went to, “Okay, I did something wrong, or this isn’t right, or What’s going on?”

There wasn’t a,” just sit with me in this for even just a minute and acknowledge that this is hard.” This has been that point of 20-something-odd years of struggle that I’m just now starting to unpack. I’m looking back at things when I was 8, 9, 10, and I remember that. My mind just starts getting blown in so many ways.

I think for me, I wasn’t even looking for her to be like, doing an about-face on mental health medication. I was really even just looking for a bare minimum of, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I can only imagine how tough this is. And so that is my encouragement to family members. You don’t have to promise the world.

You don’t have to say, okay, I’m gonna drop everything and just fly to you right now if you live across the country or something like that, but just acknowledging that this is tough and everything that they may be going through is a bare minimum and yet can go a long way. 

Carrie: Talk to us about what you’ve learned through suffering with anxiety and OCD, whether spiritually or other things.

Jon: I think for me, and this goes back and you had asked that earlier question like. How long did it kind of take me to realize adopting what I call a proper theology of suffering wasn’t an overnight thing? The origins of it were, that I grew up in Wisconsin, went to college in New York City, and I live in Dallas now.

I was back home in Wisconsin for Christmas break, the DJ came on the Christian radio station that my stepdad and I were listening to and said, “We’re big Packer fans up there, right? I’m a Packer’s owner. ” I got their fake Super Bowl rings behind me. And he said, “Reggie White who had this title, minister of defense,” He was a preacher. He was evangelizing in the locker room, like you talk about a godly man and the DJ comes on and says, “Hey, Reggie Whites died of sleep apnea.” And my stepdad looks at me and goes, “Hmm. Well, that’s sad because Reggie must have had an unrepentant sin,” and I was like, “What?” And he’s like, “Yes, the bible promises us 70 years. If that doesn’t happen, obviously there’s an issue there.” I just remember getting so upset in like this righteous anger. That really started my journey, because I know there’s something inside of me that says that’s not right, but I don’t know why. Over the next few years, I started really absorbing the book of Job and so it was the book of Job that really, I would say is the first domino in my understanding of a proper theology of suffering.

I’m sure your listeners know the story of Job. There’s a little detail in there that I think a lot of people missed, and it’s this. It’s that Job is called a righteous and upstanding man. There’s this conversation that opens the book of Job between the devil and God, and I think a lot of people and me too, right?

You kind of assume that “the devil goes to God and asks God if he can inflict all this stuff on Job. God says yes, just as long as you don’t kill him,” but that’s actually not the story. The devil and God are having this conversation and God brings up to the devil. Have you considered my servant Job? Wait, so God is the one that kind of, Hey, bad job. Sometimes God is the one that’s allowing these things to happen. Now, he didn’t cause it. The devil was still the causer if you will. Right? He was still inflicted, but God is the one that kind of allowed us. He could see that in the end. This was a story that needed to be told that needed to happen why?

Well, you get to two reasons for the job’s good and God’s glory, and that starts to form the basis of a proper theology of suffering, knowing and understanding that our afflictions are mental health situations are allowed to happen for our good and his glory. That’s the basis, right? And then we can just take off from there.

Carrie: Yes. One of the things you talked about was losing some family members pretty tragically, and the pain and the hurt that you went through for that. I really appreciated what you said about your mom saying, are you believing for healing for your stepfather? And I just want you to kind of talk through that response because I just feel like, oh, this is so powerful.

Jon: Yes and it was the middle of Covid and I was helping my church. We had gone completely online because of my digital media background and the consulting work that I do. I was in charge of filming capturing and editing and posting our services. There we were doing the Easter service and we’re getting ready to film it and my pastor’s giving the message and I get a call from my sister.

My mom is not in great health. Whenever my sister calls, even if I’m just like, Hey, is everything okay? Yeah, great. Okay. I’ll call you back. I answer, I answered it and she goes, “Hey, have you heard?” And I said, “Heard what?” She said Mike, who is our stepdad, collapsed at home. He came home from work early. He wasn’t feeling well. He started vomiting, and he collapsed. He’s in the hospital, but he’s unconscious and it doesn’t look good. Long story short, my stepdad, who, one of the healthiest people I know, the guy who said we’re guaranteed 70 years died on Easter Sunday within two days, and he had a massive stroke in his brainstem and went brain dead and that was it.

Ironically died before he was 70 years old. Again, one of like, you talk about prayer warrior, you talk about the guy who every time the church doors were open, my stepdad was there. TYhe most generous person too, sometimes my mom chagrin, my mom’s like, “Hey, we need that bread. I could use that bread.” He’s like, “Ah, they need it more.” When I’m sitting there, this was right before he died, my mom pulls me aside or we’re sitting at my brother’s kitchen table, I guess, and she said, they called me Johnny growing up. That’s my name. Everyone back home in Wisconsin calls me Johnny. She looked at me and she said, “Johnny, are you believing for a healing?”

It was one of those kind of out of body experiences that came out of my mouth? I knew it was me talking. I’m not saying I was taken over by the Holy Spirit, right? Or something like that. But it was definitely the holy spirit in a sense, giving me that. And I said, mom, listen, I do believe that Mike is gonna get a healing.

What I don’t know is if it’s gonna be on this side of glory or on the next, and if he doesn’t get it here, I know that the Lord is still faithful to give him a healing because he will wake up next to Jesus tomorrow, being able to talk and dance and all the stuff that he’s wanted his whole life. It was just kind of this seminal moment between my mom and I.

I’m not saying like right then and there, she’s like, oh my gosh, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard because she lost her husband the next day. But I think we lose sight of that sometimes. We say I’m gonna claim my healing. I’m gonna be healed now here when I want. And the Lord is saying, maybe I wake up every morning, I say, Lord, like please take this from me, and he hasn’t. So then what? That’s where the proper theology of suffering comes in. What I would say is, and I’ll expand on what I was saying earlier, is you look at Job, but then you look at Paul and you look and you see the story where Paul talks about the thorn in his flesh, and I think there’s some important words there where he says, to keep me from being conceited, if you just stop there.

That’s all you need to hear. I mean, it gets better, but to keep me from being conceited, I was given this thorn in my flesh. That is the summary of a proper theology of suffering because he was given a struggle that made him better and glorified God. I mean, I love Paul. You should be on the Mount Rushmore of faith.

Honestly, you know what I think, and if you think about Paul’s past, I think Paul had a proclivity to be a very prideful person, and that’s not me saying that I’m literally just using Paul’s words to keep me from being conceited. Here you have Paul. He says, to keep me from being conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh and goes on to talk about how it does glorify God.

I think what we have lost in the church is the idea that our suffering, while in an unfallen world, God wouldn’t need to use suffering for our good in his glory, but we do live in a fallen world. Now, when you look at Job and you look at Paul, it’s like the Lord is saying, listen, I love you and because I love you, there are times that I’m gonna allow you to go through things.

Sometimes maybe it’s a day, maybe it’s a week, maybe it’s a month, maybe it’s five years. Maybe it’s your entire life because I know that I need to keep you from being conceited because pride is much harder and is gonna lead to much worse things than if I allow you to go through this and you have to trust me.

Carrie: Wow, that’s good. Obviously, like really being able to lean and depend on the Lord every single day. When you have a condition like anxiety and OCD and you don’t know how that’s gonna impact you, sometimes people can get really worked up when they just wake up in the morning, like, what’s it gonna be like today? And to be able to bring that to God and say, regardless of what happens today, I know that you’re with me and I know that you love me and I know that you’re for me, and somehow you’re gonna work this situation in my life for good. 

Jon: Here’s the thing, like someone once told me, they’re like, I was kind of talking on this and they pushed back, which I was grateful for, and they said, is that the same message to someone who loses a loved one tragically, or whose husband cheats on them and lives the family. And the way I respond to that is a, I’m not like out here rooting for you to go through bad things. I’m not out here saying that. I hope that you go through some of the worst crud in your life. I’m giving you a framework to make sense of it. Then I tell people, listen, I can’t make sense of my mental health struggle without that. I can’t make sense of it without the idea. And this is, I borrowed this from a pastor out in Phoenix and I name him in the book, can’t remember it off the top of my head, but where I get to a place where I don’t judge God by my circumstances, but I judge my circumstances by who I know God to be.

