In this episode, Carrie explores the profound impact of spiritual abuse on mental and emotional health, outlining red flags and steps to healing.
Episode Highlights:
What spiritual abuse is and how to recognize it.
Common red flags of spiritual abuse in religious settings.
The importance of identifying and addressing abusive elements.
The value of surrounding yourself with solid biblical teaching.
Strategies for re-engaging with a supportive Christian community.
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I discuss a four-step process to heal from spiritual abuse. I first explain what spiritual abuse is and the red flags to watch for, such as the misuse of scripture or church authority for control, promotion of non-biblical theology, or using a position of power for personal gain. Healing from spiritual abuse takes time, especially if the abuse was prolonged or part of a rigid religious system.
The four steps to healing include:
Identify Abusive Elements and Seek Trauma Therapy: Recognize the parts of your experience that were abusive and seek professional help if you’re struggling to move past them.
Commit to Solo Time with God: Spend time with God to understand His true character, separate from the distorted teachings you may have encountered.
Surround Yourself with Sound Biblical Teaching: Ensure the teaching you receive aligns with scripture and helps you build a healthy spiritual foundation.
Re-engage with Christian Community: Once you feel ready, reconnect with a Christian community that embodies Christ’s love and provides healthy relationships.
Healing from spiritual abuse is a journey that requires time, reflection, and the support of both God and a loving community. If you’re dealing with the effects of spiritual abuse, remember that God’s love for you is unwavering, and it’s possible to find hope and healing.
If this episode resonates with you, I encourage you to reach out and explore intensive therapy options. For more information, visit my counseling website at bythewellcounseling.com or learn more about the podcast at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
Thank you for joining me today. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hi, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 129. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I wanted to share with you today a four-step process that I came up with on recovering from spiritual abuse. Before we get into that, I’m going to walk you through what is spiritual abuse. What does that mean? What are some red flags? If you think you might have experienced spiritual abuse, then we’ll go through the four-step process. My husband and I also did an episode called When Ministry Becomes Toxic in episode 92. If you want to go back and listen to that one as well, it may be relevant to you.
I want you to know that I am excited and looking ahead to the fall to get some ICBT groups together. This is inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy. You have an impact on what these groups will look like, whether you are wanting more interaction among each other in practicing the skills or whether or not you want to come learn about it and then have a self-help application to your life. Please take our very short survey on ICBT. If you’re an insider on our email list, you have already received the survey. Please go in and take it. If for some reason you’re not on our email list and haven’t received the survey, you can definitely reach out to us through the website at hopeforanxietyandocd.com
Let’s talk about what is spiritual abuse. Spiritual abuse is when someone uses the Bible or non biblical theology or their position in the church as a pastor, mentor, leader to control you in some way. Some red flags would be they’re promoting non-biblical theology. For example, “God heals everyone who comes to Him for healing. If you’re not healed, it’s due to a lack of faith.”
If you look in the beginning of Luke, Jesus actually walked away from people that were coming to the house for healing because he went away to spend time with the Lord. That may be the beginning of Mark. Jesus was in a house and he had slipped away. People were looking for him. Even when Jesus was on the earth, that was healing was not his number one ministry. He was leading people to the Father. That was his main point of view, but there are some teachers out there that say, “God heals everyone and if you’re not healed, therefore it must be a lack of faith.” That’s not what we see in the Bible. We also see that Paul had a thorn in the flesh. He was an incredible man of God and God did not fully heal him. God told him, my grace is sufficient for you. That would be one example.
Another example that we see a lot of times in church is “God wants to bless you. That blessings means God wants to give you financial wealth and make you a great person. If you have faith or if you give to this ministry.” A lot of times that’s not what it is. Unfortunately, people looking for money, If you give to this ministry, then God is going to just bless you and make you super wealthy. That is not what we see in scripture. Once again, going back to Paul, Paul was preaching the gospel and there were churches that donated to him, but he also made tents for a living. I don’t know if you knew that. That is in scripture as well. Jesus said, I don’t even have a house to lay my head. There were some wealthy people in the Bible. Don’t get me wrong. You look at Abraham, had quite a bit of wealth, which back then was in terms of flocks. Solomon had a lot of wealth. So there were wealthy people in the Bible, but there were also some people that weren’t wealthy and they were just had given up a lot in the service and ministry of the gospel.
Just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean that God is going to bless you financially. I do believe that if you’re following God, God will bless you, but that’s not always in dollars and cents. Sometimes that’s a relationship blessing. Sometimes that’s a joy that you’ve received from the Lord. I believe, that God does bless his children, just like we want to bless our children as earthly parents. That’s not always a financial or a material blessing, and that should not be our main focus of what we’re trying to receive from God.
Another red flag would be using a position of power or influence to gratify their own sexual needs. Sexual abuse does exist in the church. Let’s not try to pretend like it doesn’t. I wish that it didn’t. Not all abuse involves touching. Maybe inappropriate comments that are sexual or flirtatious comments that shouldn’t be going on with between two people who are married, or it may be inappropriate flirtatious comments going on when you know clearly that other person is married or they clearly know that you’re married. It may be like exposing themselves in some sort of way or exposing you to sexual material or pictures. Know that not all sexual abuse. involves actual physical contact.
I think this next red flag kind of goes along with that one. Someone may lead you to do something that you know in your spirit or you know based on scripture is wrong, but they may use some type of spiritual justification for it, saying God wants us to be together. This is God’s will for your life, that you do this, and you know in your spirit they’re asking you to do something wrong, like have an affair or have an inappropriate relationship with them.
Another red flag, they’re the only ones that you can get spiritual answers from. No, I know that in the early church, there was a church who would listen to what the disciples were saying, and then they would go back and they would search the scriptures for themselves. That’s something that we all should be doing, even if your pastor is using scripture. Examine it for yourselves. The Holy Spirit interprets the Word of God. Some of you may say, “Well, I read the Bible, but I don’t fully understand everything that it says.” Okay. Welcome to the club. I think it’s a difficult book for a reason. God wants us to wrestle with it, not to be completely mysterious, but that we have to seek him in that process of reading the Bible and receiving that interpretation of the word by the Holy Spirit. You don’t need a pastor to tell you exactly what it says. Some things in scripture are just very clear and very black and white.
Some things are a little bit more gray where we have to wrestle with it a little more and people may come to different theological conclusions. But some things are very, very clear. If someone is telling you, “Well, you need to run that decision by me,” and you’re kind of like, “Why would I need to do that?” That’s creating an unhealthy level of dependence on for you to, they’re wanting you to depend on them or feel like, You can’t think or make decisions for yourself. That’s not a position that you want to be in.
Last red flag that I came up with is an important one. It happens, unfortunately, a lot in families where people withdraw love if you do something that they don’t agree with. I’m not talking about something that’s morally wrong, but you make a decision. Or set a boundary in such a way where they’re not in agreement with what you’re doing. It could be something completely that you feel like God has called you to do or wants you to do and your family is kind of giving you the cold shoulder.
You’re the one that’s not invited to the family dinner and there’s a sense of withdrawing love. It’s kind of like Well, we really don’t approve of you, and so therefore we can’t love you. Those things are not mutually exclusive, right? Because as Christians, we should be loving people that we don’t agree with.
Newsflash, hold the phone if you haven’t heard that before. We are supposed to love our enemies. We can love people that we disagree with, or that are doing things that we know are blatantly wrong. We can still love that person and say, Hey, I love you, but your behavior is really off course right now, or I love you, but I’m really concerned about you.
You’re headed down a dead-end street here, and if you don’t turn around, then I’m afraid for your safety or your health. Those are healthy conversations, not withdrawing love because someone is doing something that we don’t approve of.
Let’s get into the process of healing. Yeah. Now, healing takes time, especially if the spiritual abuse was ongoing. Maybe you were a part of a cult or very rigid religious system. Maybe you were a part of that for a long time, like years. It’s going to take you time to heal from that. That’s just makes sense, right? You’re not going to be able to unravel all of that overnight. Give yourself the time and space that you need to heal.
I think the number one step that I put down was identify the pieces that were abusive and seek trauma therapy if needed. What I’ve seen with my clients is that so many people are suffering in this world. From bad theology. Yes, I’m going to use the word bad because it’s not biblical believing that we have to be perfect in order for God to love us. That’s completely antithesis to the gospel, but that’s how some treat other people, believing that God is angry with you. If you have one sin or one small mistake, you are God’s child. That’s something that is important to keep in mind. There’s always this balance that we have, obviously, between sin and grace. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about situations that are extreme. Identifying the pieces that were abusive in that maybe church context or in that relationship context and seeking professional help if you keep running against a wall or you feel like you’re not able to get to a healthy spiritual place that you want to be or you’re not able to get to a healthy relationship place with others.
You don’t feel like you can be vulnerable in your relationships. You don’t feel like you can be safe to be vulnerable with God. Maybe you’re having a lot of flashbacks back to that time or intrusive memories where you feel like you’re just constantly ruminating or thinking about various things that have happened to you.
Those are all flags that you need to get a professional to help walk you through that journey. If you are seeking to like to rebuild and re-engage with a healthy faith situation and relationship with God, it just makes sense to have a balanced, healthy Christian therapist who can walk you through that.
Even though that may be challenging if you feel like you were hurt or abused by the church, what is it going to look like? Or what is this therapist going to be like with me? I will say that I’ve seen people do incredible trauma work surrounding hurts that they experienced in the church so I know that people can heal from that.
I know that EMDR has been an amazing tool for some of those individuals to allow their nervous system to clear that out. So that something goes from, hey, it’s in the short-term memory and feels like it’s happening right now to it’s in long term storage. I don’t have to worry about that right now.
The other thing I put on here is tocommit time. Step two, commit solo time with God to get to know Him personally. In the Bible, it talks with us about seek the Lord and that if you seek the Lord with all your heart, you’re going to find him. God is not going to just remain mysterious and hidden from you. If you are openly saying, “Okay, God, I want to know your true character. Maybe these are things that I’ve been taught in a very unhealthy situation. Maybe scriptures were twisted. It was kind of use the scripture, but they also There was some truth and there was some not truth mixed in there. Getting to know God on a personal level. “Who are you really?” This is so important. This should be a question we’re all asking in a lifetime process. Who are you, God? I want to know you more today than I did before.
As you really seek the Lord, soaking in the scriptures, literally reading the Psalms, seeing the depth of the emotion that people experienced with God, and knowing that that’s a welcome and safe place, God Is a safe being to connect with, because even though he is incredibly holy and incredibly above us and distant, there is also a scripture that tells us that God wants to have an intimate relationship with us to have a closeness to have a friendship with us.
That’s all because of Jesus, not because of anything we’ve done. I don’t deserve that at all. You don’t deserve that. God allows us to have that opportunity to seek Him, to know Him in a personal, intimate way.
Third step, surround yourself with solid biblical teaching, really examining, and for all of these, you have to be in the Word.
You’re not going to know God if you’re not reading the Word. You’re not going to be able to be surrounded and know that you’re surrounded by sound biblical teaching if you’re not comparing it with what God’s Word is saying to you. I think it’s an important reparative experience for you to Have a positive experience with the church.
I know a lot of people have given up on church. They’ve walked away. They’re like, “I’m not doing that anymore,” but I’ve also met some other people who have said, “I’ve had some really painful church experiences, but I’ve gone somewhere else now and God has restored my belief in the church and the importance of that.”
There’s a verse that God, like, is bringing to mind where it talks about, I will restore the years that locusts have eaten. There was this locust plague, basically, and that was God’s promise. “I’m going to restore that.” Even though it takes time for things to grow back, it takes time for fields to recover. God promises us restoration and redemption if we’re seeking him.
As you’re surrounding yourself with sound biblical teaching, when you feel ready, step four is re engaging with the Christian community. I believe that the love of Christ is so powerful, and one of the amazing gifts is that we get to receive that love from other believers and other Christians, it’s just a small picture, a small portrait of how much God incredibly loves us.
It says that we will be known, Christians will be known by our love for other people. Unfortunately, a lot of times that’s not what we’re known for in today’s world, but that is what the scripture tells us, that people will know us by our love for One another. When they see you reaching out to someone who you know is having a hard time or bringing them a meal when they’ve had a child or bringing them a meal and leaving it on the doorstep when someone’s sick, that is a powerful witness and testimony.
We like to believe that we can all survive on our own. We’ll be fine. Everything’s good over here. The reality is, is that we need each other. We need relationships. We need people who can tell us, “Hey, you’re walking sideways there.” We need people to encourage us. We need people to speak truth into our lives. We need people to just have a taco with every once in a while. You know what I mean? Or have a slice of pizza or go out and eat a plate of vegetables, if you’re a vegetarian, whatever is your flavor.
We need people in our lives. God has wired us that way. He didn’t wire us to just be in relationship with Him. He wired us to be in relationship with each other and within community and so many people are missing out on that, and that’s such a hard piece. I know sometimes people feel like, “I’m too busy for that, or I have too much going on, or I’m working too many hours.” You will feel that void, you will feel that sense of loneliness and loss when you’re not connected in the community.
