Carrie explores how OCD can interfere with your prayer life and offers effective strategies to manage it. She addresses the challenge of repetitive praying and offers practical advice for dealing with OCD’s demands.
Learn how to stay connected with God and maintain a meaningful spiritual practice despite these challenges.
Episode Highlights:
How OCD can mess with your prayer life and what to do about it.
How to use scripture in your prayers for more focus and clarity.
Why it’s crucial to resist the urge to repeat prayers due to OCD’s demands
Strategies to overcome obsessive praying.
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I share three strategies to help stop obsessive praying, a common struggle for many dealing with OCD. If you find yourself repeating prayers because they don’t feel sincere enough or confessing the same sins repeatedly throughout the day, this episode is for you.
First, I encourage you to try something new in your prayer life. It’s easy to fall into a rut, especially when OCD dictates that there’s only one “right” way to pray. I recommend exploring different prayer methods, like centering prayer or breath prayers, to break free from obsessive patterns. Remember, prayer is about connecting with God and aligning your will with His, not about achieving perfection.
Second, I suggest having a dedicated time for confession. By setting aside intentional moments once or twice a day for confession, you can avoid the cycle of confessing sins repeatedly throughout the day. Trust the Holy Spirit to guide you in this process.
Finally, I talk about resisting the urge to repeat prayers. OCD often convinces us that our prayers weren’t good enough the first time, leading us to repeat them. But God hears us the first time, even when our prayers aren’t perfect. It’s important to remember that OCD-driven anxiety and guilt are false alarms, and you don’t need to give in to them.
I also touch on the benefits of ICBT (Inference-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) in managing mental compulsions, which we’ll explore more in our upcoming Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. If OCD is impacting your prayer life, consider joining us for the challenge to learn practical tools for breaking free from these patterns.
Thank you for tuning in, and if you found this episode helpful, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Your support helps other Christians struggling with OCD discover the show. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower. wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.
We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.
I know some of you have been hearing about this for the last few weeks, but you are down to the wire on the last few days to sign up for the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. You can sign up at hopeforanxietyandocd. com/challenge. We are going to do some fun giveaways. We’ll give you some coffee gift cards. There’s going to be free coaching with Carrie given away. I’m so excited to be talking with you about ICBT and how that can really help. The way I explained this to someone the other day is if you’re dealing with a physical compulsion, like I’ve got to go check that doorknob lock, from me to my doorknob or my door lock, that might be five to ten seconds, depending on where I am, and I might have some time to think about not going back and checking that, but if you’re struggling with mental compulsions, your brain is always right there, and it’s an easy, quick go to.
ICBT will literally help you train your brain to think differently and to recognize these obsessions as an invalid argument. At the time of this recording, we’ve already got several people signed up, so please come join them: hopeforanxietyandocd.com /challenge.
Today I want to talk with you about three strategies to help stop obsessive praying. Some of you are going through and repeating prayers over and over again because the first time you pray it, something just doesn’t quite feel right, or maybe you’re repeating the prayer because you didn’t feel like you were sincere the first time. Maybe you’re finding that you’re confessing over and over again throughout the day.
We’re going to talk about each one of those things today. The first strategy I have for you is to try something new in your prayer life. This is just good advice for all of us as Christians. Get into a rut of speaking with God the same way all the time. And it’s not bad to follow certain prescriptive prayer methods.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Acts, which is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, kind of helping you process instead of just going to God and asking for something, using some of these others, making sure that you’re praising him and thanking him, confessing your sins, all of that. Those types of strategies are good.
If we’re going get out of a rut in our prayer life, be willing to try something new, and this is going to be uncomfortable especially if OCD is telling you, you have to pray this certain way, or no, you didn’t do it right, or it wasn’t good enough or sincere enough. I want to refer you to a couple of previous episodes that we’ve had on prayer. In episode 48, I talked with Rich Lewis on this practice of centering prayer, just really more of a meditative type of prayer, where you’re sitting in silence, you’re focusing in your mind just more on an image, maybe of Jesus, or the focus is more on spending time in God’s presence, allowing God to utilize that time to fill you and bring you at peace in his presence. This is very different than many of us pray. So, I encourage you that if you’ve never done that before, maybe try that. Maybe try sitting in silence and listening. Maybe just taking some time to slow down. There are many different ways to pray, so don’t allow OCD to get you stuck or pigeonholed into just one way of praying.