I know he’s good. I know he will work all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Now, I grew up in a tradition that claimed that if you like, needed a good parking spot at Walmart, but I think it goes much deeper and it’s much more comforting than that.

Listen, the only way that any of this makes sense is by adopting that framework, that proper theology of suffering and knowing, okay, God, kind of those baseline problems that you do in like Philosophy 1 0 1 in college. If I know A to be true, and I know B to be true, I know A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C.

Carrie: Yes.

Jon: I know God is not bad. He can’t be bad. I need to start there and then work backwards in my circumstances, right? Okay, well then I know that God is gonna use this for my good and his glory. 

Carrie: That’s so good. I was thinking about my mom. She died of pancreatic cancer last year and it was tough because, kind of similar to your stepfather, she had been very healthy and was walking and she wasn’t overweight and she was eating right and doing the things. That was a big struggle for me because I said, God, I prayed and I said, God, I don’t understand. She literally served God her whole life was in church and involved in everything. I said, why did she have to go out like this? Because if you’ve ever watched somebody die from pancreatic cancer, it’s a very painful and very awful way to go, probably any cancer, but that one kind of hits you hard and hits you fast and really what God showed me through prayer in that situation was how much opportunity my mom got to witness to people in the hospital. Because if you’re on your deathbed and you know the Lord, you know what is holding you back at that point.

For her to give little informational tracks to people and different things and just say, Hey, this is what I believe, and I hope that you read it and take some time to consider it and think about it. That was the good that came out of that ending and probably a lot of things that I may never know on how God was glorified because I didn’t see everything behind the scenes and how he was working in other people’s lives who interacted with my mother.

Jon: I talk about my stepdad, but I also talk about my sister and it was a very similar situation. My sister was, did lead a very troubled life. She was an addict. She was in and out a rehab. She was in and out of jail. And she was going to pick up a part for her car. She had a retired mechanic who was helping her out.

They were in a van driving down the interstate and one minute they’re driving down the interstate. The next, someone from the other side of traffic going the opposite direction, crosses the median, hits some head on, and all three of them are killed instantly include my sister, who then left three kids.

Without a mom and looking at that funeral, I grew up in a smaller town in Wisconsin. We had to rent a local junior college auditorium for that funeral because so many people attended. And what that meant is so many people heard the gospel of Jesus and more people than I know that my sister ever told in her life because she was struggling.

In her death, more people were witnesses to Jesus than ever in her life. And again, we live in a fallen world. I’m not saying “Oh, that’s great.”Well, no. I mean, her kids now don’t have a mom and I don’t have a sister. yet the Lord takes what’s meant for evil, and I think that’s a good distinction too.

Well, I think the Lord allows things, right? There is also a prowling lion out there trying to seek, kill, and destroy. We can’t discount the fact that the devil is at work as well. There is spiritual warfare. There are things that he is putting into place, and yes, I guess we know that God could stop anything at an instant.

He doesn’t. Again, that’s one of those things that we know about God. We know that he’s good. We know that he can, but he doesn’t stop every tragic thing. What are those ultimate conclusions that leads us to, and so for me, it’s like seeing how many people were introduced to Jesus at her funeral was just mind-blowing.

With my stepdad and my sister, let me put it this way, those deaths broke certain people in my family. I’m not gonna say who but there’s a lot of hardship that has come from those deaths. And in God’s grace, Well, I’m still navigating there. I’m still in therapy for staff. My sister still comes up and my stepdad still comes up in therapy, but I was able to navigate those deaths in a way that a lot of other people in my family were not.

I don’t say that to bolster myself, but I say it to bolster God because the only way was because I had gone through this suffering. I had gone through these trials of like being undiagnosed in my mental health and then getting diagnosed and then doing that work of Paul and all those things that then when those tragedies struck, I was in a much better position to acknowledge that I serve a God who allows things for my good in his glory. And my wife sometimes jokes. She’s like, why aren’t you more messed up? You know? Like, only by Jesus.

Carrie: Absolutely true. 

Jon: I’ve actually now gotten to a place where I thank God for my mental health struggle, and it’s in the sense of like, it’s in looking at what Paul said, That’s really got me there is that like if I didn’t have my mental health struggle, who knows?

Maybe I’m the most maniacal, prideful, arrogant, conceited, mean nasty. I don’t know, fill in the blank with whatever adjective you want. But because Paul can say to keep me from being conceited, I can say, Lord, obviously I’m still struggling with this because I need to still be struggling with this. Maybe there is humility and grace that I can give to other people not just in mental health situations. but to my wife and my kids in certain situations because I’ve struggled and know what it means to be in the depths of despair. And by the way, it still happens, right? I just got out of a depressive episode that happened over the fall that I can say, you know what, God, thank you. I thank you for my mental health struggle because obviously, I’m a pretty rotten person without it even more rotten than I already.

Carrie: Yeah, and just thinking about it, you’ve had a lot of success in your life. You’re the president of a company, you’ve written a bunch of articles, you’ve had your share of accolades on your book, finding rest and other things that you’ve written, and I could see that. I could see how you could kind of lean on that and say like, “Okay, well look at me. I’m successful.”

Jon: If you’re watching the video version, you can see I always have a CS Lewis book behind me. He has done so much great writing on pain and suffering. He has that really popular quote, and it’s popular for a reason that basically like God shouts to us in our pain. It says, megaphone to rouse a dead world.

Guess what? You and I are really hard of hearing how many times, I mean, I’ve fallen into this trap a lot when things are going well, in my spiritual life. It’s way more easy for me to set that on cruise control. When things are going well, I am nailing it since. This is awesome. My kids are behaving. I haven’t had a depressive episode or an anxious thought or an OCD thought cycle and whatever, and that’s when I really easy for me to put my spiritual life on pause, I’m good, but it’s in those times where man, I just can’t get out of bed. Then I’m like Lord, I need you. My prayers become shorter during those times, but man, they become a lot more desperate and I think that’s when we crawl up into his lap and find that comfort. At least I have.

Carrie: One thing I like to ask all of our guests who are sharing a personal story towards the end is, what would you tell your younger self who is going through anxiety or OCD?

Jon: That’s a good question. I’ve thought about this. There’s a lot of things. First of all, like I think back to my first intrusive thought episode, and it’s even more scary for a reason. I’ll get to you in a second, but. I was going to get the mail. We lived in the country in Wisconsin and so we had this long winding gravel driveway past a couple of old barns and it’s an old farmhouse.

I remember we would always basically draw straws for who had to get the mail at the end of the driveway. And because in Wisconsin, like nine months out of the year, it’s like 30 degrees. I remember my sister and I drew straws and I got the short draw. And so I get out there and I go to get the mail and I look through it.

Never thought about this before, but it’s like there’s nothing for me in here. Not even a piece of junk mail. And I just could not get that out of my head. I tell you that because that’s set in motion. Way more of that kind of intrusive thoughts and I think, I thought I was. When I said I knew there was something different about me growing up, I think a lot of times that ended up being I’m just like, shame. Not shame in the sense of, I knew what it was, but just frustration. Maybe that’s the better word. And so I think I would tell myself, it’s okay, you can’t control this. And in the end, my anxiety in OCD I talk about this as in the book, is like there’s a physical component. My brain is broken, but there’s also a spiritual component. I’m willing to recognize that now the church has historically treated it only as a spiritual issue. While the world has historically treated it only as a physical issue. it’s both and, but in the end, it’s a pride issue. It says I can control everything, not just I want to, but I can. So then in my OCD all the stuff that I do, the rituals and all that, it’s a fight for control.

I think I would tell myself, listen, this is not something you can just control. I think I would tell myself, you’re not alone. I remember growing up in the household that I did that they said like, my mom would say live like all the people at school wanna, would want what you have. And I remember thinking this was in my high school, ninth grade, freshman year hallway.

I remember walking and doing classes and like someone had said something in class and looking back, it was pretty innocuous. I just was ruined. And I remember thinking, walking down that hallway, why would anyone want what I have now? Even at the time, I didn’t know I had it. I just like, whatever this is, no one would want that.