We saw this huge with COVID-19. There have been studies, Cigna did a major study on loneliness. found out it was a major killer of people worse than heart, heart issues and chronic conditions were people that just didn’t have a lot of interactions with others. They tended to die earlier. Amazing, absolutely kind of mind-blowing when you think about how much the interaction between our physical health and our mental health is and that sense of interconnectedness within community.
If you’ve been through spiritual abuse, I want you to know that God loves you. That if you’ve had a bad experience with the church, that those were people who were sinning, don’t put your view of God onto those people, because God is not other people. That is something that you have to remind yourself, or as you’re re-engaging with other Christians, “Okay, these are not the people that hurt me. I’ve been hurt by other people.” That is where I need to allow that to lie and taking the time to heal from the wounds, it allows you to experience forgiveness. I think that’s something that I didn’t list on here, but forgiveness is an important part of the healing process and allows us to be able to open up to other healthy people. to be able to receive love and to give love in the future.
If we remain angry, bitter and remain in unforgiveness, then we won’t be able to move forward and experience health for everyone out there, know that you are very much loved and cared about if you’re interested and you had one of these experiences and you say hey, I want to take some time aside to heal from that.
I do intensive therapies on Fridays in my practice. You can always check that out at bythewellcounseling. com. You can check out more on the podcast at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
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 The use 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
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.
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.
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and ocd, episode 85. Happy New Year everyone. Happy 2023. It’s hard to believe that I started this podcast towards the end of 2020, so we’ve been going strong for a little over two years now. If you are new to our show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope in developing healthier connections with God and others.
Today on the show, we actually have a returning guest from episode 41, Tiffany Cicconi. I’m very excited that you are here today, Tiffany, thank you. Very excited to be here. I brought you back because I thought beginning of the year, let’s break down and do just some very, like get back to basics. Just do some question and answer about anxiety. And I thought it would be kind of fun to have you read the questions. So that’s where we’re going today if everyone’s wondering.
However, before we get into that, I wanted to ask you to give us a little update since we missed you being a part of episode 80 on updating previous guests about what you’re doing now.
So you were writing a book about anxiety when we interviewed before.
Tiffany: How is it coming along? It’s coming along really well. A book is called Anxious with Jesus, and I have a little subtitle for it now. A memoir from the Messy Intersection of Faith and Mental Health or Mental Illness. I forget God, basically provided me with some time to just hunker down and work on it.
So I would say that my manuscript is basically finished and I’m in the process of submitting proposals to a couple publishers, and if they don’t bite, then I’m going to self-publish it. I don’t have a date yet, but it’s kind of new, exciting, unexplored territory for me. That’s where I’m at. Hey, when it comes out, we’re blasting it all over Instagram and get shared on the podcast.
Carrie: I’m very excited about it.
Tiffany: Oh. Thank you.
Carrie: If you need someone to read it and write you an Amazon review, you know where to find me.
Tiffany: Definitely will be doing that.
Carrie: I think it’s so relatable to people who deal with anxiety, because sometimes in their lives they feel like people around me just don’t get it. Even unfortunately, it happens a lot of times in the Christian community. Where if they read a story or hear a story about someone else who’s also struggled, it’s just that relatability is so helpful to be like, “Oh, okay. They’re a Christian. They’re trying to follow the Lord, and they’re also struggling too. And I don’t feel so alone anymore.”
Tiffany: Yeah, that’s definitely a major goal in my book because when I first started, I was diagnosed 15 years ago, and at that time, mental health was not as openly discussed as it is today, and I went through it very much alone. And so one of my goals now is to kind of reduce that.
I’m sharing my story so other people don’t have to live through theirs with a sense of doing it by themself.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Fire away. What’s the first question? Or FAQ? Episode.
What is Anxiety?
Tiffany: Gladly. Let’s start with the beginning. So Carrie, what is anxiety?
Carrie: Anxiety is a bit of a broad term, so I want to kind of break it down into different aspects, right?
So there’s mental aspects of anxiety, like worry, thinking about the future, oh, something bad’s gonna happen. Being really convinced of these types of things. And we also have a physiological aspect to anxiety. In our nervous system, we have a part of our nervous system called the sympathetic that revs us up.
That’s the fight or flight response, and we have a parasympathetic that calms us down. We call that rest and digest. So people who struggle with anxiety, they’re their fight or flight systemis overactivated and their rest and digest is underestimated. So part of what we do in things like therapy is help people tap into that calming aspect of their nervous system that’s already in there.
We can have spiritual aspects to anxiety where we say, okay, maybe I’m not trusting God with my worries, or I’m closing him off, or not bringing them to him. There’s these different aspects of anxiety that I think sometimes people just look at it at only one aspect, like, oh, anxiety is a spiritual problem.”
It’s not, it’s a physiological and emotional issue. And because a lot of times the emotional components are tied to negative past experiences, times where we’ve been hurt, times, where we’ve been ridiculed, so we’re afraid of those things happening again. That makes sense. Our brain remembers things for a reason, like, don’t touch the hot stove again, don’t speak in front of people because when you were in the fourth grade and you were giving your presentation, everyone laughed at you.
It’s a multifaceted issue. So I think that that’s important for people to know. It’s not just like one simple thing, “Oh, I’m a person who worries or all of that.”
Tiffany: And I think the lack of understanding of anxiety as a multifaceted thing has been the root of so many misunderstandings I’ve had with people, especially believers.
Unfortunately, they might say, “Oh, how are you?” And I might say, “I’m okay, but I’m feeling a little anxious.” And then they come back with a spiritual interpretation of that saying, “Oh, well, when I’m anxious, I learned to give it to the Lord and he takes it.” And I wanna say that’s not what, I mean, that’s not my issue right now. It’s physiological. So I really appreciate that multifaceted definition, and I’m excited for that to kind of spread,
Carrie: Yes. For more people to understand like how our brain, how our nervous system works and that God make us robotic, but we have these complex systems in our body. And let’s face it, they’re not perfect.
None of us have a perfectly functioning body, not until we get to heaven anyway, so things are gonna malfunction and we’re active sometimes.
I Pray But Why I’m Still Anxious?
Tiffany: Absolutely. So this next question relates. It’s, “I can quote scripture and pray, but I’m still anxious. Why?”
Carrie: I think a lot of times there’s this sense of cognitive behavioral therapy that has infiltrated the church. They’ll even quote scriptures like, there’s a scripture in Proverbs and it’s probably not gonna come to me, but it’s something like about a thought process and that being a part of a person. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Tiffany: I don’t know. The first one that came to my mind was trust in the Lord with all your heart leaned out on your own understanding. But yeah, I’m not sure.
Carrie: Okay. Well anyway, scratch where I was going with that. But there’s this infiltration that if we just control our thoughts, we’ll feel better. Like just, okay. So when you have that worry, you are supposed to pray about it and let it go and move on. But going back to the multifaceted approach, we can change our thoughts about something, but that doesn’t mean that our body accepts that fact as true. There are so many people that I’ve worked with that and I think of even in my younger years, There was a very loving mentor that was like, “You just need to know who you are in Christ, Carrie, like that’s gonna change your life.”. And I knew mentally who I was in Christ, but because of previous negative peer experiences, verbal bullying, those types of things, I didn’t have that sense of confidence of who I was in Christ.
I had to heal past garbage and shame and negative experiences in order to really be able to embrace and feel deep down who I was in Christ. So with anxiety, scripture is very powerful and certainly we’re not minimizing that at all, and I do believe that you need to hide that in your heart. But I’ve met so many Christians, I’ll never forget I was, speaking at a conference on the National Alliance for Mental Illness.
It was a statewide conference they have every year on anxiety. There was an older man in the audience during the question and answer time, and he said, “I know like I’m supposed to be anxious for nothing because I was talking about how to help anxiety in all these different areas and it wasn’t a Christian conference, so I did have spirituality in there.”
He said essentially like, “How do I do that? Because I feel anxious my whole life. I felt anxious, and really what I did was I pointed him back to people that were anxious in the Bible and I said, “Okay, so do you think that Gideon was anxious before he tore down his father’s altars? Really going against the grain of society.”
I think sometimes we look at these heroes of the faith and we think that they never had any anxiety, and that’s not what the Bible says. They had anxiety, but they still acted obedience. They still followed God and Jesus’ sweat drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane over going to the cross. He still went to the cross.
He still obeyed God, but he didn’t wanna do it like he was like, “Take this away from me.”. If there’s some other way to go through this, let’s go that way. People forget that or they overlook that a lot of times. And how I see those scriptures is not as a command of like, don’t be anxious. I see it more as like, okay, God is in control.
God loves you. You’re his child and like, so there’s not anything you need to be afraid of. Like if you can rest in that security and know that like, okay, I can bring these things over to him when we pray and we let things go. I don’t think that that’s an easy process a lot of times, right? , like there are some things that really we have to wrestle with in prayer that’s very scriptural going.
And praying about something and saying, okay, God, this I don’t understand. This is really bothersome to me, or what do I do about this situation? And we don’t always get an instant answer. In fact, a lot of times we don’t get an instant answer, right? Like, okay, God, what do I do about this decision?
It’s not like there’s this shining light that comes down and says, go left. We really have to continue to meditate and pray on that. Talk to wise counsel. Search the scriptures. Okay? Is what I’m doing lining up with the Bible? Okay. It’s not a moral issue, but where do I sense the Holy Spirit leading me?
It’s not a quick thing, so I don’t know why we would think that if I just pray about something that I’m worried about, that all of a sudden I’m gonna have like, I don’t know, a warm fuzzy feeling and just be like, “Oh yes, that’s great. I have complete and total peace.” I do think that God gives us peace to where we can move forward to where we can get through to the next thing, but I think sometimes it’s oversimplified. Let’s just put it that way, in terms of how Christians view it.
Tiffany: Absolutely. I just started to look up a verse actually in Philippians when you just said that. I’m not sure where it comes from. This belief, that expectation that we’re supposed to get instant relief from our anxiety when we bring it to God.
And I think there it is a verse in Philippians. And it says, oh, it’s actually in the be anxious for nothing passage, I think. Right. Pray with Thanksgiving and the God of all peace will I forget.
Carrie: You’ll have basically, you’ll have the peace that passes understanding.
Tiffany: Yes. In Christ Jesus. And so I think that a lot comes from that and I love that they write the fact that we have to look at the entire Bible. We can’t just single out one verse and blow it, zoom in on it, and forget everything because life is complex. Scripture is complex, and that’s why I think conversations like this are really important.
Carrie: And God’s complex. Why are we trying to make God simple? He’s huge.
Tiffany: Yes.
Carrie: He cannot be simplified.
How Do I Know If I Need Help for My Anxiety?
Tiffany: Yeah. I have another, I like the next question. I feel like I’ve heard it from other people. How do I know if I need help or my anxiety? Where’s the line?
Carrie: Of course, we’re talking to a therapist and I’m very biased towards therapy, so I truly believe that anyone can benefit from therapy.
I think sitting down with someone and having an objective perspective on your life, I know as a therapist. I practice this stuff, that it’s been transformational to me to receive that support and love and acceptance from another believer who is able to affirm me and validate me, but also at the same time challenge me and say, well, have you thought about it this way?
Maybe you’re only looking at one side of the story and not the whole thing. However, when we’re talking about medication counseling, those types of things, getting help, I think we’re looking at the domains of a person’s life. Are the domains of your life impacted? So those would be things like your relationships.
Sometimes people come to counseling because they may say, “You know what? I know, like I’m driving my spouse nuts, and it’s to the point where they don’t know what to say to me. They’re trying to be supportive, but they kind of said, Hey, like maybe you need somebody more professional to talk to about this, because I’m kind of like at the end of my rope, I don’t know what to do.” Or
the anxiety is affecting their ability maybe to go out with their spouse and have a good time or be able to enjoy life with them. It may be it’s impacting work or school. So the anxiety has gotten to a point where I can’t complete my assignments because I want them all to be perfect and I’m super stressed myself out over.
I’m not sleeping, so we’re also looking at symptoms. Things like sleeping, eating too much to cope, not eating enough because you’re so anxious I can’t eat. Same thing with sleeping. Typically with anxiety, people sleep less or they’re waking a lot during the night. That can be another issue. Those types of things. Daily functioning. Is it hard for you just to get out of bed in the morning and get going? A lot of times if people have been anxious for a long period, they’ll get depressed because it’s really hard. Same with OCD.It’s just really hard to wrestle with it every day in and day out, every day, and that can really lead to a place of depression.
So sometimes when you treat the anxiety, develop some better coping skills for it, then the depression will relieve. Or sometimes antidepressants can help and different things with that too.
Should I Take Medication for My Anxiety?
Tiffany: Well said. I love that you mentioned antidepressants because that begs a whole, whole new question. New topic to explore here.
Should I take medication for my anxiety?