In episode 75, we talked with Jennifer Tucker about breath prayers. This is where you have certain words that you would say like on the inhale, and they’re based on scripture. For example, you could inhale, “The Lord is my shepherd, and exhale, I shall not want, or you could exhale. I have all that I need.” You can inhale, “The Lord is my refuge and strength.” Exhale, “an ever-present help in times of trouble.” With anything, this in itself could become compulsive as well. You just have to play around with some different things. If you are really sitting and trying this out, I know some people have obsessions about breathing, so that may throw you off. It’s just an opportunity or an invitation to calm your mind and your body while you’re breathing and also speaking out scriptures. Jennifer talked about how breath prayers really helped her get through a difficult time where a lot was happening with her daughter and she just didn’t have a lot of words at that point.
When you’re so overwhelmed or stressed, sometimes, less is more, and really focusing on what is the purpose of our prayer. The purpose of our prayer is to connect with God and to align our will with His. We’re not trying to make something dramatic happen. We’re not trying to change God’s mind or bend His hand.
We are just saying, “Okay, I am here.” I am intentionally focusing myself on connecting with the presence of God because God is the source of everything. That’s it. God has everything that I could ever need in this life, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I want to be abiding in the vine and receiving that nourishment.
That’s what our prayer time is about. It’s about connecting with God and surrendering. It’s not about me. It’s not about what I want today. It’s not about here’s my list of 50 things I want to happen. Yes, it’s totally fine to ask God for things. He wants us to come to him with our needs, with our joys, with our sorrows, with everything, but prayer is about at the end, God’s will be done. “These are the things that I’m laying before you, God, but ultimately I want you and I want your will and your desires to be above my desires.” As you pray and you align yourself with the will of God, then God gives you a heart for certain things that maybe you didn’t have a heart for before. All of a sudden, you start feeling passionate about certain areas or like, “Okay, I feel like God is leading me in this direction.” Maybe you feel like, “Oh, God is asking me to give something up so that I can focus on something else that’s more important. God’s giving me comfort that whatever situation is going to work out.” We can approach it different ways. It may be that you approach it as kind of like a checklist item. “Okay, this is one more thing. I know I really need to pray. It’s a spiritual discipline. I need to do it.”
Maybe you’re in a Christian tradition where you repeat certain prayers. I know in the Orthodox tradition, they have certain morning prayers or evening prayers. I know that in the Catholic tradition, they say certain prayers, and if that’s a part of your particular tradition, you still want those prayers to have meaning and significance and connect you back to God.
Another strategy you can try to shake up your prayer life a little bit if you’ve never done this before, is to pick specific scripture verses to pray. They may be scriptures from the Psalms, or they may be scriptures from the New Testament. So, for example, in James 1, 2, it says, “Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature, incomplete, lacking, and nothing. “That’s actually James 1, You could even turn this into a prayer regarding your OCD, so you could say, “Dear God, please give me joy in this trial of OCD. Develop my endurance so that I may be more mature, complete, and lacking in nothing.” Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 say, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own understanding.”
In all your ways know him and he will make your path straight. This is a familiar scripture. So if we were to pray that scripture, we would say something similar to, God, I want to trust you. I want to really trust you with all of my heart. Help me to know when I am relying on my own understanding instead of trusting you.
Allow me to know you at a deeper level so that I can follow your path. I know when I do that, that you promise to make my path straight. So there we have a New Testament and Old Testament example of praying the scriptures. Let’s face it, there are going to be times where you’re in a low point, you may feel really overwhelmed, you’re lost, and you just don’t even know what to pray or maybe your mind just feels so full, you may feel down, depressed, lonely, whatever it is. I can think of a couple of different times in my life where that definitely fit my circumstances. One was when I went through my divorce in 2015. That was a really low, depressing point for me. And another one was when I lost my parents, but I remember reading this, another verse in James.