What I’ve gotten to the point of is I’d say, you’re not alone. You can’t control this, but then I would also say, you are broken. One of my favorite messages of all time from a pastor here, we went to the church for a long time, Matt Chandler, who said, I was talking to someone the other day and they said Christianity is a crutch for the week.

I told them, absolutely, it’s a crutch for the week. You just don’t realize that your legs are broken. My legs are broken. Your legs are broken. It would be to rest in the fact that, yeah, you are broken. And to the conversation I had with my mom, we’re not gonna be fully healed of anything until the next side of glory. Our bodies are gonna continue breaking down. Right? 

Carrie: Right.

Jon: You can probably hear my voice right now. Allergies here in Dallas area and it’s just like we’re gonna suffer from that kind of crap. Tell kingdom come so long answer. You got me on a good day when I’m just nice and long winded. Those are what I would tell my younger self.

Carrie: I think that’s great and I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Everyone, find the book Finding Rest and there’s also a workbook companion to go with the regular book, however, you say that, but the first book and the workbook both called Finding Rest. Just so we’ll put the links in there to Jon’s information for you if you are looking for him.

Jon: Well, thank you so much for having me. The book has been such a great conversation starter. I just got back actually from a luncheon that we were talking about offline, the opportunities to talk to people who even aren’t Christians, because I think so many people are struggling with this, right? And if you can bring up that proper theology of suffering that we were talking about, here’s the beauty of that.

It doesn’t just apply to mental health. It does apply to the person who’s lost their job. And again, I’m not saying you like, if someone comes to you tomorrow and says, I lost my job, or my husband or my wife just walked out on me, I’m not saying that you go, okay, I wanna show you in job one, one this really cool thing. No, sit with them for a little bit, but as long as you have that understanding, pray for the right time to bring that up and to engage people in those type of conversations. But Yeah, it can apply to mental health. It can apply to so many other things, and that’s the beauty of the gospel. It’s not just a one-trick pony. It answers everything.

Carrie: Yes. Very good. 

I love podcasting because I have gotten the opportunity to interview some wonderful people with amazing stories. So thank you for tuning in and listening today. We will be back with you in a couple of weeks for a compilation of some of our stories of hope episodes. We’re going to do a couple episodes on that as we get prepared and ready for our 100th episode that will be coming out, which is going to give you a hundred tips on managing anxiety,

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 use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, may be comforted by God’s great love for you.

91. Harm OCD in Pregnancy Sent me to the ER with author Amber Williams Van Zuyen

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

Amber Williams Van Zuyen, author of Pregnant and Drowning tells about her struggle with harm OCD during her pregnancy.

Episode Highlights:

  • How and when did her OCD symptoms start
  • What happened the first time she sought help for her OCD
  • How her OCD symptoms intensified during her pregnancy and after giving birth
  • What helped her during her process of overcoming her OCD
  • How God helped her get through her struggles
  • Amber’s book, Drowning and Pregnant 

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 91 of Christian Faith and OCD. In this episode, I’m thrilled to share an insightful conversation with Amber Van Zuyen, the author of Pregnant and Drowning. Amber’s story is incredibly relatable for those who have struggled with anxiety and OCD.

Amber opens up about her personal journey with OCD, which began in childhood with compulsive rituals and obsessive fears. She recalls avoiding stepping on lines and constantly checking for lice. Her symptoms worsened in her twenties, especially after experiencing ocular migraines, which she feared were symptoms of a serious illness.

Amber’s story resonates deeply with anyone who has faced similar challenges. She describes her struggles with health anxiety, driven by fears related to her grandmother’s battle with MS and her own obsessive thoughts about having a serious disease.

Throughout her journey, Amber grapples with the stigma around mental health and the misconceptions within faith communities.

Amber’s reflections offer a poignant reminder that mental health issues are real and deserve compassion and understanding. Her story is a testament to the courage it takes to confront and manage these challenges while maintaining faith and hope.

Tune in to hear more about Amber’s journey and the insights she offers for those struggling with similar experiences.

Related Links and Resources:

Amber’s book: Pregnant & Drowning

Explore Related Episodes:

126. What if I Abuse My Child? Postpartum OCD Story with Sarah Brown

89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

In this episode, Carrie interviews therapist and author K.J. Ramsey about her healing journey from spiritual abuse and chronic pain.

Episode Highlights:

  • How K.J. realized that she was in a spiritually abusive situation
  • Wrestling with questions about why God allowed her suffering
  • The importance of emotional safety in a church or community
  • Her process of leaving a spiritually toxic environment 
  • How connecting to her body helps in her healing
  • K.J.’s books, “The Lord is My Courage” and “The Book of Common Courage”

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD! K.J. Ramsey, author of The Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poems to Find Strength in Small Moments. K.J. shares the powerful story behind her book, which emerged from her personal journey through religious trauma. What started as a means of self-help transformed into a heartfelt collection of prayers and poems designed to support those who feel overwhelmed and wordless in their faith.

K.J. shares how her book complements her earlier work, The Lord is My Courage. Both books offer a deep dive into Psalm 23, with The Book of Common Courage providing concise, trauma-informed prayers. These short prayers serve as a soothing balm for those difficult times when long, elaborate prayers can feel out of reach. The book acts as a source of comfort, entering the private spaces of readers’ lives and reminding them they’re not alone.

Our conversation also touches on the significant theme of integrating our physical experiences with our spiritual lives. K.J. emphasizes that our bodies are not betraying us but are integral to our spiritual journey.

I personally found K.J.’s insights profoundly impactful and am currently reading her first book. I hope you find this episode as enriching as I did.

Related links and Resources:

www.kjramsey.com

Explore Related Episodes:

129. Four Steps to Healing from Spiritual Abuse with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD  episode 89. I had the absolute privilege of interviewing K.J. Ramsey. This was a situation where I didn’t realize before the interview how much we had in common. We both have a background as trauma therapists with more of a somatic lens. We both graduated from the same seminary. It was very interesting to see her perspectives based on her own experiences and understanding of scripture.

Carrie: K.J., welcome to the podcast.

K.J.: Hey, thank you for having me.

Carrie: I know that with authors, you guys tend to have a lot of podcast interviews. It’s almost like you’re on a virtual book tour nowadays, right?

K.J.: Basically what it is, it’s an extensive virtual book tour, and I am an introvert.

Carrie: Oh, no. Well, at least you don’t have to meet as many people face-to-face then.

K.J.: I guess in a way, especially during cold and flu season, and there’s still COVID all around. It’s nice to minimize some of that, but it is good. I get to talk to a lot of really interesting people.

Carrie: My understanding from scoping out your website is that you talk about your personal story there, and I imagine that is what you write about as well. You’ve written a few books. Is it an autoimmune condition that you have or some issue that causes chronic pain?

K.J.: I have several autoimmune diseases, but I started with one, which is a way that it typically goes if you have one; it kind of blooms into more. I’ve had ankylosing spondylitis for 14 years, and AS is the shortened version of that, which is better on the tongue. Last year, I got COVID-19, which turned into several more diseases I will have for my life under intense treatment. I have a lot.

Carrie: You ended up with the long haul COVID symptoms?

K.J.: Yes. Because of it, I had long covid and new diseases, which is hard.

Carrie: I’m curious because you also talked in your story about spiritual abuse, and I’m processing, as well, a lot about healing just in general because my husband was just diagnosed last year with a permanent neurological condition, and there’s no cure for it.

I’m curious if you could share some of your thoughts on healing. I think it helps our audience with anxiety and OCD as well because there’s a lot of struggle in wrestling. Why am I having to deal with this? Why won’t God heal me? Why can’t he take this away from me? He’s all-powerful. He has the ability to do that. Can you tell us about maybe some of your wrestlings with that?

K.J.: I was 20 years old when I suddenly got sick and went from being a fully functional young adult to barely walking and could barely hold a pen or drive myself across campus. I was a college student at the time, and that persisted.

I entered adulthood wrestling with this question of why I have this suffering that doesn’t seem to go away. What is the point? And also, what does God care? What is God going to do about this? And really, my better answers are in the book, my first book, this Too Shall Last. I will say that I’m more a writer than anything else, but I’m a trauma therapist learning how to listen to my body and respond to my own sensations with kindness, compassion, and movement.