Carrie: Yeah. I think there is the stigma in the church about taking medication for mental health issues, which is really interesting to me because there are a lot of people in the church who take medications for other things like blood pressure or cancer or diabetes, or they have some personal family members that I know that take medications for these types of things and,
I would never say to my relative, “Well, you shouldn’t be on that high blood pressure medicine. Really what you need to be doing is exercising and eating right.” Well, they need to be doing that too, but at this point, since it’s not managed very well or their high blood pressure may be genetic, cuz sometimes it is, then that’s a medication that’s helping them live and helping them function in day-to-day.
If I have high blood pressure that is can be dangerous. So when we look at anxiety and talking about it as a multifaceted issue, if it’s affecting my physical body, then why should it be wrong for me to take something to help my physical body? Just like it’s helpful to take these things for other issues, medications for people. I always say it’s a personal decision because medications, sometimes people have had negative experiences with them or they’re like, you know what? I’m the person that gets all the side effects from the medicines and I have a hard time with them. So there are people, even though I will say there’s different options, just talk to your doctor about it.
If one thing doesn’t work well for you, you can look at something different. But some people say, “You know what? I’ve tried a medication or two, I just wasn’t happy with it, or I didn’t feel like it really helped me the way I had wanted it to.” And so they try counseling. Sometimes we try counseling for a while and then we roll back around and say, it’s really like hard for you to engage in these positive activities because of the anxiety. Your depression is so bad like would you be considered taking medication for it? And so those can go either way. I always think obviously, it’s a very personal decision what you put in your body, so I never tell people like, oh, you have to be on medication to see me or anything like that.
It’s just, “Hey, this is something that could be helpful for you. If you’re interested, why don’t you talk to somebody about it?” Whenever people initially come in, if they haven’t had just like a general blood work screening for things like vitamin deficiencies, thyroid, iron, that’s another thing that can cause issues, although that’s probably more on the low energy side rather than the anxiety side.
But anyway, the point is all of these things we talk about in a very early episode with a nurse practitioner about how all of those things can contribute to anxiety. So always like people to have a blood work rule out too. And we don’t wanna assume it’s all emotional if they’re also could be something physiological going on that could be contributing to the symptoms.
Tiffany: Absolutely. Yeah. That holistic approach is really important. And I’m gonna mention it’s just so on topic with a lot of things I’ve thought about and wrote about. One of my chapters in my book is called Therapy and the one after that is called Medication because that’s my story and I’ve been on medication for over 10 years now.
And like what you’re saying is absolutely true. In my case, I’m able to actually engage with life, engage with people, engage with God better because my mind’s working the way it’s supposed to with, you know, a boost from the medication I take. But it definitely was a journey. I know people who all over the place.
A couple good friends actually I saw go through hesitation with medication. One because of breastfeeding issues. Another because of one thing you mentioned with the, oh, I get all the side effects from everything I take, and it’s been a blessing to be able to walk with them, just kind of watch their story unfold.
And like you said, it’s not for everyone, but actually they both ended up trying it because when things get really hard, for me anyway, I end up at a place where it’s like anything to stop the anxiety. There’s something that can make me feel better. I’ll try it. That’s just my story.
Carrie: I talked about this in my first episode as like when I was going through my divorce, I was like, I’m not functioning.
I mean, I just remember periods where I would like, I’d be trying to write something for work, like a progress note, and I’d literally just stare at the computer screen for 30 minutes and all I could think about was you know my marriage that was ending. . It was very tough. I remember that was my realization moment.
That was like my wake-up call. And it was interesting because I think either that week or shortly after my therapist had said, “Have you thought about getting on an antidepressant, at least for this period? Like until you can get over this hump?” And I saw my doctor and ended up taking one for six months and it was probably one of the best things I did at that point in my life.
I think that’s another thing to tell people too, is not everybody has to be on it forever. I don’t know why people think this, because like I said, it’s not true for other medications. There’s people that might start taking medications because they’re pre-diabetic and then they can come off of. They manage with diet and lifestyle, those types of things.
But for some reason, when it comes to mental health meds, people think that somehow they’re gonna get sucked into this vortex and they’re gonna have to take it for the rest of their life. I don’t understand, cuz we don’t believe that about other kinds of medication. , it’s so bizarre. But that’s a thing that I hear a lot from people.
“Well, I’m gonna become dependent on that and I’m gonna have to have it all the time.” Plenty of things that you can take that are not addictive, right? Certainly for anxiety. Now there are some that can be potentially addictive. Those are typically prescribed more for like short-term relief, panic attacks, those types of things.
Even with that, there’s, you know, other options as well. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna get addicted if you get on an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication.
What Do I Do If I Have No Idea Where My Anxiety is Coming From?
Tiffany: Right. Yeah. Thanks for diving into that. Let’s see our next question. This is a good one. I’ve been there. What do I do if I have no idea where my anxiety is coming from?
Carrie: Yeah, I think this is a good one because people are always trying to find like the answer, right? So like if I’m anxious, there must be some kind of reason that I’m anxious. Let’s face it, because we’re both females. Sometimes you just feel stuff, , and you have no idea why. I don’t know. Hopefully, men could resonate with that too, but I really believe like there’s some hormonal components at times that we don’t know are working behind the scenes.
You know, maybe we ate something that wasn’t agreeable. Maybe it’s just something with our nervous system that’s malfunctioning and to really be able to say, you know, “Okay, I don’t know why I’m anxious right now. Like you, you may know. And if you do know, then you can acknowledge it and go, “Okay, like, yeah, I’m really worried about this test that’s coming up on Friday.
It’s worth like three grades. I’m afraid I’m gonna fail it.” and then I can approach that several different ways. Obviously, I can breathe into it, I can pray about it, I can study, I can say, you know what? I’m gonna do the best I can. And if I fail, you know, I fail.” And then we’ll have to regroup from that.
But most likely if I study, I’m not going to fail. I’m not gonna get to that point, but if you don’t know and you just feel that, especially the physiological sense of anxiety. Sometimes it can be because something from the past is triggered that something going on in the president has kind of reminded us of a previous time, and our cognitive brain is not necessarily able to link it.
But it’s stored somewhere in our body. A lot of times trauma can be stored in in the body. When we realize that, I think it’s just, we lean into it and we say like, okay, I don’t know why I’m anxious right now, but that’s where this place of awareness and acceptance comes in. So I’m gonna acknowledge it first of all, like, “Okay, I’m acknowledging that I’m anxious right now and that we can’t snap my fingers and let that go.”
But what I can do is try a coping skill. I can try to think about something positive. I can breathe, I can go outside for a walk, you know, I can pet the dog. I can think about vacation I wanna take, that would be really peaceful. Those types of things. Even though that can be scary because we feel outta control, it’s like, “Oh gosh, this is just coming up
Seemingly out of nowhere.” A lot of times it’s not really as out of nowhere as we Think it is. If we’re able to kind of like dig in and do some work in therapy. But that’s kind of what I would recommend. I think
Tiffany: That’s good. I once had a therapist recommend to me if I’m interested, if you would agree with it, recommended, you know, if you’re feeling your anxiety physiologically, if it’s just a, I think she said somatic thing, then you should attack it on the somatic.
She recommended like a jog, try yoga, you know, breathing those things. Because you have no thought to work with it. It does make it a little more challenging. Right. And I’ve actually just went through a bout of that about a month ago I was unemployed and I was shocked by how much jogging actually helped work it outta my system or something. Nothing else would get rid of it. I just go run it off and then I feel better.
Carrie: Yeah, exercise is really great. It’s really, really good for anxiety and depression and does wonders for our body, but I would agree with that. Yeah. I think a lot of times this is another problem that people have if it’s physiological, then a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll sit there and they’ll go, “I have no reason to be anxious.
I’m fine. My life is good. It’s okay. Move on. Like what’s the next thing?” Instead of like using something physiological to help themselves calm down. Take a deep breath, quiet your mind. Meditate, walk. Good.
Everyone says to try deep breathing when you’re anxious. It doesn’t work for me. Why?
Tiffany: Yeah. So speaking of taking a deep breath, the last question I have when I got from, a friend, this one says, “Everyone says to try deep breathing when you’re anxious. It doesn’t work for me. Why?”
Carrie: This is a good question, and I think there could be a few different reasons. Some people have get really weirded out focusing on their breath, or they start to have some obsessions about it or doing it right, something of that nature. So it really trips them up to kind of have that focus is one thing I’ve seen.
Another thing that can happen is people are not breathing in a way that’s activating that calm-down response. So like we were talking about the rest and digest, there’s something called your vagus nerve that is around that diaphragm area that if you’re breathing from your diaphragm for anybody that’s. Taking choir or anything like that, it’s right above your belly button.
So if you’re breathing into that area, you’re pressing on the vagus nerve, and that’s gonna trigger that calm down response. Sometimes when you see people take a deep breath, it comes from their chest, and it’s like, if it’s way up top, then they’re not activating that parasympathetic nervous system response.
So that’s a problem. It also could be because if you’ve had a lot of trauma or negative experiences, it may not feel safe to be at a place of rest. And this happens a lot for clients that have experienced chronic developmental trauma. So for example, growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent, I come home.
Dad’s been drinking. Dad gets violent sometimes. I don’t know. Is he gonna hit mom? Is he gonna throw something? Is he gonna just gonna be passed out in the chair? I don’t know. But I need to somehow be on high alert when I get home because I need to be prepared at all times for whatever it is that I’m gonna face.
And so that will linger in people’s nervous systems and in their body. So even though they’re a grown adult, they have a good spouse. They have kids, like their home life is actually okay and can be, you know, reasonably calm. They may wonder, why do I feel so anxious? But they’re still keyed up from all that stuff that happened to them earlier that they haven’t been able to clear out of their nervous system in some way, shape or form.
So when you try to teach relaxation skills to these people, you say, “Okay, like take some deep breaths.”. It’s almost like there’s this part of their body that’s like, “Nope. We can’t do that. Not safe. Okay.” . And it almost like, sounds this like secondary danger alarm, like, “Nope, nope. It’s too dangerous to relax.”
So in those types of situations, we really have to like ease into it and kind of like dip our toe in the water and even like recognize that anxiety and like acknowledging and validating that like, “Oh, okay, it didn’t feel safe when a kid to relax or didn’t feel safe to let your guard down.
Sometimes vulnerability is super hard for people, so it may take them time to open up in therapy or time to be able to feel comfortable enough. Sometimes it’s like having another person in the room. It feels too vulnerable to relax in the presence of another person. That can be another issue that comes up with those types of things. Multi reasons. Someone may have difficulty using breathing to relax.
Tiffany: Thanks for sharing. That’s all really interesting. I’ve never been in that place myself like the deep breathing, I have positive reactions to it. I find that really interesting. It makes a ton of sense. I also didn’t know that about the vagus nerve, about that being a reason why it helps calm down.
How Do you Respond to Someone When they Say that Anxiety and Depression are just Spiritual Warfare and Lack of Faith?
Tiffany: The last question comes from a friend of mine, and it’s something again that I’ve heard plenty of people say when I’ve come out about my anxiety. Basically, what do you say or how do you respond to someone when they say that anxiety and depression are just spiritual warfare and lack of faith?
Carrie: Yeah. Okay, so there’s two different aspects to that, right? , I think we have to address those one at a time because they’re two different responses. So our anxiety and depression, spiritual warfare, I think they can be, sometimes. , but I don’t think that they always are. So that’s really the defining piece. I think that there are times where I have like a feeling of oppression on me.
That’s the only way I can kind of describe it. I can verbally say like, “Okay, this is not from God. I don’t know where it’s from. I don’t know if it’s from Satan or if it’s just depression, but it definitely feels like, okay, this is something that’s trying to pull me down. If you acknowledge that, kind of going back to the multifaceted view of anxiety.
You know, there can be spiritual components to it where you say, “Okay, I have put my faith and trust in say, money, for example.”. Maybe you are a person that was like super financially secure and then you lose your job. Well all of a sudden you’re like trying to do it all on your own. You’re not like necessarily praying about it and you’re just, you’re getting super stressed out cause you’re like, I have to make it happen.
Pride can get in the way or not trusting. So can anxiety be a faith issue? Can it be spiritual warfare? I think it can be. However, it’s just not always going back to people like, I think to give simplistic responses to more complicated issues because they don’t. What to say or how to respond. So going back to looking at people in the Bible who were anxious or who were sad. I mean, there were people in the Bible who wanted to die, you know?
Because they were so sad about their situation. So I don’t think that those individuals had a lack of faith. When you look at faith, You look at like David prayed for his son that was sick and then the baby died. Did the baby die because David didn’t have enough faith? No. That’s not what the Bible tells us. Or there are other situations you look at Paul with like the thorn in the flesh. So did Paul not have enough faith that he could be healed from this? Well, no. It was something that God used in his life as part of his sanctification process. Mm-hmm. . One of the things that I’ve really come to learn is that the things that we want God to take away in our lives, the things that we say, Hey God, I need this.
Like I need this tho removed and I need it removed right now is like the very thing that God may be wanting to use in our life to make us more like Christ.
Tiffany: Amen.