One, where it talks about, the scripture basically says that every good and perfect gift comes from God. So when I realized that, it caused me to shift into this attitude of gratefulness and I just started thanking God for everything that I did have in my life because the loss felt so big. and so overwhelming that at the time was overshadowing the good things that were in my life.
So I intentionally focused my prayer life on gratefulness. Let me just make a very specific list of everything to God that I’m grateful for. I was driving in my car going down the road just saying, okay, God, thank you for this car. It’s old, but it runs well. It gives me where I need to go. I’m able to go to work and back.
I’m able to go to the store and get food. Yes, I’m so thankful I have food on my table. I’m thankful that I have a place to live where I feel safe and comfortable. Just things that we take for granted that not everybody has. If you start thanking God and being in a place of gratitude, that will absolutely shift your mood.
I don’t know how it could not. Gratitude is so good for your mind and emotions and obviously your spirit. Maybe you take some time in your prayer life to really sit and praise God for his character. Praising Him for His holiness, His righteousness, His faithfulness, enduring love, God is incredibly patient.
These are just a few of God’s attributes, but when you start to go through those and praising God, and thinking about his true character, that shifts our mindset to realize how big and how vast and how incredible God is. And if you realize, like, how big and vast and incredible God is, yet at the same time, So profound he wants to have a relationship with us.
This is absolutely mind-blowing when we break it down I know these are things we hear in church, but we don’t really sit and marinate them The God of the universe is holy set apart yet loves you and wants a relationship with you incredible When we realize how big God is, we realize how small our problems really are.
There is no problem that God can’t solve. God is in the business of doing God-sized things. that humans cannot explain or take credit for. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation in your life where you’re like, okay, how am I going to make it through this month? How am I going to pay this medical bill? How am I going to get to work? I got laid off. How am I going to get a job? And then somehow God just shows up because he’s that good. I did not mean to get into all this today, but somebody needed to hear that.
We’re talking about three strategies to help stop obsessive praying. So our first one, we only got through number one. Try something new. Two is have a dedicated time of the day for confession. This is a ditch that you really might be falling into because I see it time and time again. You’re going through your day, you feel really bad about something, you confess it, but then you’re starting to question, Did I sin? Did I not sin? What happened? And then you’re confessing again. Confessing for stuff you’ve already confessed that happened five years ago. It can really cause that obsessive cycle loop to be going on. Let’s not do that. Be intentional one to two times a day, okay? Maybe in the morning, maybe at night, if you’re not fully awake in the morning, do it at lunch, but a couple of times a day where you sit down and you say, okay, Lord, let me think through and be intentional about the things that I’m confessing. And here’s the deal, if you can’t remember it, or the Holy Spirit doesn’t prompt you to remember it, to confess it, wasn’t a sin, we’re not worrying about it, moving on.
We have to trust the conviction of the Holy Spirit as Christians. The Holy Spirit is not going to let you go way off track. The problem is if we start to ignore him. Most of you who are listening to this episode and are trying to be conscientious about confessing, I don’t imagine that you are stiff-arming the Holy Spirit.
I’ve had clients who have practiced this dedicated confession time and they have told me that it really cuts down on getting stuck in that confessional loop spiral where you’re feeling questioning sin and feeling like you’re having to confess all day long. And the third strategy is I know it’s going to be hard for some of you.
Resist that urge to repeat that prayer because here’s the story that OCD is going to spin you. It’s going to tell you that your prayer wasn’t sincere enough. Were you even thinking about what you were saying? You need to go back and do that again. Just to make sure. And then OCD might start attacking your character and your relationship with God and all this other extra.