I do believe that there is healing in the way that I would say, the capacity to live as fully as we can, even for some things to be reversed. And that’s with me saying that with a person with a lot that’s wrong on my test results.

A lot of ongoing pain still in my life that I’ve seen things change, and I’ve seen my capacity to show up in my life grow massively as I’ve learned to listen to my body and what she has to say about how safe I feel on any given day or moment. From both a theological and a trauma perspective, I believe there is possible healing in how we face ourselves with compassion and face one another with compassion. And I caveat that by saying how I define healing might be different than sudden spontaneous removal of all of your symptoms. I think that pain prompts us to pay attention and bear witness to the pain in our lives. When I say pain, I mean all of it. Emotional pain too, struggles, the very inconvenient experience of having intrusive thoughts. That’s painful. Pain prompts us to pay attention and can point us to the places where parts of us still need to be unfolded with the care that needs to be held.

It’s in that process that we experience more fullness, more joy, that’s healing. There’s a difference between healing and curing. The difference is between good removal of all of your problems and experiencing wholeness, and I think we all can experience wholeness even in a body that continues to have a disease and a mental illness.

Carrie: That’s incredible. I don’t think that I could have phrased that better because I think that aligns with some of the process of what I’ve been thinking about with my husband. It’s like we haven’t gotten the healing from, or the cure, like you said, from the diagnosis, but we’ve been healed in the sense that we’ve been healed from isolation.

We have support and other people we’re connected to who are going through this. We have a support system outside of those that are going through it. We’ve been healed from the financial stress of paying for medical bills, and God has provided. That’s something that I want to write about a little bit more.

When we started this journey, it was kind; a lot of people were praying for him, and he was having eye issues, and they were praying for him for healing. That in itself is somewhat of a miracle because even though he has a degenerative condition, his eyes haven’t changed in a year, which we are just really celebrating; that, and so thankful that he hasn’t lost any more of his vision, but it’s been a process of, I think his eye doctor’s probably not a Christian and doesn’t know quite how to make sense of that. I thought when we first started going through this, God would take healing in any form that it comes in.

However you want to do this, if you’re going to heal him physically or if you want to heal him emotionally, and there’s the level where he’ll talk about how, even though he likes to be in the background, he has this walker now that puts him in the spotlight. People speak to him, and he’s able to encourage them. Or even people with mobility issues say, “Oh, tell me about this walker.” It’s just a little bit different from your typical walker. How do I get one of those? Those types of things. It’s been very interesting to see how God’s used him differently with this struggle and suffering because it’s definitely changed him a lot. It changed me a lot and drew us closer to God and each other and those things. I’m really thankful for it.

K.J: I love that you started that off office saying God has healed you of; I don’t know if you put it exactly like this, but your individualism. I think that’s one of the core things that we’re all being invited into, whether it’s with struggling with something like OCD or Ankylos Spondylitis or complex trauma, there’s this invitation to be more fully human, which means to be in relationship to others, to be connected. There’s something about our struggles that invites us in a way that is harder to decline, to be connected, and to be supported, to be seen. The way that my body works, I can’t do life on my own.

I can’t. There are many stretches where I can’t take care of myself fully; beyond that, I need the emotional support of the people around me. I don’t love experiencing that, and I love that my body pulls me into a story where I don’t have to be self-sufficient, and nobody else has to, either. And I think that is the healing in which we’re all being bound.

We’re all being invited into. It’s the space between each other. That’s where Joy is. That’s where wonder is through love; our struggles take us to go there.

Carrie: We’re entirely too isolated and disconnected from each other in our society. I’m really curious about this. It is kind of switching topics, but your story regarding how you discovered that you were in a spiritually abusive conversation. Just gives us a picture of the warning signs of that or when it starts to click like, “Oh, this isn’t healthy.”

K.J.: In my previous book, the Lord is My Courage, I share a lot of my husband and my story of waking up to the fact that we were in a spiritually abusive faith community in this church and choosing to leave it and trying to heal from it. Dealing with the ongoing effects of religious trauma is so hard about spiritual abuse that it’s often quite subtle.

Of course, there are going to be things that are not subtle. But I think the whole, does the fish know what the water is around them? It’s just, you’re in, you are swimming in the water, and that’s the water. For us, waking up to the fact that the water we were swimming in was toxic was a slow process of paying attention and sensing our pain.

For us, it was noticing how other people were being harmed. My husband was a pastor at this church, and his coworkers would come to him in tears after being yelled at in the pastor’s office. So hearing other people being belittled or overworked, noticing how people are subtly mocked in staff meetings, and being disturbed by that is part of what woke us up.

At first, we weren’t the people being directly attacked because we were doing the stuff that the pastor didn’t want to do himself. My husband was over pastoral care and counseling, and I ran my counseling practice at the church. This pastor wanted to preach, so we were in good graces because we did something that made the church look good and took stuff off his plate. That favor you can get with a leader can blind you for a while to how they might be treating other people. But as soon as we started to confront, I don’t love how you yelled at that person; that’s when you become the problem, too. I don’t so much to categorize warning signs or red flags.

The most important thing is that we should know, especially in white evangelicalism, that we have been taught to dismiss our own bodies’ signals about how safe we are in our environment. We call it definitely faithfulness that you should serve no matter what, volunteer, and believe the best of your leaders because of so many things.

The inheritance of Nastheism down to the more recent effects of purity culture. We have internalized and ingested a spirituality that says the body is bad and your emotions are untrustworthy. I’m here to say that’s not scripturally true, theologically true, or physiologically helpful.

Carrie: Yes, it drives me bonkers.

K.J.: Yes. It’s terrible. That in itself is, those are the seeds of religious trauma right there, but your emotions and your sensations about being in church and being around other Christians are actually telling you really important things about how safe you are and how safe everybody is in that community, and learning to listen to your own sense of distress and being disturbed by something is actually what helps you move into more safety.

Sometimes, your body has wise things to point out about whether somebody’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Our bodies helped us over time. Very slowly, our bodies begged us to listen. I know it was listening that got us free.

Carrie: This is something that really bothers me, that when people comment in church, and I’ve heard it repeatedly with pastors, you have to choose faith over your feelings. Those are interacting with each other all the time. God gave us a body and emotions for a reason, and God has a wide range of emotions. That statement, to me, I feel is very unhealthy, but it’s something that I’ve heard repetitively.

K.J.: You can walk around in public and see people wearing shirts that say faith over fear. It’s so prevalent that we don’t even need to understand how it’s been co-opted by certain political movements. But faith over fear is self-harm because fear is your body’s wise response to show you that you don’t feel safe and help you move into safety and connection. And I know this is bold to say on a podcast, especially about OCD.

Fear is not the enemy. Fear is there to move you somewhere. All emotion is energy meant to move you. Emotion, energy, and motion. It’s intended to prompt you to pay attention to yourself as somebody who deserves safety, connection, fear, and faith. Fear drives you to treat yourself as a friend of God. Fear doesn’t have to be something that we fight.

It can be something that wakes us up. Fear makes you quite alert, and often for those of us with mental illness. It might prompt us to be way more observant than we wish we were all the time. The experience of hypervigilance is not necessarily pleasant, but it is a prompt. It is not the problem; I think it’s the space that goes back to talking about healing.

That’s the space I love seeing people get to make a shift because when you start to treat your fear, which is part of your body’s physiological response to danger and the perception of danger. You start treating your fear as a friend with something important to tell you. Your life changes. There’s room for things not to feel as terrible as they do when you’re fighting part of yourself.

Carrie: It’s so rare that I get to have conversations with somebody that’s this mindful because essentially what you’re talking about is mindfulness. This sense of being curious about our emotional state instead of trying to judge it and say, oh, I shouldn’t be afraid. The Bible says, fear not, so I have to cut that piece off and go with God’s given me love and power to sound mind. And it’s this bizarre Christian CBT, is what I call it, where we try to do some thought replacement, and we’re all going to feel better now, and it just doesn’t work.

K.J.: I would say, what I’m saying more than mindfulness is that embodiment is the practice of non-judgmentally paying attention to and responding to our sensations.