Carrie: My husband was recently diagnosed. I’ve talked about this on the show before, but he was recently diagnosed last September with basically a life-altering neurological condition and it’s degenerative and there’s no cure.
And so I think it, it’s been interesting kind of to see some similar responses to it. Like, “Okay, well we’re gonna pray for you and we’re gonna lay hands on you and God’s gonna heal you.” And he has had people lay hands and pray for him, and that’s been incredible. But also what I’ve really seen happen over the last few months as he’s, you know, walked out his life in his struggle to walk with a walker in his forties is that other people look at him and become inspired or their faith is increased.
I don’t know how you are so positive while you’re going through all of this. You know? So I would say if somebody’s struggling with anxiety or OCD, never underestimate how God may use that in your life. Or may use it in someone else’s life. When my husband was diagnosed, I remember just sitting there and telling God, like, “I don’t have the prayer life for this.”
You know, it’s definitely transformed the way that I have depended on God. It is transformed how much I’ve realized I need community and the body of Christ instead. You know, living in a lot of independent pride for a long time saying, ah, I don’t need your help. No, we got this. Like, we’re good now. I’m just like, yes, I need help. I raise my hand. “Can I have some help over here?” And that has been incredibly humbling, and hard.
This is, none of this that I’m talking about has been easy, but I’ve been reading in Olympians and Paul talks about being in Jail. He’s like, Hey, I’m in jail. And it’s totally like advanced the gospel all over the place.
Everybody knows like I’m here because of Jesus. And that’s what I really pray over my husband is that when people see him and they see his positive attitude that they’ll see like, This is Jesus, you know? In him. And that’s how he’s able to get up every day and do the things that he’s doing and have hope and to keep moving forward each and every day.
That’s a long response and some, you know, extra personal info in there. But I think if we run around every corner and say, you know, that must be Satan, or you’re not trying hard enough, because I think the lack of faith response, my husband gets really, , tiffy about this one because essentially, it’s saying, you’re not a good enough Christian, essentially, right?
well, you don’t have enough faith to be healed, then you know you’re not a good enough Christian. And we just don’t know like what God is doing behind the scenes. So many times in our life, we just have no clue. Like if you never had anxiety in your life, And this happens to people. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but like if you went forward at a prayer service and someone laid hands on you and you never felt anxious again, you and I like, we wouldn’t even be sitting here having this conversation, like trying to give hope to other people.
You wouldn’t be writing a book to encourage other people. You just never know. We don’t always see the purpose in it when we’re suffering, especially in the beginning of our suffering, we do not see, we’re like, whoa, this is awful. Take this away. Right? God’s at work all the time.
Tiffany: Amen. That’s beautiful. And we see it in Jesus himself. So, yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
Carrie: I kind of shared a little bit of a story of hope at the end, but a lot of times I like to, I didn’t prep you on this ahead of, but do you have, you have any recent story of hope, like where you received hope from God or another person?
Tiffany: I like that. Sure. I know I do. There’s been a lot going on lately. I think there’s a girl who’s kind of recently come back around, a church, church that I meet with, and she struggles from anxiety and trauma growing up. She’s in her early twenties. Context. I’m 40 in a month, so we have a bit of an age gap, but we’re in the same small group together.
And she called me one night asking if she could have a ride to the emergency room, and her anxiety had been so bad recently that she got to the point of throwing up the hospital visit. They said that there was more going on than just anxiety there, but I see hope in that. She called me and I stayed there with her in the hospital until 2:00 AM.
Carrie: Wow.
Tiffany: When we got out, you can’t explain that other than Jesus, like we don’t have a whole lot in common. We both really like coffee. We both have anxiety. , but, but that’s Jesus. Like, I don’t think I would’ve stayed if I didn’t know how it might feel to be in anxiety alone.
Carrie: Right. And I didn’t want that for her. And there was another occasion before that where she texted me, “Hey, I’m really anxious right now. Can you pray for me?” And I texted her back, “Yeah, should I call you?” And she said Yes. And so I called her. And I don’t often pray for people over the phone, but this is just one example, like how your husband’s, how his
disease has reawakened your prayer life. I guess that’s kind of a micro example of that. Her reaching out to me saying just like you, you know, I need help that awakened my prayer life. And reminded me of years ago when I was like much more practiced in my intercessory prayer life. And you know, I feel like God used that to kind of start nudging me back toward that and she’s, I’m going to her birthday party in a weekend or so. So that’s definitely a story of hope. I can definitely see hard things bringing people together and the body of Christ coming together in community to support one another.
Yeah. That’s awesome. I love it. I’m so glad that you joined me on this episode. It’s been a lot of fun.
Tiffany: Me too.
Carrie: It’s good to have like your insights and your feedback as well. That’s awesome. Glad we could work this out. Well, like I said before, let us know when the book comes out. We want all the details and all of the links and people can go follow you on Instagram too to keep up with you.
Tiffany: Yes, absolutely. It’s uh, Tiffany and some Italian last name, .
Carrie: I’ll link it in there for you all so you can just look in the show notes.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Carrie. I really enjoyed this too.
Carrie: Welcome to Hope For Anxiety and OCD episode 73. I just have to do a little short shout out before we get started. Cause it’s actually coming out on my brother’s birthday. Happy birthday Paul, and hope that you have a good one. I am here with my good friend, Erica Kessie who we have known each other for over four years now. Did you realize that because.
Erica: Great.
Carrie: Erica actually through my business. It’s very first birthday party. When my business, By The Well Counseling, turned one and we were in the suite together. So that was just a really fun time. And my business just turned five this year. That was exciting too.
Erica: Wow. Five years old. What they say about five years, it takes you about five years to become profitable in your business.
Carrie: Wow. Well, fortunately for counseling, we’re able to do that a little bit earlier. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here. Most businesses don’t last to five years though, right?
Erica: They don’t.
Carrie: So that’s, that’s exciting.
Erica: Yes, it is. Congratulations.
Carrie: Thanks. I wanted you to give us an update Erica, on your business, because I know that some things have shifted changed from when we recorded last, that was on episode nine, which was the very end. The very end of 2020, what’s been going on in your business in the last year and a half.
Erica: So many wonderful things. The more that you’re in business, the more that you get clear on who you serve and how you want to serve them. I have coined myself now, the leader’s healer, cause I wanted to broaden my target out to all leaders. Be mothers, doctors, nurses professionals, because I recognize with my own experience that sometimes leaders feel lost and in order to not be lost. It’s important for you to make sure you take care of yourself. That’s so important and putting yourself first, those who have servant hearts, right? They are leaders and they put everyone before themselves. So it’s important that they take care of themselves, do their own work.
Carrie: Right.
Erica: About own anxiety and their depression and imposter syndrome. And also if they do their own work, they will also be doing something that’s so important. And dear to my heart is to do no harm. I think a lot of people don’t talk about that. But there are many circumstances in which Carrie knows that counselors and therapists and even other leaders do harm in ways, because they haven’t did their own work. So I’m the leaders, healer and the entrepreneur therapist. I provide professional training and speaking, as well as civil little counseling and coaching alignment, executive coaching.
Carrie: One of the things that you do that I really appreciate is you help businesses and leaders, like you were saying, “understand the importance of counseling skills and how those can be useful in their business environment”.
Erica: I have a book called “Honey”. You need counseling skills. And these are soft skills as well as life skills. It is vision casting. A lot of even entrepreneurs don’t know the difference between vision and mission. So vision casting, mission creation, time management, communication skills, and thrive planning, which is it’s a strategic and personal plan to thrive. We have a plan for everything else. Why don’t we have a plan to thrive?
So there’s thrive plan for that.
Carrie: Awesome. Today we’re talking about boundaries, which I’m really excited about, I just.
Erica: I’m so excited.
Carrie: I’ve decided to dial some things back on the podcast and do some like 1 0 1 type episode. Let’s consider this boundaries 1 0 1 there’s lots of conversations we could have on boundaries. We’re gonna keep it really simple today for people because it’s a word that’s thrown around. And a lot of people don’t really understand what it means or how they can start to begin to even look at boundaries in their own lives or setting them. We’re in a society right now, unfortunately, where all, all kinds of lines are being blurred, lines between work and home, lines between professional relationships and personal relationships.
I asked a group of therapists today, I said, is professionalism dead. And we kind of had a chuckle about it, but I was serious, you know.
Erica: Yes.
Carrie: Because there’s a lot of people that are in professional roles that are acting in unprofessional ways. So this conversation on boundaries. Is super important in the same way between client and therapists. There have been lots of different ways that receiving therapy has changed. Whereas maybe, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago we would never have texted with a client. And I still don’t text with clients in that way, but some therapists, that’s how they set their schedule. We have to kind of talk about some of these things of boundaries lines, and we won’t get into all the ethics today.
Although that cause that’s gonna be another episode. I know that’s something that Erica is really passionate about is, good ethics for professionals and leaders. Let’s talk about what is a boundary, how would you define that for somebody?
Erica: I wanna keep it as simple as possible. There’s a book called it by Henry Cloud. He’s an older book and it’s called “Boundaries”. And the way he explains it is like having a fence in front of your house. Certain people can come in the fence. For example, your mailbox is outside the fence. The mailman only goes and handles that particular part of your property. Then you have individuals like the Amazon man. He comes to the door and he drops your package he’s off, but he doesn’t come in. Correct? Or you can even say, leave it there and don’t knock. Right? When you send message, when you create your package, then you have people that can come be in your living room, your kitchen.
They can even walk down the hall sometimes and be in the spare bedroom, but only certain people can be in your master bedroom, in your bathroom. Think about it that way. It makes it really simple on how we have to isolate out who deserves to be where in our lives we are our house. This is our temple. Okay. And only certain people should be able to come through our eyes, through our ears and to allow them to be a part of our space. These are guidelines for ourselves and for others to keep us safe.
Carrie: There’s internal boundaries. I think that we can even set within ourselves. I think a lot of times we think about boundaries with other people, but there’s internal boundaries that we can set within ourselves. Just kind of knowing our move and groove of life. For example, and I know this has to do with other people. But for therapists in terms of like how many sessions that we choose to do in a day, or, you know, how many clients we see, how many of them are going to be new clients. I know for me, it’s harder to meet with new people than it is to meet with people that I’ve known for a long time.
I already know how they’re going to act, to flow. They’re not gonna read me the wrong way or if, if I say something funny, they’re gonna be like, what is that? You know, they’ll call me out on it. Whereas if I have a new person, I have to be a little bit more cautious about what I say, how are they gonna receive this and so forth. So that’s kind of maybe an internal boundary within myself that I might set for myself, or I could tell myself, you know, a boundary is that I’m gonna shut off all my electronics at a certain time so that I can get a good night’s sleep. Can you think of any of those that you have for yourself?
Erica: Oh yes. Internal boundaries. AKA your discipline, your own discipline. I have a certain discipline as 12:00 I take lunch. No one has that time. One o’clock is usually my nap time. If I don’t have a nap, I usually have a nap another time during the day. I am Adam adamant about it.
I need a nap. It’s just good for me to have my siesta every day. And those are internal boundaries, but I have other boundaries regarding myself as far as making sure that I don’t overextend myself. I have to watch myself every day. Not to have the savior complex. I’m sorry, I’m adding in things that are more complex.
This is the perfect actually podcast to talk about the savior complex. None of us is Jesus. We need to not try to be Jesus.
Carrie: That’s right. We’re not out here to rescue everyone who’s in crisis.
Erica: Yes. And so we have to decide to remind ourselves. I have to remind myself every day, I call my reminder not to overextend myself, to watch all my obligations and watch my schedule to make sure I’m not doing too much boundaries of making sure that physically making sure that I eat. And I’m cognizant of everything that I put in my mouth. So really being intentional is my internal boundaries.
Carrie: Why do you think that boundaries are so important? Obviously what you’re talking about is boundaries relating to self care. Why else are boundaries important?
Erica: Boundaries let you know exactly where you end and somebody else or the environment begins. It’s a great way to make sure that you have all the things that you need and that you’re cognizant of all the components of your life in order for you to have harmony. It’s important for you to have harmonies physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, professionally, all these ways. And we have to be cognizant of doing that. That’s the hard work. That’s a lot of work actually to do, but it it’s the kind of work that we should be doing instead of putting ourselves out there. To help other people. It’s so easy for us to extend ourselves, to help other people and neglect ourselves.
So it’s so important to have boundaries with yourself and to be cognizant of taking care of yourself, because guess what, you know, everybody’s heard this, you gotta put your option mask on in order to help other people, or one thing that I say, going back to that vision, that we were talking about my vision for myself, which that’s why this is a boundary as well. Is, I will if I like and love myself so authentically and thoroughly that I overflow onto those who stand close. Part of that boundary is, I’m not gonna seek out people to help. They will stay close if they want my help. And I will make sure I focus on loving myself and going a step more into liking myself.
So sometimes we may love ourselves and we may not like ourselves. Right? So we have to like ourselves too, and know what we know like and trust about our self.
Carrie: Boundaries really connect with our values. We really connect with what’s important to us. So if I say that my daughter is important and you have a daughter too.