You have to remember that OCD brings up these real intense feelings of anxiety that are going to lead you to believe, or it could be a feeling of guilt, or may just feel like something just doesn’t feel quite right. And in those moments, you can’t trust those feelings because they are a false alarm of your threat detection system.
So when OCD is encouraging you to repeat that prayer, you don’t need to. God heard it the first time. My daughter is only two years old, so she doesn’t have a full vocabulary, but she’s starting to speak more and more in sentences, which is really cool because When she was younger, you just had to guess at what she wanted or what she needed.
It’s kind of hit or miss, but the cool thing is I do want her to talk to me. I don’t always understand what she says. She blurs things together because she’s still learning. But I want to hear from her. I want her to speak to me. God wants to hear from his children, too. And quite frankly, we don’t always get it right.
Sometimes we ask for some dumb stuff. My daughter might ask me for cookies right before dinner. I’m gonna be like, no, you can’t have that. I look back at things that I thought I wanted. I’m glad God didn’t answer those prayers, okay? But he heard everyone and he cared about me enough as a good father to give me what I needed, not always what I wanted.
So if you’re having perfectionism issues with your prayer life, Know that it doesn’t have to be perfect. God wants to hear from you. Communicate with him. If you find OCD is really messing with your prayer life, please join us at the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. You only have a few more days to sign up.
It is on August the 5th at noon Central Time. We’re going to be talking about how ICBT can help with mental compulsions. I’m going to be teaching through the 12 modules of ICBT very soon and would love to see you there. I want to share with you one of our iTunes reviews. This is by Marnie. I cannot thank you enough for this podcast and how much it is truly helping me.
I’ve been listening to as many episodes as possible since I found it last week. I’m beginning a new counseling journey where I now feel so much hope to be vulnerable and heal from shame due to lifelong anxiety and OCD. I feel a sense of relief and grace, encouraged and so hopeful. I truly cannot tell you enough what listening to these episodes has done for me already.
I will be forever grateful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Marnie. I received two emails this week from individuals in Canada as well. So hello to our Canadian listeners. We’re so glad that you’re here. And until we get our new website built, don’t get me started. Breathe. Patience. We are still at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts App on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.
Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
Carrie interviews Jessica Ray about her experiences with OCD and faith. They discuss how OCD developed alongside Jessica’s newfound faith after childhood trauma.
Episode Highlights:
The challenges of navigating OCD within Christian community.
The importance of recognizing the difference between demonic oppression and mental illness.
Jessica’s journey of finding relief through diagnosis and treatment.
The supportive role of Christian community even at times they didn’t understand mental health struggles.
Specific things that helped her along her journey of healing.
Welcome to Episode 117 of Christian Faith and OCD. For the past three years, I’ve seen firsthand how sharing personal journeys can deeply resonate with our community. Many of us facing anxiety and OCD may feel isolated, but connecting through shared experiences and faith can be incredibly uplifting.
In this episode, I’m honored to speak with Jessica Rae, who opens up about her personal battle with OCD. Jessica’s story is remarkable as her symptoms began in her late teens, right after a profound conversion to Christianity. She describes how her OCD manifested through relentless obsessive thoughts and paralyzing panic attacks, particularly around her role in evangelism and her personal relationships.
Jessica’s path to healing has been both challenging and inspiring. Initially, she encountered some misconceptions about mental health within her church community, which complicated her journey. However, Jessica’s perseverance led her to seek professional help and receive an accurate OCD diagnosis. This pivotal step marked the beginning of her significant progress in managing her symptoms.
Jessica’s experience highlights the critical role of recognizing mental health issues and finding the right support. It also emphasizes the power of faith and community in the healing process.
One thing that I’ve learned over the course of three years doing these podcast episodes is that you guys love personal stories. You find them very relatable because so many people dealing with anxiety and OCD feel isolated They feel like I’m the only one that’s going through these things.