I take it one step further because I think that even with mindfulness, we can stay detached from our physical experience. What’s happening? I’m making this little movement you can’t see me. You keep making this movement with my hand, like cutting ourselves off at the neck. Basically, what happens when we feel afraid, or when we feel overwhelmed, we feel ashamed?

Any of these activating big feelings that come up is that the way your body works, you’re temporarily cut off from the regulating power of your prefrontal cortex. So your brainstem is very active, your limbic system and your brain is very active, and your body is quickly mobilizing you to seek safety, and you can’t access the part of you that’s, well, God is love, and Christ dwells in me. Therefore, I am actually okay. You can’t access that. We’re talking about a bottom-up approach to belief, which is that response to the sensation happening in your body; that’s what I mean by bottom. So, the lower half of you, starting with your body, responds to this sensation with curiosity and compassion.

That is what brings your body and mind back together so that you can return to that place of faith, of mentally accepting an ascent and receiving that Christ is with you. Embodiment this non-judgmental, which is easier said than done, paying attention to what’s happening inside your body.

Carrie: When you were leaving the spiritually toxic environment because essentially you both had to leave your jobs, it sounds like that’s a significant shift. How did you recover from that trauma to become more embodied? Was that through your therapy process?

K.J.: The recovery began, I would say, I think something that feels in this moment important to point out is part of why we don’t leave is because we are so afraid of losing our livelihood and our sense of belonging; that’s why we took us so long to leave. Truthfully, the fear of how we will pay our bills and how we will afford insurance. That kept us extended our stay in the land of toxicity for years. And a lot of people don’t talk about the practicality of that. Having money to pay for your groceries and pay for your rent is pretty important. And whether you’re working for a church or maybe realizing maybe my community is unhealthy and you don’t work there.

The fear of losing your belongings is massive. Most of these kinds of churches prompt like they are ordered around the church should be your whole life. This is where you go multiple times a week. Your small group is your community. So what happens when you have to leave? You lose everything. And I no longer think your life should be ordered around an institution, but that’s a separate conversation.

Healing was started by leaving, and that was terrifying. And it was a rescue in many ways that God would lead us out into a broader place. It was once we were out my body got even more vocal. And I was experiencing a lot of anxiety and tremors in my arms. I was falling. I thought I had had so many mysterious health symptoms over the years with my disease, and I’ve been tested for MS before.

I had a lot of tests done. I had at one point this whole brain and spine MRI done and saw this neurologist, and this was such a moment of grace, of God’s kindness. He showed me the pictures of my brain and spine and said, your brain is beautiful. There is no evidence of disease here. “My wife is a complex trauma survivor,” and I think what’s happening is he had asked us questions about what’s been going on in your life.

“My wife is a complex trauma survivor.” I think what’s happening here is trauma. The further you escape this situation, the better your body will feel; some of these symptoms will disappear. At that point, I was just a therapist. I hadn’t started to specialize in trauma, but to hear somebody named that for me was incredibly helpful because you feel it’s not; what I’m going through is not that bad.

It’s hard to even get to the point of letting yourself call something spiritual abuse. Because we’re so conditioned to be deferential to pastors, to leaders, and we want to be kind. We think that it is not gracious to say something or use a word like that, but grace and truth go together. The truth is my body reacted with such violent, intense shows and displays of a lack of safety because I had been so gaslit, demeaned, and pushed out because I had been treated less than human.

My body was responding in kind, saying this is not okay. That was my body’s protest. I started there because I think it was my physical experience of such extreme distress of feeling terrible. That prompted me to seek more help to get into therapy again. I believe that, more than anything, put me on a path of studying somatics and beginning as a therapist myself into great somatics into my practice, and that’s now the foundation of everything I do. But I start there; I just gave you the version of if we would have this conversation for three hours. I always trust that you know what; sometimes, in these conversations, there’s always a reason that what comes to my mind first is what there’s an invitation to say. And so that’s where we went.

Carrie: How wise of that neurologist to be admitting. “Hey, there’s some psychological things going on.” But not make it, “Well, it’s all in your head because you’re kind of crazy.: There’s this balance where some have had either of those extremes.

K.J: Yes, I’ve been told it’s psychosomatic. It’s all in your head dismissively and blames me like I am too broken. And I’m sure so many people listening have experienced this too, and maybe your husband did far before getting his diagnosis. There’s a vast difference between an acknowledgement of how our brains and bodies are connected that says your symptoms are real and they make sense based on what you’ve experienced.

This is psychosomatic; if you can fix your mental problems, your body will feel better. That’s the sin right there of individualism. That kind of medical model that blames people’s symptomology on their struggle is why they feel these symptoms when our bodies are begging us to hear the truth about the broader systems that we’re a part of, our family systems, our church systems, our society.

I think the point is that these things we feel are such problems or separate us from those who don’t have struggles as much as we do. I say this as a disabled woman. I think there’s some fierce wisdom in the ways that we struggle that our bodies are trying to tell us. You and those around you deserve more love and support than you have received. All of the symptoms of stress that we experience in how they manifest are shouting to tell us we deserve to be seen, held and helped.

Carrie: Very interesting and definitely brought up some things I haven’t considered. I’m curious for you to tell us about the Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poem to Find Strength in Small Moments. How this book came about and the importance of it. Why does it need to be out in the world?

K.J: We have been talking about trauma and part of what happens when we’re experiencing trauma. Also, when we’re feeling overwhelmed, we talked about how your body is strongly mobilizing. Energy to keep you safe, but that is sinking you further away from your being able to access the language centers of your brain, for example.

The point is when life is hard, it’s hard to have words, and the Book of Common Courage is really my offering of words for the moments in our lives and the seasons in our lives when we feel wordless and when we don’t have words to pray, and we wish we did. When we are struggling to make sense of our lives, when we don’t feel strength, and we don’t feel seen. We want to that it’s an offering of presence, as I think that books are portable presence in so many ways that there’s something about a book that can enter into the private place of your home, your bedside, your living room and be with you and make you feel less alone in your life and story.

I think we all need the reminder that we are not the only ones with questions and confusion about God. And when it comes to whether our stories are excellent. So this is just my offering to bridge that gap between belief and the body, between your hard day and the hope that’s yours.

I wrote it, not meaning to write a book. When I was writing the Lord as my courage when I was processing my own story of religious trauma. I started to write poetry and prayers for myself. Just to process the intensity of the story and really to help myself. There’s poetry is a really distilled form of language, so to help myself distill down, what I am trying to say in this chapter.

What’s the most important thing and what’s just for me and my spouse, and what needs to be out there for thousands and thousands of people to read? Poetry helped me find my way, and then, over time, I just shared it and shared some pieces on social media, mostly because I was tired while writing a manuscript and needed something easy to share.

People felt seen by the poems and the prayers. It was before I called it poetry because I didn’t even feel I could give myself that label. It was through other people’s responses to the words that I was like; I guess maybe this would be encouraging for people, not just for me. And it became a book.

Carrie: I love it. It’s based on Psalm 23.

K.J: Both The Lord is My Courage and the Book of Common Courage walk through the exact breakdown of phrase by phrase through Psalm 23. The book of Common Courage is an exploration. It’s praying through the Psalm, but it’s also praying through getting to receive, being in dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd. Who is the person who that Psalm was pointing towards? Most of the prayers in the book are a colic, short form of prayer, which is intentional. It’s my trauma-informed way of doing less is more. We don’t need long prayers and lots and lots of words when we’re struggling. We need small, and we need a little bit of containment. They are structured, and they are a little bit of containment to help you feel held. But they’re mostly appointed at Christ to dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd who still is seeking you.

Carrie: I love less is more. We did an episode not too long back on breath prayers. That’s something that I’ve just been able to incorporate in my life at different times or seasons, and those are very short but very helpful. If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who is dealing with chronic pain or spiritual abuse?

K.J: I think that I would tell her your body is not bad. Your body is not betraying you by feeling all this pain and struggling so much. Your body has wise things to say, and I dare you to listen. Please listen to her. I think that’s what I would tell her.