Erica: Yes.
Carrie: If we say our daughters are important to us, and then we don’t set up boundaries to protect that time that we have with our children. If I don’t take the time, set up boundaries to protect time that I have with my spouse or time for church and investing in my spiritual health. Not just church, but time at home where I’m reading, where I’m praying, then my values are not in alignment with my actions.
And then that causes all kinds of anxiety and internal conflict, right? I wanna be with my daughter, but I’m doing all of this over here. I’m taking on extra responsibilities. I don’t need to, you kind of call me out and say, you know, you’ve just had a child. Your normal is changed care. You have to accept that. You’re not gonna be able to go back and do all the things that you used to be able to do, which was a good call out, by the way, you know, you need to have friends like Erica in your life to call you out.
Erica: Well, you call me out too, is the end goal. Why are you doing this? This is so helpful for me, who run off trying to help people like what’s the end goal. We gotta get our money. We need to make sure we are. Moving towards getting money, not just doing all these things, because that’s how we need food, clothes, and shelter. That’s why we work. She calls me out too.
Carrie: Don’t do too much. I wanna talk about examples of situations that the people experience in life. That cause them to have difficulty setting boundaries. It caused them difficulty to be able to say no, or say, man, that’s an excellent opportunity, but it just doesn’t fit in my life right now. You know, maybe later, let, let’s talk about that another time. I mean, there’s lots of different ways that you can say no to something or say yes to something, but what are some situations people go through that cause them difficult their boundaries.
Erica: That’s a great question, Carrie. I don’t think people talk about the situations,
Carrie: Right?
Ericaa: When you grow up, you as a child, sometimes don’t wanna do something, right? And then your parent tells you you’re gonna do it. Okay. I have to abide by this person or I have to please. Most children spend time wanting to please their parent, guess what? Then they grow up being people pleasers. Then you have a problem saying no that’s having poorest boundaries. When you are unable to say no and get yourself involved in everybody trying to help people. Then if you have some kind of trauma or you’re a pain that happens in your childhood, you’ll have rigid boundaries around certain things.
Scenarios would be, you have a balls.
There’s a power differential between you too. You don’t want to what lose your job or being seen in a negative way or retaliation in any kind of way. So you say yes to things that are against your values. You can’t go spend time with your daughter because your boss wants you to work extra hours. There’s so many scenarios with our partners. We may not want to do something like they wanna watch anime all night. You’re like, I gotta go to bed and they’re like, we don’t never spend no quality time with me. That’s a guilt trip, FYI. Let’s going into those manipulative tools. Anyway have to be able to say the boundaries, but you may have a rift in the relationship that you don’t wanna experience because you had to assert yourself and say, “I don’t wanna do this”.
So you have to have good communication skills. You have to be able to assert yourself. You gotta be brave to hold your boundaries.
Carrie: Let’s talk about parenting for a little bit, because this is a huge issue. If you had parents who were like, I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m the adult, you’re the child. It reminds me of that dad in Matilda.
She’s smart enough to realize that some of the things that he’s doing are wrong. Right? As a child, she’s like, wait a minute, dad, that’s wrong. You’re cheating people up to go into a movie analogy, but that’s basically what he tells her, you know, I’m right you’re wrong. Then we’re not teaching kids to think for themselves.
And there’s no autonomy there that’s learned. So it’s, it’s finding this balance. You wanna set boundaries for your kids, but you wanna help them understand why those boundaries are there.
Erica: Yes.
Carrie: There’s a reason. There’s a difference between saying don’t you ever talk to a stranger, you know, and, and threats and those types of things, I’ll spank your behind If you do that and a parent who says, Hey, we don’t talk to strangers and let me sit down and tell you why I’m telling you, you don’t just run up to the guy that says he has puppies to show you. There are people out there that want to do your harm. Here’s the lines that are drawn. You know, I’m asking you to pick up after yourself because one day you’re gonna be an adult with a house and you’re gonna have it. Learn how to manage a household, not just your room. So if you can’t pick up your room, you’re not gonna be able to manage a household.
Erica: Oh my goodness. You understand this because also you used to work with children as well. And I also, we both specialize in planning, express for arts therapies. We understand that we need to respect them and honor their thoughts and honor their behavior and try to empathize the reason behind the behavior that they’re exhibiting. I always find that it’s the parents. If I need to get the parents straight, cause it’s not the kid, the kid does need a healthy relationship with somebody who was going to honor them, who was gonna respect and listen to them. You have to teach your children communication. You have to let them know the reason behind it. You don’t just say it’s because I said so.
Carrie: Right. Everybody at one point or another, I’m sure there’ll be some point where I say it, you know, so , I’m not gonna call anybody out for that. But I think growing up in a type of household where the boundaries were not just strict, cause a lot of people grew up in a strict household, but where the boundaries were too rigid really. I mean, you got in trouble practically for breathing in some of those households. It can be, people have a really, really hard time setting boundaries because they were always told, no, you can’t do that. And it was very much that authority position.
They probably felt less than. And, you know, growing up in some of those environments or let’s talk about something even further where there were environments of abuse, there were boundary lines being crossed. In that person’s childhood, it doesn’t matter what kind of abuse it was, physical, emotional sexual. There was a line that was crossed and it was basically told your rights, your needs, you know, were not valued, were not important at all. And there was a violation there. And so people who have had their boundaries violated often have a hard time setting them for themselves. I mean, is that something that you’ve seen as well.
Erica: Definitely. They don’t understand what healthy boundaries is. So let’s explain what that is let’s define that. And then also go and look things up. One thing that I say is don’t listen and wait for someone to define things for you. This is what I tell my daughter. Go and find out for yourself. Look it up, go to the library, Google it, ask around. That’s one reason how abuse happens is the isolation of the information and your experience with an exposure to things. So always define things for yourself. Let’s define healthy boundaries. That’s when you are able to say yes to something or no to something based on how you feel, you understand how you feel about the circumstance and it aligns with your values. Going back to what you said, your values, and you understand how to assert your boundaries and say clearly and not have a problem with saying clearly. Yes, I can do this because, or no. And guess what period.
You don’t even have to give any definition. If you don’t feel like it, you don’t wanna do it. It’s simple. You can say no and that’s it. And I know may, sometimes people feel like, I can’t say no, there’s gonna be backlash if I say no, but a lot of time. It is you that’s stopping you from saying no, it’s your fears. So you have to interact with your fear and ask that fear. What’s why are you coming up? What’s going on? There is fear and there’s love. So how can we bring love into this circumstance to kinda dissipate this fear that you have that you can’t say no for something you don’t wanna do.
Carrie: And it’s okay to have physical boundaries with people. I think I wanna throw that out there.
Erica: Yes.
Carrie: If you don’t feel comfortable, some people are huggers. I like hugs, but I’m more of a person that I want to hug people that are close to me, that I know really well, that I’m really comfortable with and have had that kind of relationship. Some people just wanna hug you the first time they meet you. I’m not quite Into that, you know, but, I’ll probably have an uncomfortable look on my face and kind of do one of those tap hugs or something like that, where you just kind of lightly tap ’em on the back. Hey, it things, things like that. If you have somebody maybe that you feel like is too touchy, you know how the, some people just wanna touch you when they talk to you.
Maybe this is not as much cause of COVID maybe we’re we’re keeping a little more distance. I don’t know. I remember there was one time where I was talking to somebody. And a kind of a dinner thing and they just kept touching me. And I didn’t say anything about it, but I thought, well, this is really, you know, kind of odd and thinking about it just in terms of interpersonal context and things. But if you don’t want somebody to hug you, or if you’re in a dating relationship and you’re not comfortable.
Erica: I’m think about that Carrie all the way.
Carrie: With certain things, then it’s okay for you to say, I’m not there yet in the relationship. I don’t wanna kiss you yet. You know, I’m not there. Those are examples of physical boundaries that we can set for ourselves. And if you’re in a dating relationship, you probably need to have some of those conversations pretty early about where you’re at, what your expectations are, what you want, what you don’t want, because those can really go south fast. If you’re not upfront with the other person absolutely.
Erica: It’s all about having the right fit. If you feel like you can’t say no to someone, then you probably need to investigate that relationship about why you feel unsafe to say no.
Carrie: And regardless you brought up bosses earlier, and if you were an adult
to adult relationship. That’s what we’re trying to seek out. Even though there is some power differential there, you do have to respect your boss. You do have to listen to them. You do have maybe, probably some things from your job that you can’t say no to, but let’s say for example, that your boss hires you. This happens all the time, America, right? Your boss hires you and says, “Hey, you’re gonna work Monday through Thursday, 10 hour or you know, you’re only gonna put in 40 hours a week. That’s all we’re gonna ask from you”. And then next thing you know, you’re into the job two months later. Well, you know, we need somebody come in on Fridays. We just don’t have anybody come in on Fridays. And can you please, we really are gonna need you here this Friday. That’s an example where somebody has a freedom, perfect freedom to set a boundary, even though that’s their boss, even though they’re in authority role.
Erica: Yes, very much so like right now we have the great resignation that’s happening. Cause most people recognize that I don’t wanna be disrespected. I don’t wanna be disregarded for my personal life. And this is my job description. I’m supposed to be able to deliver this, but you also have to be courageous enough to speak up and say, that’s what it is.
Everybody knows the 80 20 rule when you’re working 80% of the people are not working or lacks of days old on how they work. And 20% are doing most of the work, right? Don’t be 20%. You have to decide that I told plenty of my clients, you should probably work. Give them 20% of your energy. And she actually got an award for her work ethic. After she did it, but also I told another lady who was having heart issues and stress and anxiety about working to slow down and only give them 20%. And her heart palpitations stopped.
Carrie: Wow.
Erica: Sometimes we do it to ourselves. A lot of this. Is, we have to step back now. It’s hard to do it in a job that you went in there and I’m gonna fix it all. And now everybody think you gonna keep on fixing it all. But if you go to another job or you could try to fix help with the boundaries, boundaries are easier with new circumstances sometimes because.
Carrie: That’s true. They’re definitely.
Erica: You can say this is who I am and they don’t know you to be a pushover. They don’t know you to be a doormat or a people please. But when you really wanna decide for yourself that boundaries need to happen, sometimes environment has to an environment change has to happen too.
Carrie: I don’t think I can stand behind giving your employer 20%. I think you’ve got to really work as an unto the Lord, you know, as a scriptural principle. And so I think that you have to put forth the effort to do a good job, but there’s, there’s a difference between doing a job where it’s like you said, kind of killing your health. And, and if you’re at that point, then I think that a conversation needs to happen to with your employer or your spouse. If you need to take a step back or whatever, to be able to say, you know, this job really is affecting my physical health, my mental, emotional health. And sometimes people have to either work less or they have to pick a less stressful job or different work environment. Maybe they need to be working from home.
Whatever the case is there are a variety of different boundaries and it’s okay to say to your employer, you know, I feel like I’m doing too much. I feel like the workload is too heavy. I don’t think that I need some help with this. How can we delegate some of these responsibilities? Is that okay? That those types of conversations I think are super important because unfortunately not just employers, but if someone sees that you are willing to have your boundaries crossed time after time after time again, like if you come in on that Friday, just this Friday. And then next thing you know, two Fridays later. You know, we need you again on Friday. It’s like, no, I agreed to work Monday through Thursday was our agreement. I’m not gonna be able to come in on Friday.
I had a friend a long time ago who, one of his first jobs he worked at McDonald’s when he was a teenager. And he said to the people, when he got hired, he said, “Hey, I just want you to know that I will work any day, but Sunday I’ll work, you know, the evening shift I’ll work late at night. I’ll I’ll work in the morning whenever I can”. Obviously it was the summer or something. He wasn’t in school. I’ll work here, but I will not work on Sundays. And so is that okay with you? I just want you to know that, is that okay? They said, “sure, that’s fine we can accommodate your schedule”. So the first time they scheduled him for a Sunday, he said, “now you remember that I told you I’d work any day, but Sunday and I’d work all these different shifts. I’m going to church on Sunday and I won’t be here. I just wanted to let you know that ahead of time, because that was our agreement”. And you know what, they had to honor that at the end of the day, cause that was what they had agreed to. But had he said, they put me on the schedule. I’ve gotta do it. I’ve gotta go in. They would’ve probably continued to schedule him for some days. And then that would’ve been a violation of his, not just his boundary, but his values of church and spiritual rights.
Erica: His religious rights as well. I wanted to go back really quick to say that most of my clients are really high functioning individuals that give like 200% work. So I have to say 20% to help them to edge off.
Cause if I told them only give them 50%, they would still give them 150%. So I’m trying to get them to edge off and not do so much because they’re a lot of their energy, cause they’re just high functioning individuals who feel like they have to work very, very hard. Those are usually my clients. I have the high functioning anxiety clients most of the time.
Carrie: So you, you have to throw out something drastic to get them to dial it down just a little bit. Okay, let’s talk about how do you know a boundary has been crossed?
Erica: Great question. First of all, you can feel it. It’s a gut feeling.