So it really helps you to hear from other Christians who are also struggling and how they’ve seen God in their redemptive story. They’re still in process of working through some things. You know, we’re all on a journey to become more like Christ and in pursuit of healing from him. Today on the show, I have with me Jessica Rae and Jessica had emailed me when I was looking for guests and just offered to share her story. If you would like to be a part of our email list, definitely go on www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. Hit up any of our downloads and then you can kind of be in the know and get random questions thrown at you sometimes.
Carrie: Jessica, I appreciate you responding to that and welcome to the show.
Jessica: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on.
Carrie: Tell me a little bit about how OCD showed up for you when you were younger.
Jessica: Whenever I was very tiny, under the age of two years old, I was a victim of sexual abuse. And I can remember having anxiety attacks, probably starting around four or five years old.
I also had an issue with food at a super young age. As a whole, I wouldn’t say that anyone ever recognized that I was an anxious child, but I definitely remember having things pop up like anxiety attacks if I was away from my parents or in a place that I wasn’t comfortable in. Anxiety really didn’t pop up for me until I was around 19 years old.
So my story’s probably a little bit different from other people. I didn’t really have any OCD type symptoms manifest until a little bit later on, until around 19, 20 years old.
Carrie: Okay. Do you feel like the people in your life just kind of saw some of these maybe as Age appropriate behaviors, like it’s somewhat normal for children to go through separation anxiety, and maybe they didn’t realize internally how much that was affecting you or how troubling that was for you?
Jessica: I would say so. I can remember having a very black and white bend in my thinking. And a shame oriented type thinking, especially if it had to do with getting in trouble or rules, or if I’d done something wrong, I could only hold it for so long and I had to go and confess it. I can remember going to church off and on as a kid and somehow I only heard hell.
I didn’t hear the gospel. My brain focused in on the idea of hell and I just thought I was going there. I can recognize internally that I had some issues. Very black and white thinking and some shame based thinking, but outwardly, I would say I appear pretty, if you want to call it, normal. Right. So it would make sense that my parents didn’t think to take me to a professional or anything like that.
Carrie: Yeah. What showed up when you were 19? What happened there?
Jessica: 19 is when I was born again. 19 is whenever I began my relationship with Jesus. I had a very, very radical conversion for lack of a better way to put it. Things changed for me overnight. God really just changed my heart and I was truly born again.
I was all in 100 percent and that is when the obsessive thinking, the panic, the anxiety started to manifest. I would say the first, after two or three months in going to church regularly. Being in the scriptures, starting to be discipled, I started to have some behaviors and some ways of thinking, looking back on it, that I’m like, there’s OCD.
Some examples that I could share would be, a few months in, I had a thought that I needed to end a relationship that, a friendship that I’d had from childhood. And this person wasn’t a believer, but she wasn’t bringing any sort of that influence into my life. And I just had this thought that I needed to end this friendship.
Even after talking to my youth pastor and them encouraging me not to do that, the anxiety, the obsessive thinking that what if that was God’s voice and I’m being disobedient, that sort of thing. Just was so intense that I ended the friendship. That was kind of the beginning of it. After that OCD latched on to evangelism.
I was a baby, baby Christian. I’m introverted by nature. I’m not somebody that just walks up to strangers and let me tell you about Jesus. It usually happens in a relational form for me, but it seemed that anytime I would hear a teaching. And it seemed that I was deficient and are not doing things that I should be doing, quote unquote, not doing things the right way my brain would latch on to it.
So very early on, I had an evangelism obsession. The anxiety of walking up to a stranger probably outweighed the anxiety of OCD in most points, but I remember going and knocking on doors at my grandma’s apartment complex in absolute torment. Praying for people having a pure heart wanting to honor God, but just not knowing what was going on And having thoughts and every thought that I have, I think it might be God.
I was in quite a bit of torment the first year of my walk with God because of undiagnosed OCD.
Carrie: Wow. The people that were discipling you, did they pick up like something just doesn’t seem quite right here? Like, were you asking for a lot of reassurance or, but maybe they couldn’t put their finger on it of what was going on?