Carrie: That’s definitely good. Your body is not bad. The people hear nothing else from this episode. I hope they receive that piece because, as you said, it’s somewhat so ingrained in our Christian culture to almost be scared. To be embodied, something like you’re getting too new age or something like that is not what we’re doing. And it’s not scriptural to be disconnected from ourselves.

K.J: It’s an expression of faith in God who put on flesh to dwell among us. When I treat my body with reverence, I worship Christ, who decided to become human in a body and still reigns in a body. This is worship.

Carrie: Thank you so much for being on the show today. Share your words of wisdom. I think this is going to be relevant and helpful to a lot of people.

K.J: Thanks for having me.

______________________

Carrie: I am currently reading KJ’s first book. I went ahead and picked up a copy after I did the interview, and I’m enjoying it. As always, thank you so much for listening.

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 use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum.

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

76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet

In this episode, Carrie is joined by John Bennett, a banker and author, to discuss finding joy through life’s trials. John opens up about his journey from a cancer diagnosis to his recovery, sharing how his faith and mindset helped him through some of the most challenging times in his life.

Episode Highlights:

  • John’s initial cancer diagnosis and the challenges he faced during treatment.
  • How he managed the emotional and spiritual side of being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
  • The impact of hundreds of people praying for him throughout his journey and how that support helped keep his spirit strong.
  • How the acceptance of life’s limitations, whether dealing with cancer or mental health struggles like anxiety or OCD, can bring peace and growth.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 76 of Christian Faith and OCD. John Bennett, a banker, author, and cancer survivor shares his remarkable journey through multiple myeloma—a type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.

John opens up about his initial diagnosis and the rigorous treatment regimen he faced, including chemotherapy, radiation, surgeries, and a stem cell transplant. Despite the severity of his illness, John’s unwavering faith in God guided him through this challenging period. He discusses how his Christian beliefs helped him view his diagnosis as part of a divine plan, balancing his trust in God with proactive medical treatment.

Throughout our conversation, John reflects on the transformative impact of his illness on his life. He highlights how facing such a serious condition led him to reevaluate his priorities, deepen his relationships, and find new sources of joy.

Tune in to discover how finding joy amidst trials is possible through faith and perseverance. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking encouragement and strength in their own challenges.

More Episodes to Listen to:

95. Healthier Theology of Healing with Pastor Mark Smith

75. God as Close as Your Breath: Breath Prayer with Jennifer Tucker

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 75. God as Close as Your Breath: Breath Prayer with Jennifer Tucker

Today on the show, I’m joined by author Jennifer Tucker. Jennifer talks about her discovery of breath prayer and how it helped her with her anxiety.

Episode Highlights:

  • Jennifer’s experience of anxiety and depression
  • How Jen came across breath prayer
  • How breath prayer helps calm anxiety 
  • Examples of breath prayer
  • Jennifer’s Book: Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul

Episode Summary:

Jennifer Tucker, the author of Breath as Praye shares how breath prayers helped her navigate anxiety and depression. She opens up about masking her struggles for years, thinking anxiety was something to be ashamed of because of how certain Bible verses were presented to her growing up. She talks about how anxiety often showed up as perfectionism and people-pleasing, and how she finally faced her struggles when helping her daughter through severe panic attacks.

We also discuss the stigma around therapy and medication in Christian circles and how important it is to see mental health as part of our overall well-being. Jennifer beautifully explains how breath prayers combine calming techniques with connecting to God, making them a powerful tool for managing anxiety.

If you’ve ever felt isolated in your mental health struggles or overwhelmed by anxiety, I hope this conversation encourages you to explore what works for you and lean on God’s ever-present comfort.

Links and Resources:

Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul

Jennifer Tucker 

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD episode 75. Today on the show, I’m very excited to bring an interview with Jennifer Tucker, author of Breath as Prayer. She will share with us her discovery of this practice of breath prayers and how those helped her get through a challenging situation in her own life. So here is the interview.

Carrie: Jennifer, talk with us about your story of dealing with anxiety and depression. 

Jennifer: Sure. So, my story of dealing with anxiety and depression is a whole lot of not dealing with my anxiety and depression. I think for a very long time, I wouldn’t even admit that I struggled as much as I did with anxiety and depression. I grew up feeling like anxiety was almost like a sin. It isn’t good. If you’re anxious, ’cause the Bible says, “Be anxious for nothing, do not worry about anything.” So that was crammed in my head so much. And so when I would struggle with feelings of anxiety or feelings of depression. I would really be filled with a lot of shame about that.

I tried to hide it. I tried to mask it for a very long, and I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I don’t think at the time, especially as a teenager or young adult, I really didn’t know that’s what I was doing with my anxiety. I came out a lot as. It is masked as perfectionism, overworking, and extreme people-pleasing. I felt like I needed to control every little piece of my life in order to keep those feelings of anxiety at that day. And then when things, of course, wouldn’t go my way or things weren’t quite perfect. Then, my anxiety would flare up, and I’d have a tough time emotionally. I just felt like I was just an emotional person.

Why do I feel this way? Why do I struggle so much? I’ve always leaned more toward a bit of melancholy, kind of just—more that way. Just my natural tendency is that way. Regarding the depression side, I did not recognize my depression for what it was: the symptoms. I didn’t want to have it, so I masked and hit it a lot. It wasn’t until my youngest daughter, when she was 13, started having very severe panic attacks, and that’s what sent us. Head first into the world of mental health and trying to help her through her severe anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I had to get real honest with myself and my own anxiety and my own struggles with my own mental health.

I’ve learned a ton in the last four years since we’ve been on this journey with her. Much of the work has been working on myself and addressing my anxiety and depression. I see a therapist regularly. I take antidepressants. And I love Jesus with all my heart when those things are not contradictory. I’ve come a long way. My whole idea of mental health has totally flipped and shifted since working with my daughter through all of her struggles and identifying and being honest with myself and with God about my own.

Carrie: I think your story is so relatable to many of our listeners who grew up with that church idea of, okay, well, the Bible says, “be anxious for nothing or don’t be anxious.” Don’t be afraid. And we take that the wrong way. We take it kind of like a directive, like a command, like do not almost like it’s next to do not murder, do not murder, do not be anxious, but really it’s more, I see it as comfort as God sharing with us. I have everything in control. It’s going to be okay. Right?

I don’t want you to have to worry about that. Just like I would comfort my daughter if she cries, it’s okay. I’d tell her everything’s fine. And God does that with us through scripture. It’s just that we don’t have a tone connected to the Bible. And so whatever tone gets laid on by spiritual leaders and others is the tone we take from it—many times. I like what you said about masking your anxiety as other things, such as perfectionism, as the person who’s the high achiever, the go-getter. That’s always moving, always going, the people pleasing. Often, people don’t recognize anxiety symptoms because they are so high functioning.

One of my friends was talking to me about this today, who’s also a counselor, and she said, “You know, so many people deal with high-functioning anxiety. And they don’t even realize it”. And she said, “People don’t think that I’m anxious, but there are times when I’m anxious because I look so high functioning, I look like I’ve got my ducks in a row and I have things together.” So maybe that’s a cue for some people who are listening right now. Perhaps they think they’re listening for somebody else. And they might realize, ” Hey, I have some of those things too. 

Jennifer: Absolutely. I think for many years, I kept myself so busy that I didn’t have time to pay attention to what was happening. It wasn’t until I had to slow down that I could identify and recognize those symptoms for what they were when I took away all those masks. I had to quit my job, my full-time job, and stay home. Well, then, I didn’t have that job to keep me busy and distracted anymore. And so I was left with myself in a lot of ways. And so, that forced me to pay attention to what was happening. And that’s what breath prayers that we’ll talk about later have helped me, too: to slow down and pay attention. And I think that’s been vital for me. Unfortunately, I had to do it. I didn’t choose to do it. I had to do it through circumstances, but I’m so grateful looking back for that. 

Carrie: I love that you and other people we’ve talked to are trying to de-stigmatize going to therapy and taking medication as a Christian like it’s okay. For you to struggle with some of these things, it’s okay to reach out for help, whether that’s medical help or professional counseling help. So, I appreciate you sharing that with our audience. You can love Jesus, have a therapist, and take medication. 