Carrie: Yes.
Erica: You can feel it. The thing is we ignore our feelings because going back to what we said about growing up, we had those good feelings and our parents shut it down. We were silenced. So you think, this is the feeling that I always have here, but I had to do it anyway. So I’m just gonna go ahead and do it anyway, like surrender to. I’m saying if you have this feeling, listen to it and acknowledge it. I feel statement is amazing. Go ahead and figure out what the feeling is. I feel irritated, frustrated. It doesn’t matter who this is, whoever you’re talking to, you can say this statement. I feel when you, whatever they did, I would like you to there’s that boundary. I would like you to whatever you would like them to do. That’s very explicit on what they can do to help you not feel frustrated. Now sometimes people do not respect your boundaries.
First of all, if they don’t respect your boundaries, then you have to go ahead and recognize that in this relationship, this person does not respect me. You have to decide if you’re gonna continue to be disrespected, or you’re want to figure out a way that this relationship is something that you maybe need to not have in your life.
And the other thing is, other than disrespecting you, you have to make sure that the individuals are clear, very clear on the boundary that you set. A lot of times, we’re kind of, you make me unhappy. I will like you to make me happy no like.
Carrie: What in the world does that mean?
Erica: Right. What does happiness to you? So that means that you gotta do some internal work to know what your boundaries are. I think a lot of times people wanna have boundaries. But they haven’t figured out what they like, how they want people to treat them. What do you want? I ask you for that. I ask a child that what they like want they know.
Carrie: Yes.
Erica: I know because they’re so accustomed to accommodating others, especially women, Carrie, let’s talk about that, that story that you said it was a man.
I haven’t heard many stories like that when a woman doesn’t to it and go ahead and go with.
Carrie: I mean, you look at women are much less likely to negotiate their salary going into a job. Because they just feel like, well, someone’s giving me a number. That’s what they’re comfortable with.That’s just what I’m supposed to take. And going from there, you know, that’s a boundary. If you say, you know, I have the skills and experience and I can show on paper that I should be making this much money or somebody else offered me this, are you able to match that? Or I need to be making my current salary. That’s okay to have that boundary. I think in terms of going back to like, feeling like a boundary has been crossed for me, it usually comes up as anger.
A lot of times, like, I’ll feel this feeling of anger. And a lot of times, you know, I’ve been in business five years. I talked about that. And so when I feel like something’s not working and it was frustrating me, I would say, okay, Something’s frustrating me about this process or this system, what do I need to change? But that anger came first and that was a good gut check for me. Okay, I’m frustrated, I’m angry. Why am I frustrated and angry? Okay. Well, because maybe I took on this client that wasn’t the best fit for me. You know, maybe it was a referral from a colleague and I felt like I really needed to take that person on.
Maybe it was somebody really begged me. They couldn’t find a therapist. And so those days are long gone. If I don’t feel like people are a good fit, I don’t have any problems, you know, referring them out or something.
Other things, I’m just thinking of other things that came up were phone calls. I was spending a lot of time on the phone with, you know, people that hadn’t really researched who I was or what I do and was trying to, I literally was trying to help everyone that called me on the phone, whether they wanted anger management classes. And I didn’t have anything to do with that, whether they wanted, you know, something for custody issues with their children, which I didn’t do. And so here I was trying to find resources for people and pick up the phone every time I called, because I thought, well, these people really need help and I need to be the one to help them.
I had to really let that go because. I recognize you cannot help every person that calls you on the phone. That is impossible. You’re not the right person to help everybody that calls on the phone. Some of them need other things and it’s okay. You don’t have to pick it up every time it calls, you can let it go to voicemail and you can return the call later. It’s gonna be okay. It’s not gonna be a huge thing, but that was some hard boundaries for myself in terms of, setting boundaries just in my business, interpersonally in terms of working with clients. I just know that for me, a lot of times it comes up as anger or as a gut feeling, the gut feeling is like, you know, it’s just like this. Something’s just not right about that.
Erica: Dare they did that to me, you know.
Carrie: You feel that sense of like and dictation.
Erica: It does not feel good. It’s like a gut and hard feeling. And I immediately, I think about my feelings, like, what is that? What is that? I immediately go to what’s the feeling. Okay. And I do, and I feel saving, even if I don’t say it to that person, I have to write it. I have to say it to get it out of me. Otherwise it’s going to just eat at me. And then I figure out a way to talk with them. Sometimes I just write it in my journal and it’ll all work out on its own in some kind of way in a conversation without me specifically saying anything, especially if I’m really mad about it.
Carrie: Okay. That’s good. I mean, I think that that’s a really good pathway. Of like teaching people how to do that work, how to tune in internally and then try to figure out like, okay, what’s the next step? What is that next step that I need to take here?
Erica: Usually when you feel that you’re triggered in some kind of way, what is it taking you back to going back to a scenario where you were disrespected or dishonored or felt the same feeling before?
Carrie: That’s good talking about trauma trigger. That come up for people.
Erica: Because you didn’t set a boundary. So then it’s always gonna keep showing up, cause the boundary’s not there.
Carrie: Let’s talk about how do boundaries align with the Christian faith? I think people have this view that if I’m a Christian kind of going back to, I’ve gotta help everybody.
I’m to be loving towards people. And if I say no to them, I’m not being loving towards them. But I mean, we kind of gave that example of parents and their children. You can’t always say yes to your children because that’s gonna lead to disaster. There are times where you need to say no for their own, even personal safety.
Erica: Boundaries is part of the Christian faith. I know that it says, okay. And we kind of capitalize on that part of being selfless and don’t be selfish, but the Bible does talk about, like, there is boundaries, the 10 commandments are boundaries there.
Carrie:Yes they are.
Eric: You know, there are other things that are told to us lot and his wife don’t look back. Right? That was a boundary. And then we saw the consequences. You have to have consequences too, to your boundaries. You can’t just have these boundaries. It’s like you are a Chihuahua, Chihuahua. You’re a Chihuahua barking saying you, this is your boundary, but you’re not doing anything. And people are gonna keep pushing over. What’s the consequence that there has to be some kind of consequence. To pushing over your boundaries.
I just wanted to mention that, but in nutrition faith, we have boundaries. They are parents throughout the Bible. I don’t think people look for those because I’m gonna say some, I’m gonna say some, I think that a lot of people who may be leading flocks want them to follow along with what they are saying. So if you tell them, empower them in too many ways. They then are thinking for themselves and not following along. So they’re now share that kind of information.
Carrie: Well, I, and I think that’s why we have to go to following Jesus in the Bible versus following man, you know. Because not everyone is following Jesus in the Bible who is in leadership.
Erica: Too many times. I’ve had some scenarios of, man, pastors doing many things that should not have happened or I felt it. I was like, this is not supposed to be right. But it wasn’t like no one said to me that this person is not supposed to do it, but he’s up in front of me telling me that the gospel telling me the way to go, but it doesn’t feel right. You always have this feeling. It doesn’t matter what kind of leader it’s there. You have to listen to yourself. You gotta tap in and find your own answers.
Carrie: I picked out a couple of Jesus examples for how do boundaries align with the Christian faith? There was in Matthew 12 Jesus refuses to perform a miracle.
So people were saying to him, perform a miracle to show us, you know, that you’re the Christ. And the funny thing is Jesus was already performing miracles. By this point, it wasn’t like this was gonna be a new thing. They had already seen evidence that he was a Messiah and he told them, no, I’m not gonna do that because you’re basically you’re unbelieving. And you’re showing that you don’t have faith. You know, and I’m not gonna give you a sign.
Erica: I’m not gonna be a politic for you like.
Carrie: Not gonna perform miracles on demand. There was a time in Luke nine 60 that the verse, you know, let the dead bury their own dead. There was a man who he had said, Jesus said, come follow me. The man said no. First let me bury my father. And Jesus said, well, let the dead bury their own dead. It wasn’t, a cruel heartless type of thing. He was wanting to wait around for like some year long ritual that was gonna be happening. It was, what do you call that? It’s more about tradition than actually. Just a regular funeral. We have, we have probably really quick funerals compared to what they did back then in the whole process.
So Jesus was like, no, you really need to come follow me. You know, you don’t need to basically make an excuse about why you can’t come at this point. I mean, Jesus told the rich young ruler, he had to sell all his stuff too. It wasn’t really about him selling his stuff. It was more about your heart’s not in the right place.
Erica:Yes.
Carrie: To be following me. So these are all different examples where Jesus really put people in their place in a lot of ways. And times that we look at that and we’re like, that’s really radical that he said that, or I don’t know if you do that. Sometimes I read the Bible. I’m like, I can’t believe he just said that. Wow. That was.
Erica: I love it.
Carrie: You know, that was intense. .
Erica: My daughter has the Bible now we’re reading again. I loved reading the Bible. It’s great like if you read it, so I think people take, read it as if it’s a book and it’s great. It”s so much going on to so many heroes. It says that Jesus is a first superhero and that there’s sons of other heroes like Ruth and like, Esther, it’s just like, it’s radical. It’s a, it really talks about all the situations that we have even now in trying to relate to others. Jesus does plenty of parables talking about boundaries and how you should interact and what’s your value system and how to have your certain Christian values that I feel like are not upheld. They should be in a real authentic way.
Carrie: I was so glad that we are having this conversation, you know, essentially a, a boundaries 1 0 1, because there’s so many people that misunderstand what a boundary is, or they don’t think that they can set them with a boss, with a parent, with a spouse and boundaries are for many different areas of our lives. We have to learn how to set them respectfully and so fort. Let’s talk about boundaries with a parent, because I think that’s another one people carry their childhood into their adulthood of, you know, well, this person is my parent. I have to honor them and I have to respect them according to the Bible. So I can’t say no. If my parent wants to call me at all hours of the night or if my parent wants to just drop by, I just have to be okay with that because that’s my mother. That’s my father.
Erica: I’m the one to talk to about this. Or I was in my internship, I was trying to create this group called “Toxic mom relationships and how to manage them”. So when I talk to every people, just, you know, one on one, every last person has some kind of issue. With they mama or they daddy, or both of.
Carrie: We call those family of origin issues. Everybody has to deal with their family of origin issues.
Erica: This is actually the first, I think people they’ll have problems in their relationships, their intimate relationships, you know, sexual intimate relationships.
And it be the same problems that they have with their parent, like the same boundary issues, being people pleaser, or thinking that you have to say yes to everything. When you become an adult, like first of all, you were supposed to be expect when you were a child, maybe didn’t happen. You have to understand.
Now you’re an adult. Okay. And you’re taking care of yourself. And even if you’re not, cause I have a lot of college students, I have individuals who are still on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26 and they’ll think, I can’t say no, cause I’m still tied to them. You have to decide. What’s right for you.
Your life is your life. It’s not your parents. I think a lot of times, some people have issues with feeling like they are connection or, you know, a part of their parent instead of them being a whole person and they have their own thoughts and their own feelings and their own way of doing things that fits best for them. And you have to going back to being brave. Being brave to say and speak up for yourself. Now, let me just tell you if your parents love you, love transcends all of this, and it’s opposed to transcend all of this. And if they reject you because you asserted your boundary, then maybe later on, they will think more about this relationship and not. Let it be severed, but you get to have your boundaries and it’s important that you have them and you have to assert them. You have to be clear on what and who you are.
Cause a lot of clients say, my parents don’t even know who I am. You haven’t shared who you are with them because you’re afraid to share who you are with them. And then a lot of parents say, all my kid only calls me once a week or I only see ’em on holidays, probably because you have no idea who they are and they are afraid to show you who they are. And it’s such a sad circumstance to live in a life where a person brought you into this world, but you can’t share who you are with them.
Carrie: That is a sad state. This has been such a good chat and I hate to cut it off, but I know we’ve gone a little while and maybe at some point I’ll do boundaries 2.0 or, or we can do it or something like that. We’ll figure it out. But I think that this has been a great intro for people to understand really what’s a boundary and hopefully it’s got people thinking like, maybe through the podcast, like maybe there is a boundary that I need to set with myself or with other people in my life and knowing that. Not only is that okay to do so, but that’s a healthy thing. And we can follow, you know, in Jesus’ example, in terms of, of setting boundaries.
Erica: Yes. Going back to the book I recommended was Henry Clouds “Boundaries”. It is actually Christian based. So if you’re listening to this podcast, it puts a lots of information in there about Christian examples of how you should move in your boundaries in that you are not meant to be selfless, but you have boundaries. And I do wanna be before I end, is to talk about hunting unique counseling skills, because that book is a book that you can get on Amazon that I wrote and boundaries is in that book.
So I talk about it in that book, as well as other counseling skills that are needed, like communication and time management.
And lastly, I have a freebie. Because it’s, I am this boundary thing is so important. So I have a freebie it’s 11 page ebook called “Boundaries guide four leaders”. You can get that at www dot heal yourself, grow.org. Heal yourself. grow.org. And you can get free freebie on how to even discover and set boundaries under eight categories and even affirmations in order to hold your boundaries and reiterate your boundaries to others.