Jessica: Yes. About three or four months in, the evangelism compulsions hit. I was living in Northeast Texas, which is not where I’m from. I’m from Houston area. And I started going to this church. I went to church by myself. My dad would drop me off and I would just go because nobody in my family was really following the Lord.
On my journey, God’s really put people in my life really to protect me. People that were very kind, but were also very patient and would kind of deal with the reassurance that I needed. I had a pastor that I would call at seven o’clock in the morning. He was so kind and patient, but yes, I had the wife of my associate pastor and then the pastor of the church that I was going to, my best friend, I would call her at three o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, I was just absolutely tormented and they would try to direct me and give me reassurance.
You have to be led by the Holy Spirit. All these things, I was so new in the faith and I’m dealing with this anxiety disorder and. It was like dropping a quarter into a bottomless pit. It just, it would come back. I don’t think anyone around me knew what OCD was. I don’t think anyone around me even thought, Oh, this is a mental illness, which kind of tells you the lack of awareness that we have in the church.
Definitely, I think maybe what was going on with me at first was branded as like legalism. I come from more of a charismatic background and so maybe more of like thinking it was demonic oppression or things like that. No one really even thought, Oh, this could be something that maybe she needs a doctor. That conversation never happened.
Carrie: I really wish that we could put out more educational materials to the church to let them know some of these warning signs of scrupulosity. So that if they have someone who seems quite distressed and is coming and asking a lot of questions, instead of saying like, okay, this person is really trying to figure everything out, or they’re dedicated to their faith, or, and like, it could look a lot of different ways.
That they really have some information to point that person in the right direction to say, Hey, this is potentially what it’s called. Go to a mental health professional and see if you can get assessed and get some help so that you’re not living in such a high state of distress. I wonder if when you got saved and then there was all this psychological torment, was there a part of you that sensed there’s some kind of peace in here?
I know God’s with me. Like even in the midst of all of that that was going on because you kept following Christ, like you didn’t give up on your faith.
Jessica: I think that I had such, for lack of a better way of putting it, I had such a supernatural experience. My conversion experience was very much, I knew nothing about Jesus and I just came to God in absolute surrender and I was changed.
Literally overnight, I fell in love with Jesus. But in a sense, I fell in love with the God that I didn’t really know yet. I know I was absolutely convinced that Jesus was it for me. I didn’t want anything else. But honestly, the first couple years, I didn’t have that peace. It was several years down the line of the Lord really intervening in these places where I was super tormented.
There are some pretty wonderful stories that I have in ways that God just supernaturally would just drop things in my life to be like, hey, this isn’t who I am. This isn’t me. But it was rough. It was rough for quite a while. That’s that piece, that anchor didn’t come until a little while down the road.
Carrie: It seemed like you held on to your salvation experience though. I find that even in the midst of like all of the OCD distress, usually, people can name a time or two out of their life where they really saw, whether it was their conversion experience or whether it was experiences after that as well, like, okay, I know that God is real and I have encountered him in this experience in a positive way.
It’s almost like the Israelites when they picked up stones from the river, it’s like kind of remember that you crossed the Jordan and you each get a stone so that you can remember that God did this miracle for you. And I feel like we need those markers in our own lives as Christians. To say, hey, things are really rough right now, and I don’t have stable footing, but I know God did this back here, and so I know that he’s going to be able to do, lead me through the next part of life that feels scary or uncertain or troubling.
Jessica: Yes. I would say at the beginning stages of my walk with God, he really showed up for me through people. I had wonderful people around me who loved me really well, and who were very patient. It’s kind of mind-boggling the way that looking back, I can see how God protected me. It was almost like I was in this little bubble, but he did it through people.
That was one way that I definitely look back and go, “wow.” There are a few other just short moments that I could share. One, I was in Northeast Texas and my best friend was around Houston area where we lived and she knew what was going on with me, what I was experiencing because I was calling her at three o’clock in the morning, which she was really in it with me, which I’m so grateful for her.