Jennifer: Absolutely. Because I mean, a lot of this is tied to our brain and how we function, and your brain is an organ, just like any other organ in your body. And that’s one thing I’ve learned through working with my daughter, too. I mean, this is as much a medical issue as it is. Mental health is physical health. It is your health. 

Carrie: Yes.

Jennifer: And so treating that, there are so many different factors and things. One of those could be needing professional medical health professional, psychiatric help. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just like going to a specialist for kidney disease or a specialist; if you have a heart issue, you go to a cardiologist. We need to recognize that the brain is so complicated and there are so many factors. Yes. There are environmental factors and far thought patterns and things that matter, too. Still, it could very much be a physical issue with the brain and those connections there and those, so identifying that and recognizing that and design-stigmatizing that, I think, is critical because it’s not a sin to struggle.

We’re all; we live in a fallen world in broken bodies. They’re going to fail us in one way or another. And that’s just that we all deal with something different. But mental health is, unfortunately, I think, where it intersects with faith. We often feel very isolated and alone, and we don’t know how to talk about it in relation to our faith. And I think a lot of times it’s not talked about enough, and it’s not. And there’s that’s where, like, the shame, and that’s what I lived with for years; I had so much shame piled on me because of my struggles. And God doesn’t want us to live that way. And like you said, when he says, “Do not fear, or don’t be anxious,” it’s not a command. I saw it as a command for so long. But it wasn’t until my daughter was struggling. She’d come to me, terrified and afraid. I didn’t get mad or yell at her for being scared. I wrapped her in my arms, and I reminded her. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here. You’re not alone. You’re safe. And that’s what God’s doing in the Bible. He’s telling us you’re not alone. I’m here with you. You’re safe. You don’t have to be afraid. And that’s the thing that’s shifted everything for me is realizing that difference there, turning how I perceived how the Bible talked about anxiety. 

Carrie: In this process of getting your daughter some help and then recognizing your anxiety working through that physically, emotionally, and spiritually, you came across breath prayers, right? So, tell us a little bit about that. 

Jennifer: Sure. Yes, this was in the middle of it; it was probably two years ago or so. One of the very first things my daughter’s psychiatrist and her therapist worked with her on, and incidentally, the first thing her psychiatrist told her was breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.

And so, the breathing exercises were one of the first things they started practicing with her to help her manage her anxiety. I had never realized that before now, different breathing exercises don’t necessarily work for everyone; for my daughter in particular, I’m not a scientist; I’m not a doctor. I don’t claim to be an expert in any way, but I have researched, and it is more and more fascinating how God has created our bodies and even the act of breathing. It’s the one body process that we have control of. We can control whether we’re breathing rapidly and fast, or we can slow our breathing. But we can do that. By slowing our breathing, we connect to our parasympathetic nervous system, which tells our brain the whole process of how our body handles anxiety. It’s how God created us. And it’s okay. It’s not bad, especially if you’re going for a hike and you, a bear, come in your path; you’ll be thankful you have anxiety.

Carrie: Right.

Jennifer: Because your body is going to be the gear. That sympathetic nervous system kicks in, your amygdala takes over, and you will act and respond to that threat. That fear that’ll help you hopefully keep you safe because you’ll be able to respond to that. But many times, because of the fall, our brains aren’t always connected the way God originally intended, and our bodies don’t always process stimuli as we’re supposed to. Sometimes, the sympathetic nervous system will get riled up over something that isn’t a threat to us, and we’ll get anxious and worried. And so one way we can calm the amygdala down and calm the sympathetic nervous system down is through deep breathing because our breath connects to the vagus nerve, which connects to all of our organs, our major organs in our body. And so by slowing our breath, we’re telling our brain we’re okay, we’re not in danger here. Then, the brain can send signals to the heart, which slows down as our breathing slows down. And you really, you do feel calmer.

It’s a physiological thing that happens in our bodies and how God made us. And through the breath, we can do that. And when we connect, that’s the physical side of it. But then, when we connect prayer to that, we’re, at the same time, turning our thoughts to Christ, to his truth, to replace. Whatever those worries are, whatever those fears are, with some truth from his word, then we are connecting our mind, body, and soul all at once to Christ. And to me, that’s what makes the breath prayer so powerful. Cause there’s lots of breathwork. There are lots of different breath-breathing exercises you can do. And they are very helpful, and there are tons of scientific studies around that. But I also believe there’s just a significant power in prayer. Combining the two. To me, breath prayer is a powerful tool to manage my anxiety.

when she focuses on her breathing, it makes her more anxious and conspires with her into panic. And so this isn’t something that works for absolutely everybody. 

So, she’s had to find other techniques for her, but breathing exercises help me greatly in researching. What are different things that can help her? What are strategies that both she and I can use? How can we learn to manage this anxiety? I did. I completely stumbled upon breath and prayers in a blog post online that someone I wrote, and I had never heard of before. It’s not common, at least not in my faith tradition. I had not heard about it very much. But it captivated me from the get-go because it incorporates and ties into your breath, which I already knew was significant in helping me manage my anxiety.

It brought in the other element of connecting to God through prayer and focusing on his word. And so, when I learned about them, I scribbled down a few of them and even wrote a blog post about them. It was so helpful to me, and I just thought they were a great way to pray when you’re anxious because they are so short that it doesn’t require a lot of because when you’re anxious. A lot of it’s really when you’re anxious. I know for me, it’s hard to think, and it’s hard to process because you get so lost in the worries and the thoughts and the overwhelming feeling just of the anxiety. 

Breath prayers give you the words to pray when you don’t have those words to pray or when you’re feeling anxious in particular. And so that had helped me to give me words to pray when I was like, I don’t know, I don’t even know what to say. What do I say? But it wasn’t until last year that my daughter was hospitalized; she was admitted to the hospital last February. That night, I was just such a hard night because we were facing a new battle, and it was going to be, I didn’t know, would happen because she was very, very sick. And I was terrified, and I lay down on the, she fell asleep. It was like 2:00 a.m. in her hospital room. I laid down on this vinyl couch, and I was just overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and worry. I was terrified; I didn’t know how the following days would go, let alone the next few months ahead. And I felt like in the last three years before that, I had prayed everything. 

I knew to pray for healing, strength, and all these things that didn’t happen. And I was like, I’ve said all the words I know to say, God, I don’t have any more words to pray. And at that moment, a breath prayer came to my mind that I had written down months before and was from Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd. I have all I need”. And that’s the only thing I could think of when I had trouble catching my breath. I was crying. I was just so overwhelmed. But I remember those breath prayers, and I started just inhaling slowly. The Lord is my shepherd, and then exhaling. I have all that I need, and then I make myself slow down my breathing and focus on just those words. And that’s when I think breath prayer became significant to me because at that moment, as I focused on where I mean, I was in this hospital room. My daughter was so sick. I didn’t know what would happen, but I’m focusing on the Lord is my shepherd, and I’m a sheep, and he loves me, and he’s here. He’s present with me, and I have all that I need.

I have him. It doesn’t matter what’s to come. I have God; I have Christ. I have all that I need. It’s going to be okay. And I can’t explain the piece that I had at that moment. As I slowed my breathing, my anxiety eased, and I was able to fall asleep. That’s not to say my anxiety went away. Because the next day, I was anxious again. The doctors came in, and different things happened, but I found myself in those next few weeks as we were in the hospital, I’d walk the halls and breathe slowly and pray those, that one breath prayer. I think I just prayed that one mostly repeatedly, but it became my lifeline during those days. It became a prayer. I could pray when I was overwhelmed and didn’t have words. And ever since then, it has been a part of my regular prayer life. It’s not the only prayers I pray, but it’s become a significant way for me to slow down and be very intentional about trusting God and leaning into him when I’m anxious.

Carrie: Wow! That’s really powerful. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about this, and I hate to go too deep here, but when we think about it, the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. And I always just wonder about that. Yes. That’s like the Holy Spirit is somehow connected with our spirit as a person, that we’re spiritual beings. And I always wonder about the Holy Spirit’s interaction with our body. Because it says that we’re a temple of the Holy Spirit. So, I’m just curious if like breath is almost a way for us to connect. I don’t know if it is or not. This is not coming from scripture. It’s just coming from Carrie’s musings. But I wonder if in those moments, like when we slow down, and we breathe, and we pray if, that’s a way for us to just tap into the Holy Spirit that’s already inside of us, and we forget. That God’s that close. You know what I’m saying?