Carrie: Okay. And we’ll put those links in the show notes too. If people are listening to this in their car and didn’t have a chance to write that down so they can go back to the show notes and, find the links in there to your book and to the, boundaries resource that you have there. That’s awesome.
Erica: It’s so great. I love, I love talking with you.
Carrie: We have good times. I had so much fun having this conversation with Erica about boundaries 1 0 1. Stay tuned for boundaries 2 0 2. I may do that as a solo episode another time. We do have some great interviews coming up in the next month on breath prayer and on exposure and response prevention. So stay tuned for those episodes. If you like our show, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with someone else. So I know that you know, someone in your life probably who’s having difficulty with setting boundaries or they feel like if they set a boundary, that’s somehow un-Christian of them to do so. So feel free to forward this episode onto them. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By The Well Counseling.
Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Joe Padilla, a licensed and ordained minister, and co-founder of Mental Health Grace Alliance. Joe shares with us how his family was personally impacted by mental health and how he was able to work through it.
Stepping down the ministry to navigate his wife’s mental health issues
Barriers to seeking professional and pastoral help
Doing research and equipping himself to help his wife overcome her mental health condition
Learning how to integrate neuroscience, psychology, and biblical scriptures for mental health recovery
Reinventing support group models and curriculum that integrate faith and science.
Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 67. Another really great personal story interviews for you guys today. Before we hop into that, though, there’s a couple of things that I wanna say on a more personal note. On the podcast here, it’s very hard to talk about current events due to the nature of having a counseling practice and trying to keep my own sanity as I’m recording this introduction. I know that this show won’t come out for another six weeks. Also, my interview actually was recorded several months ago. However, I feel like because we have such a worldwide audience that it’s really important for me to say. A couple of things about what’s happening in our world. At this point in time, Russia has invaded Ukraine and it’s a very heartbreaking situation.
We know from what Jesus told us that in the last days. There are going to be wars and rumors of wars. So this should not come as a surprise to us. I hope though, that these recent events have reminded you to pray for your brothers and sisters all over the world who are in war-torn countries, or who are experiencing persecution for their faith. If you have freedoms and the country that you are in to worship and praise God as you, please, if you are able to go to bed tonight and not have to worry about being bombed, we need to be very thankful because we may not always have those freedoms. We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we know that God loves us and that God is with us. And if by some chance you are in Ukraine and you’re listening to this, just know that we love you. And we are praying for you.
Today on the show. I am interviewing Joe Padilla, who is the CEO and co-founder of the Mental Health Grace Alliance. I didn’t know anything at all, really about the Mental Health Grace Alliance, until I was told by one of our previous guests that I needed to look into this organization. They’re doing some amazing things, just combining this passion of helping people who have mental health issues in the church. And Joe is gonna share his own personal experience of how they got started. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Joe: I am a licensed and ordained minister. I’ve been in ministry for 20, some odd years now. And my background really kind of started with missions and then local ministry, and then really running the Grace Alliance as a mental health type of ministry, helping churches and individuals and families now based out of Texas. So, that’s where we are.
Carrie: Awesome. I know that your family was personally impacted by mental health, and that’s kind of how you got on this journey. Tell us a little bit about that.
Joe: When we started a ministry, basically in missions that we were on the field for probably a total of 10 years in regard to that. And during that time, we noticed a lot of challenges with my wife’s mental health, as far as depression, anxiety, and different things like that, which led us to come back, worked locally within the church and stuff.
But while we were here trying to get the mental health care system, you know, all of those pastoral care as well and all that kind of stuff, but really nothing ever really kind of progressed for her from both the professional and the pastoral, which got to the point where we actually had to step down from ministry because of those.
We’re extremely challenging for her, for us and for our kids. And then really started to try to figure out, and how do we navigate this journey? And it was a time when we stepped down, that where we started to focus on how, do we really navigate this? And so I started to dive into really learning. What is neuroscience? What is, the psychology, all these types of things. Cause I wasn’t getting all of that information. And as you know. With the church leaders and things. That’s one of the areas where they just don’t get a lot of equipping and training and being a leader myself, I just didn’t have that.
So it really took the time to kind of research and look at all those. And it was finding this way that you really could navigate this for kind of what’s called mental health recovery. And no one was talking about that. They were just talking about management and things like that. Long story short, I started to apply all these principles and then over about a year and a half period, I saw my web significantly improved. Through her journey where we’ve never seen any of that kind of progress in the last kind of eight to 10 years of suffering. And that led us to having to leave, ministry altogether. And then here we are now, building, rebuilding life, our marriage or family and everything. And just looking at all these concepts are using a real whole health approach or a holistic approach and doing all that we got better medical care, the mental health professionals.
I started to figure out what works, what doesn’t work and an even from ministry, figuring out what works. And what doesn’t work and why things were getting so bad. So, from both of those end, we just kind of learn how to navigate it and figure some things out and then rebuilding life towards a new promise for us. And in front of that journey, that’s where we start to figure out there really is a way to navigate this. Even within the church, and it’s way simpler than we think, but it’s a very useful, and then that’s kind of where the organization came from that experience.
Carrie: I like that. We talked about the holistic approach a lot on this podcast, you know, it’s not just your spiritual health, it’s your mental, emotional, physical, it’s all just interconnected. And that’s how God created us to be. So I like that. I wanna mention something too, that you talked about just in terms of one navigating the system of mental health care is hard. It’s hard to find a therapist. Sometimes, you call, you make phone calls. You may not get a phone call back. People say, “oh, no, I don’t take your insurance or no, I can’t work with your availability on the days you’re available. I’m not taking new clients”.
So I’ve found a counselor recently for myself or some things that I’m processing through being pregnant, getting ready to have a child. And just different stressors in my life. And I know how hard it was for me. And I understand the system and I understand how the system works, but it took me probably a couple of weeks to find somebody that could meet with me. And that in itself, I think can be discouraging. Did you guys have a lot of roadblocks as you were trying to just kind of navigate the system and get the help?
Joe: Well, I think from our position, we had excellent professionals. If it just was all scattered, do you have a family doctor who’s helping you, but then you have a psychiatrist who’s coming in, but then they don’t talk. And then you have a therapist. But then the therapist doesn’t talk to the psychiatrist. So it’s just all so scattered and you’re getting all kinds of, you know, it’s like they say, you talk to 10 people and you get a hundred opinions, but I think we’re really trying to figure out what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. And then because you have a psychiatrist, who’s prescribing medication, but then sometimes they’re not paying attention to what the side effects are, how they’re playing with other medication and what really the condition you’re dealing with as well as then you’re going to the therapy. They’re really, was kind of a way of, what kind of therapy do you need on the front end of this on to once you have a lot of stability, what’s helpful?
But if you don’t understand that therapeutic process for an individual in high crisis, in high stress, it can actually make it worse. And I see that all the time and that’s what we were going through was, this has been a health care system, is so scattered.
No one’s communicating. No one’s really understanding. And then it took time for me to learn. Wow! These medications that they’re prescribing and they keep updating them. It’s actually making it worse. Why isn’t anybody paying attention to this or the therapy? And I remember meeting with therapists and they’re trying to sole approach. I’m like, “what are you talking about? You have no idea what you’re doing”.
You have to understand what condition is, where the brain condition is from a neuroscience standpoint of what can actually be processed rather than tools based to get to the point where you can process things. So kind of an understanding, because that’s a hard journey and I coach a lot of people through this. And we look at their kind of the therapeutic process and they’re making no progress whatsoever, because I was meeting with somebody recently and talking them through that. And it’s just, like they said, “well, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere”. I was like, “well, how long have you been in that therapy”?. It was like, “well, I’ve been in for quite a long time”.
It was like, “you know, you’re paying for that. You should go back to your professional and say”. “Here’s this, this and this, this, how can I move forward with this and this and this”, but they belong for a journey. And then you ended up in this conversation.
Carrie: Absolutely.
Joe: So, again, I think that’s part of when we say the mental health care system, there is one, the availability, when you do get in, it’s looking at the process of what type of care are we actually getting into?
Is it appropriate? And is it being followed up with very well? And then you look at the community. Where’s the community support? And there’s always a gap there, especially when you get into the price centered or Christian or body of Christ or church community, that’s very lacking. And we can talk about that a little bit more later too, because that’s kind of the essence of what we do as an organization. But I think when we talk about the confusion of the mental health care system, we’re talking about all these things that just from availability to who do you see, and then is it appropriate? Is this the right process? Are you in the right place?
Carrie: If there are a lot of moving pieces really to navigate. And I think for you being so involved in your wife’s care, you were probably able to provide a certain level of feedback, maybe things that you were seeing, that she wasn’t able to see. Cause I know that sometimes people will go into see a psychiatrist for example, and they’re just reporting on their last week instead of really looking at the whole picture and reporting maybe on their last month or their last few months, because they’re in distress. And sometimes when you’re in distress, it’s just really hard to get it out and even communicate about what’s going on with you internally with your experiences.
Joe: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s when we developed our coaching and then even within our groups, we try to give information that helps when they are working on professional helps them to be a little bit more strategic with understanding their care and their follow-up. Even when you get into medication, we do have a topic where we cover that. But giving them strategic ways of how to communicate better with their psychiatrists so that you can take the guesswork out and you really get into some information that’s helpful so that you can move forward rather than just kind of guess your way through a lot of these medications.
Carrie: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of trial and error. More so in the psychiatric realm, then in other areas of medical treatment and different people respond differently to medications and it’s hard. I wanna ask you a little bit too about there’s this medical model of mental illness and the medical model of mental illness says, “Well, you know, you just have some chemicals, are often in your brain. You’re probably going to struggle with depression your whole life, or you’re gonna be struggling with anxiety. That’s just the way it is or some genetic components, this and that”. And for me as a believer, it’s always been very challenging. And there’s a part of me that greatly rejects that model, because like you said, at a lot of it is focused on management and just focus on.
Well, you know, you’re just gonna have these symptoms and we just got to figure out how to manage them, instead of saying, how can I live an abundant life in Christ, even though I have these mental health struggles. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, that I have this podcast and wanting to give people hope that you don’t just have to suffer. You know, there are so many different treatment options. There’s different types of therapy that you can engage in. There is alternative medicines. There’s so much hope and so much help out there. And the more that we talk about it and the more people know about it, like we have Christ, we have the ultimate hope to get better.
Was that something that you found or you process like on your journey?
Joe: You know, and I think that that comment of, is she gonna be like this roast her life and then something inside you, is going. “I don’t know about that”. You know, I think that’s most everybody, even if you’re not a believer, I think there’s just, that’s just hard. But especially in the church where we have this aspect of, well, then where’s Christ in that, you know, whereas that?, and I think if we take it from the position of, when we look at mental health recovery, or we look at that concept from a medical process or even, and that whole journey, we don’t look at it as we’re gonna try to get rid of your diagnosis. We’re gonna try to get rid of all your symptoms.
We look at it more of, you can still flourish in life. So it’s a really about understanding. How do you build a life that is more meaningful? And that you can flourish in your life and you have much more resilience to the condition that you’re walking through. And overtime as you build your own flourishing life and you become more resilient than you actually see a lot of symptom reduction, you may not see the whole thing go away, which is fine, but you can live very meaningful and purposeful. And I think that’s a lot of times in the medical model or sometimes in the community. And no offense, because I know that there are some conditions that are challenging. And, but I think that sometimes we just get this message of you’re gonnq be like this, the rest of your life, take your medications, manage and survive as best you came in.
I think God’s designed us for more than that, even though we have a condition because I’ve coached people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia and things like that. And I’m telling you, Carrie, I have seen them flourish from, and I have some incredible stories, even miraculous stories where they were living on their parents’ house. And this is on disability. This is what gonna be the rest of their life, to having a full life, getting married, having business, you know, all these types of things. You see this dramatic turnaround they’re conditioned didn’t go away. But what happened was there symptoms declined as they flourished in life, they’ll need their medication, but they’re able to flourish with a meaningful, purposeful life. I think that’s the opportunity to show people cause when I’m coaching somebody and I’m working with them, I just share with them and tell them, “look, I know that I know, that I know, that I know. It can be different than this”. You get rid of this. We’re not gonna try to eliminate this.
But let me show you what you can’t have. And that’s when we get into psychology and you’d know this more than I do as a professional, where we were it’s called avoidant goals versus approach goals. And so that management of you just live this way, avoid all these things. And because you’re, you know, avoid life and all this stuff, because you have this condition and the research shows the more you live that way. Especially, God is in that narrative, we just don’t have very, we don’t have good wellbeing and mental health as opposed to approach goals of, here’s what you can have.
This is what your life is about. Here’s the opportunity that you can have a build and you start to see better wellbeing, mental health and stuff like that. I think that’s what we do with our curriculum since the week. As Jesus did, he came and he flipped the script. And I think in mental health, we need to flip the script so that you see much better hope in a tangible way, rather than just, let’s just keep praying about this and go to your closet and keep asking God, I think there’s more to it than that.