Jennifer:  Absolutely.

Carrie: God’s already here. 

Jennifer: He’s as close as our breath. I mean, man, he created man. That’s what created life. His breath brought Adam to life and gave him the soul created through God’s breath. And so our breath every day, every breath we take. It is a gift from him. He is giving us life. And he’s the one who sustains our life. And I  agree. The Holy Spirit’s in us, working in us; the Bible says he’s transforming us through the renewing of our minds. And I believe that these are ways he does renew our mind and brain. And there’s science to back this up; science and faith are not contradictory. No, no. We act like they are like, no science, but no, the science is only proving what God’s already said. And he has made our body and created our body in such a complex way. And our brain literally can create new pathways in our brain.

As we retrain our brain to, for example, breathe, prayer is one way I have changed how I respond to my anxiety. So, instead of immediately spiraling into panic, I can immediately turn to Christ. Breathe in deep. Remind myself of a truth from his word. And if I do that over and over and over again if I repeat it, it’s just like with any habit or any rhythm we create in our life; you’re rewiring your brain. God’s transforming us by renewing our minds by shifting how we think and shifting how we respond to things. But it takes intentional work, and that’s breath; prayers aren’t hard. They’re super easy, but it does take intentionality to slow down. Stop. And do it just for a few minutes. It doesn’t take long, but it can significantly impact how we think and process our anxiety because we’re rewiring our brains. It’s fascinating. 

Carrie: I love that. I thought it would be cool if you could write a book. Do you put several of these prayers into a book? Breathe as prayer, calm your anxiety, focus your mind, and renew your soul. And I thought it would be cool to give people a little taste of one of those you put in there and maybe lead us through life, like one of those exercises. 

Jennifer: Sure, I’ll do my best. Breath prayers are just two lines long. Usually, I, there are.

Carrie: Okay.

Jennifer: There are a few breath prayers in my book in four lines where you inhale and exhale twice to get through it. But most of them are just two lines. You inhale on the first line, inhale slowly as you pray the first line, and exhale slowly as you pray. The second line of the prayer. All my breath prayers in my book are rooted in scripture. They’re all coming from the word of God. I’ve taken verses and made them into prayers, just short little prayers. 

So that way, we’re focused on the truth. And it’s from the word of God. Although you can pray, any prayers that you want are breath prayers. But one that I particularly like. It comes from Psalm 55: 22, which says, “Give your burdens to the Lord, and he will take care of you”. And so the breath prayer I wrote with that one says, “I give my burdens to you.” Cause I’m talking to God. I give my burdens to you. You will take care of me”. When you pray a breath prayer, the idea is to breathe in slowly and exhale slowly. And one, we typically breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth. And I like to remember that by smelling the flowers and blowing out the candles. It’s a common phrase that’s used with breathwork. 

So you pretend that you’re smelling the flowers slowly and then slowly blowing out all the candles on that cake as you exhale fully. There are lots of different patterns and rhythms to breathing that you can do. But my favorite is to inhale for five seconds and then exhale for five seconds. I’ll try to lead you in that by just saying inhale because I can’t talk as I inhale. So I’ll say inhale and then read the first line.

Carrie: Okay. 

Jennifer: Then I’ll say exhale and read the second line as you slowly exhale. And then we’ll repeat that just a couple of times.

Carrie: That sounds good.

Jennifer: And that’ll be it. Okay. Inhale slowly. I give my burdens to you. And exhale; you will take care of me. Inhale again. I give my burdens to you. Exhale. You will take care of me, and we’ll do it again. Inhale slowly. I give my burdens to you. And exhale, you will take care of me, and that’s as simple as it is. And you can repeat it as many times as you want. I typically try to pray them for at least three to five minutes. But you can start with just one minute; repeat it a few times. And you’ll find that just as your prayer aligns with the rhythm of your breath and you’re slowing down and focusing your mind on these words; it does help to calm your feelings of anxiety. 

Carrie: I like this because it’s short and you could use it anywhere you can use it in the grocery store. You can use it in the car if you start to feel anxious. If you’re driving home, you don’t even have to close your eyes. You can breathe.

Jennifer: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Breathe in and out. You can use this before going into an important meeting, say that you have for work or school. There are so many applications, I think. And I think you could even use this at the beginning or end of a longer prayer time where you’re giving your burdens to the Lord. And then all of a sudden, it brings up like, okay, well, these are some things that are on my mind that I’m thinking about that I want to talk to God about more in-depth or more fully.

I think we make prayer so much more complicated really than it has to be. Right? We believe it has to be a specific format or structure. That somehow God will be unhappy with us if we say something the wrong way, but God is longing for that connection with us. He wants us to honor him in our prayers and be respectful, but he also wants us to tell us exactly how we feel and what’s on our minds, etc. This is a great way to do that. And it’s simple; it’s a good strategy to integrate with, like you said, deep breathing, which is, this activity is a mind, body, spirit practice. 

Jennifer: And I found just what you said, the breath prayers. They’re not the only prayers I pray. Usually, more times than not, I’ll start out praying a breath prayer, but it leads right into a more profound prayer with God in a longer prayer with more specifics; it just helps set the tone. It helps me slow down and be intentional. It opens that door to prayer for me and really kind of centers my mind more on Christ, gets me out of my worries, in the middle underneath all of my anxieties, and points me more toward Christ. And that allows me to pray more honestly with God and be, you know, it does. It has helped a lot. And so, for those who don’t pray a lot or don’t know what to pray, this is a great way to start. It’s a great thing to begin with.

Carrie: It’s very mindful, too, in the sense that it connects us back to the present moment because we’ve talked about mindfulness on the podcast and how that can be helpful for anxiety. Just to bring us into the present moment with God.

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Carrie: That’s great. So, your book is coming out August 16th. I’m not entirely sure when this episode airs, but I know people will listen at different times, too. So, if it’s before August 16th, there are presales. And if you pre-buy the book, you get extra goodies and things like that. And if you catch this after August 16th, it’ll be out, and they can find it. I’m sure wherever they buy books. 

Jennifer: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Is there anything else you wanted to say about the book?

Jennifer: I hope it’ll be an encouragement to people. Even if you don’t struggle with anxiety, you know, somebody who does.

Carrie: Sure.

Jennifer: I mean, I think we all have struggled with some form of anxiety, and I do make the distinction in the book, the difference between anxiety, like your normal anxiety, and anxiety disorders; those are very different things. And I think that’s an important distinction, but if you have anxiety. It’s okay. God is not mad at you. He loves you. And he’s just inviting you to turn to him. And for me, anxiety has become, instead of an enemy that I felt like I had to fight or hide from, it’s become more of just a reminder to me. I need to turn to Christ. 

Carrie: At the end of every episode, I like to ask people a question, and when it’s a personal story, I like to go into, like, if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Jennifer: I always get a little tender. When I think about my younger self, she was full of so much shame and so much fear and denial about it all. And I would just, I think I’d, go back and tell her that God’s not mad at you or disappointed in you because you have struggles. It’s okay. And you don’t have to try so hard to be so perfect. My younger self was so determined to be that perfect—good little Christian girl. You know, I was raised in church, and I knew all the right things, and I wanted to do all the right things. And that caused me to live in so much shame when I didn’t meet my expectations or what I thought God’s expectations were for me.

But I think I would tell her that you know what God loves you, and you’re okay. And you don’t have to be so hard on yourself, and you can trust him. You can trust God. And you don’t have to have control over all things because he does. And you’re okay. Relax a little bit. I would tell her that I’m very tender toward my younger self. Bless her heart, too.

Carrie: That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing with us today. 

Jennifer: Thank you so so much. I really appreciate it.

Carrie: I like any time we can combine our physical, spiritual, and emotional health into a practice. And knowing that you’re increasing health in those different areas at the same time, we’d love for you to interact with us on Facebook or Instagram. And we will put those links in the show notes for 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 use of myself or By The Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.