Carrie: I love that. That there’s always hope. And what you were talking about with goals. Is that a lot of times people do, they come into counseling, they come to see me and they say, I want these obsessive thoughts to go away. I’m dealing with OCD, or I want this anxiety to go away. I want God to heal me and just take all this away. And it’s like, okay. So that’s like, step one, maybe. But what would your life be like if you had less anxiety and sometimes that really just stops people in their tracks, almost like they’re not really sure. Oh no. I just feel better. What does feel better? Look like, you know, cause feel better to, you might look differently than feel better to me. And we start to unravel this. And then a lot of times they’ll get to, well, if I wasn’t so anxious, then I would be able to have more social relationships or I would be able to start dating somebody, or I would be able to have more confidence to do the things that they believe God’s calling them to do.
So that’s a whole different thing to work for because who wants to work for just less of something. I mean, I guess in the physical realm, it’s kind of similar to losing weight. Well, I just want to lose weight. But why? Oh, cause I want to run with my grandkids. Well, that’s totally, you know, wow! You just opened up the world for yourself there, by looking at that approach goal. I like that concept. Let’s talk about community because you brought up the community so crucial. I think now more than ever. At least, what I’m seeing in the North American context, is because we do have some worldwide listeners, but in our American context, we are more isolated. And we have ever been, and COVID of course made things worse and caused people to isolate even more.
It’s so hard sometimes for people to find, a good, authentic Christian community.
And there’s so much shame around the stigma of having a mental illness. Sometimes I’ll talk with people and I’ll say, “okay, well, who in your church knows about this? Have you talked to your pastor about this? Is your small group praying for you”? And they’re just like, “oh, you know”, it’s just like, I can’t tell anybody that I’m dealing with these obsessive thoughts. And I’m like, “but you need these people, you know, you need this help in this community”. Do you find that as well? Just in working with people. That it’s, that is hard.
Joe: I think it’s, well, this gets into the conversation about stigma and community. Obviously, community is the biggest agent for healing and for people, anybody, even if you’re just isolated and you’re healthy.
Carrie: Right.
Joe: It’s like, not that to have a flourishing life, you have to have community. And especially when you get into mental health challenges, because it is a little bit more of a private challenge or an issue or things like that it’s often associated with fate or you’re doing something wrong, your sin, or, you know, and then it gets associated with, well, maybe that’s demonic or something like that. I think that’s been an unfortunate default narrative, which really just unfair to begin there. So it’s still with the stigma. I think it’s research nerd. So I read all this stuff and I actually went and looked at the stigma and found that there’s about 50, 60, 70 years of research on stigma, mental illness stigma.
Carrie: Wow!
Joe: And what they basically have said over all these years is the more that you try to break stigma. The more stigma you create, because we’re not built for narratives that are psychoanalytical. Or just not an institutional project, we are people. And so when you use narratives that are biomedical and things like that, we create an otherness type of people and otherness type of people fall into a brokenness and default narrative. That’s why we just create more stigma by using that type of thing. And so when we use language that we already know that we understand, as far as mental health. I often like to just, say, “you know, this, these are about mental health difficulties and disorders, or just mental health challenge”.
This is just me personally, but I don’t like using the mental illness language because, and I know that there’s others that will advocate for that. We can all have different positions. I think that, especially from the pandemic, we’re starting to realize I’m working with more church leaders. That realized this, now that is really more of a spectrum rather than a disease division. You know, it really is a place where we all are experiencing crisis and any crisis, especially within mental health, creates a longing for meaning and community. So I think we have to understand where we are on that spectrum and things like that. Yes, there are disorders and stuff and we can work. Then there’s also people on depression, anxiety scale that would never identify themselves. As mental illness or mental health.
Perfect example is, I worked with a professional. We were just in a conversation and I was just trying to help a family member of this professional. And they explained to me, when I say professional, they’re a business professional, the very fluent they’re very influential. And they were just saying to me that like, you know, they’re on medication, they had the classic symptoms of depression and anxiety and how that was causing a lot of relational challenges. And then they said, “well, I would never come to your website because that’s where mental illness”. You know, I’m just going to go to church and I’m going to go, do some more inner healing work, you know? And so it’s like, okay, well, that’s fine. And I think that’s because of the narrative that we often tell around mental illness is so limiting because we make it such a sickness issue that we forget. It’s a person and it’s a story. And so when we talk about mental health and things like that, even like when we talk about suicide awareness and stuff like that, I’m kind of like, Hey, suicide awareness. It needs to be called, story awareness.
You have to understand people’s story because you will become more compassionate and understanding to a story than you will to a statistic. So we use statistics secondary, not first. We use stories first because at the end of the day, there’s more commonality. If we just sit down and talk to each other, then we realize. And then the diagnosis will become a secondary concern, but it will have so much compassion because the story’s there. So in order to break the stigma within the church, we have to tell the story, humanness and humanity and where God is in that journey because mental health is all over the Bible. I mean, it is everywhere. It is so described and described a very, very well. But we don’t tell that narrative because we only use scientific terminology and then nobody pays attention. And everybody’s thinking, I don’t know anybody with schizophrenia, and this is a longer, obviously a conversation and stuff, and we help churches and leaders. And I have this document that I could, I have, you know, some leaders and stuff to help them understand. How to use the right language so that you can appeal to the right people and get them the right support.
Because the statistics, that show that it takes about seven to eight years before someone will actually reach out and get help. But that whole seven year journey, we talk about it as a team of how do we reach the seven-year journey person, because in that place. They’re not seeing mental health, they’re just saying I’m broken, God’s working on me and this is more sanctification in my life. And so then, and that just recreates or reinforces more of that avoidance or avoided detachment type theories and stuff like that. And so, but if we can really learn the language of the seven-year journey, I think we would see much more help and much more resources that would get to people much quicker.
Carrie: So, tell us about Mental Health Grace Alliance and what you guys do?
Joe: So, Mental Health Grace Alliance, we are integrating science and faith, scripture Christ into a material that is practical. It’s easy to use. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. So we’re really trying to get you that the insight and the tools to make life better. Okay. So from a family to an individual and even for churches. And so what we do is we provide a small group curriculums and that small group curriculum can be used even personally, because we know that, that’s hard to get groups going and stuff like that. And we just encourage people, if with the curriculum, even if you just found one person, that’s a group, this size doesn’t matter. Having one or two other people. So with that curriculum, and there are 16 week, so we have one curriculum for, again, for family members. That’s the parent or the spouse who is living with somebody that has a mental health condition of some sort.
Then we have it for the individual and that’s called our living grace. So we have family grace and then living grace. And then we have a version for students, high school and college that’s written in their world and that’s a 10-week version. So that can happen easily within a semester. We have another material called to thrive, which goes through much more of the intensive process. And that’s what we actually developed our coaching program from, but we just got overwhelmed and we turned it into a self, got to workbook. From the process of revising that. So hopefully in 2022, we’ll have a new version to be released because people have turned it into groups and we can’t keep up with them.
Carrie: So awesome.
Joe: So that’s the primary thing that we do is really provide them that a topical guidance through these, this material and everything is faith-based from a sense of, here’s a scripture. Here’s a way that you guys can discover how God is inside this journey. Not you trying to get to God, but where God is relating to you. And then some science facts and subscriptions facts. That they could discuss. And a lot of times they come with a tool that they can practice and professionals love it because it’s a place where they’re just getting reinforced because we do, like I said earlier, we have a topic on medication, you know, but then the rest of the workbooks really do reinforce a lot of principles. That are very tools based within a lot of therapy programs.
We’re not doing therapy, we’re just doing the support of it. And they’re getting the resources and the help and the groups that we have they’re easy. You do not have to be a professional. They are not, they don’t replace medicine or therapy or anything like that. It is just a way to get this conversation going. You learn and get encouraged and you grow through this. And we’ve done research on these groups. So we do have published results on these groups and we see that people reduce their symptoms and they are aided mental health recovery, and they renew their faith. And then the stories that just are amazing coming out of these groups too.
Carrie: That’s a really interesting connection, I think between discipleship and mental health recovery because they are related in the sense that we’re always on that process of striving to become more like Christ. And that’s not always just a spiritual process. It’s a communal process. It’s a self-examination process. There’s so much that goes into that. So I love that. And just the aspect of people being able to be in a group with other people who they feel like, this person gets it. They have struggles too. And we’re able to be open about that. I haven’t led a group in a while since I’ve been doing online practice, but when I did groups in person, they were so incredibly powerful. And what I would see was my clients that were in group therapy. It almost like, It’s like it lit this spark under their individual therapy work.
It’s very hard to explain other than it was just like, that was so powerful and good for them to be able to kind of see some of their symptoms in other people and be able to respond compassionately to others. When sometimes it’s hard to respond compassionately to yourself. There’s just so much. I think that people can get out of that. And I remember walking out of one of the groups and I just thought, this is what church is supposed to be like, I was like, this is what authentic community looks like. And it wasn’t a Christian based group because I had people in there that weren’t Christians.
It was just, you know, anxiety management group. But I walked out and I went, we learn a lot in the church from group therapy, you know what.
Joe: You know, from our focus is talking to some church leaders about this recently, but what we do is we have a solution for the frustration gap in the church. And what I mean by that is someone goes to the pastor and the pastor can tell this person needs way more professional help.
And I am equipped to offer, and we have nothing here at the church for them. So they get referred out to a professional. Then they go to the professional and the professional is I ready to help you? I wanna help you, but I have no spot for you for another three to four weeks. Okay. And, I wanna send you back to the church.
There’s no support for you there. Well, here’s this community support group, but they don’t do faith. And again, some of those models that those cathartic models that I’ve seen, the research on those groups, they are not effective. It’s just venting and venting and venting.
So, but its like, and so from our standpoint, I’ve been through that. Cause I went to a support group and I was like first and last meeting I’ll ever go to in the community support group because it was so horrible and it was so discouraging. And I thought there’s gotta be a better way of this cause I have seen life in the church. And so really that frustration gap, the pastor doesn’t know where to send them other than the professional, that he doesn’t know where to send them back because there’s no Christian support other than this community support. But then there’s not here from all the time. There’s no Christian stuff in these community groups.
So that frustration gap basically means the support group model needs to be reinvented. And so what we did is we have reinvented the support model into a discipleship growth, the journey for those who are experiencing mental health challenges. From the family to the individual. And so really giving away that they can grow in their relationship with Christ. This isn’t about, Hey, we have this group for you in the back. It meets on Thursday nights. You come to the back door, there’s coffee over there, and then you just really be quiet and was like, no, let’s give you a full dignity of a discipleship experience tailored for your experience of where you are on this journey. Cause you’re not losing out. There’s actually an opportunity for you to see this as a growing experience. So here’s this group and these groups lead themselves; they’re just facilitated.
Carrie: That’s awesome. I’m enjoying this conversation so much and I hate to wrap it up, but I’m curious for you, just kind of looking at your journey that you’ve been on. What would you tell your younger self who had a wife who is struggling with mental health issues? If you could go back somehow and give yourself advice.
Joe: If I were to go back and I would say, look at the science, don’t be afraid of the science. I think sometimes there’s this tension between science and scripture.
And the more that I see science, the more alive scripture gets and the more research I see that the bigger God gets and I fall in love with God more. There is a beauty between science and faith. I think we’re in a new age of the church that much more open to that now where we were 20 years ago. It was a little bit more tender, things like that, but I would say, yeah, I’d say, Hey, look at the science because there really is a way, and there’s a lot more hope 9when you integrate the science.
Carrie: Is there a way for people to go on the website and look and see what groups might be running near them?
Joe: There is. So our website is a Mental Health Grace Alliance Dot.or. And then they can just click on the, for you page and they can see our material. And then also there’s a button there on the, for you page or for the family page, just to the shows them what groups are available. There are some groups that are online and then there are some in different areas, but it’s really easy for them to start a group. We make it really easy. This free training, free support, all that stuff. All they had to do is buy a workbook. So it’s very easy for anybody to find a group.
We have hundreds of groups all over the world and things like that, so they can evaluate and see what’s there. And then if this is a shirts that’s interested and they’re listening to your podcasts, or maybe a leader, we provide free virtual meetings for church leaders because they’re curious and they want more help. And so we provide those meetings for free and I’ll meet with them and just talk them through. And most of the time when I meet these pastors and these leaders, they don’t go longer than 30, 40 minutes because they’re ready. They just need someone to help them kind of guide them. And then they run with it.
Carrie: Awesome. We’ll put the links in there and I’d love to get a hold of your workbooks and see if it would be helpful for some of my clients, you know, as an addition to what they’re already doing.
So, man, keep doing what you’re doing and just encouraging churches and people who are struggling.
Joe: Thank you appreciated.
Carrie: I know that some of you may really benefit from the resources that the Mental Health Grace Alliance has to offer. We will be sure to put their website in our show notes for you to click on for easy access.
And we are always looking for great guest suggestions for the show. I probably won’t be recording until sometime in the summer, but if you have a guest suggestion, you’re always welcome to fill out our contact form on our website: www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.