We’re still best friends. She was driving home from work, and she said the only way she could describe it is she felt internally like God yelled at her. Hell, Jessica, this. And what she felt was, stop trying to answer all of your questions. Give me all of your questions. Look at what this does to you. Look at the fruit of this.
If it tears you up, it’s not for me. When she told me that that was like, okay, I held on to that for about like 10 years. I held on to those concepts. And so anytime I would have these looping thoughts or I would have this. Anxiety that I felt like I couldn’t manage. I would literally just be like, God, I have no idea.
I don’t have the answer to this. I would just say, you have it. He just carried me that way. I live pretty normally for about 10 years. Okay. Using those few things, and of course, if you look at scripture, scripture backs that those concepts up. And the way that you traditionally treat OCD, in a sense, kind of lines up with, you know, surrendering things to God, the Ian Osborne, Catholic Christianity Cure OCD, I think he calls it something along the lines of, I can’t think of the word, but the whole concept is just surrendering these.
Formenting thoughts and doubts up to God and letting him be big enough to carry them. So I was really applying these principles before I knew I had OCD, which is a testament to the faithfulness of God. That’s one thing. One other story that’s really close to my heart is I was cleaning a room one day in my mom’s house.
This was about five or six years into my walk with God. I’m still wrestling with these tormenting doubts about certain theological issues and there’s a Bible on the floor and the room was a wreck and I was cleaning it and I opened up the Bible and it opened up to a scripture that God had highlighted to me and Isaiah about a year before.
He’s speaking to the Israelites. And he says, “Oppression will be far from you for you shall not fear.” And it’s all these promises of God establishing them in righteousness and them being free from fear. And he had used that scripture before to show me like, your life is not going to be what you’re experiencing right now.
This is not going to be your life. And that day when I was just in the muck and the mire of anxiety and obsessive thoughts. And we all have those moments when we’re dealing with that kind of anxiety, where we think we’re not going to make it. And when I opened up the Bible and it was right there to that passage, I was like, okay, I mean, how could that not be God?
I’ve had a lot of those stories on my journey, but that’s one that I can really highlight is that was just maybe a small but a supernatural act of God to keep me going really.
Carrie: You talked about having a period where OCD didn’t bother you. It bothered you really intensely and then you were able to surrender some of those doubts and having to figure it out to God and you kind of had a more peaceful period there and then things came back and that happens with OCD sometimes.
The symptoms kind of wax and wane. It depends on life change and stress and other issues. Tell us about when that came back. What happened? Was that closer to you getting a diagnosis?
Jessica: Yes. I had had some pockets off and on in my twenties where I would have those looping thoughts and that anxiety. But every time that that would happen, I would eventually just say, you know what?
The way that I was taught was it was just demonic oppression. And so I’d be like, Oh, this is the spirit of fear. And I’m going to choose not to listen to this. And then I would come back up for air and kind of go on about my way. When I was 30, I got into my first serious relationship as a Christian adult.
That’s when OCD was triggered, and really, that’s when everything came to a head. So one of the major themes that I wrestled with is relationship OCD. Relationship OCD and scrupulosity have been the two, a little bit of body image issues, body dysmorphic disorder type issues, but those are the two main themes that I’ve struggled with so I got into this relationship.
It was not a bad relationship. It was not abusive We were both believers. It was good. It wasn’t we were young and whatever but I began to obsess over Every little thing everything he did everything. He said I was terrified that I had to break up with him I was terrified that he was crazy, that there was just something horribly wrong with him, with his character.
At that time, I was living in a house with some ladies from the church I went to. The woman who owned the house, she was like a mom to me. There was a good two month period where I was in just an absolute panic and torment constantly, almost every single day, and it got to the point where I was sleeping in bed with her because I didn’t want to be alone.
I wasn’t eating very much. I wasn’t sleeping very much. I probably lost 20 pounds. Kind of one of the parts, I think, that kept me from getting help a little bit sooner was that the church culture that I was involved in at the time really believed that any sort of mental illness was demonic. Not that the person was doing anything wrong, but that this was demonic oppression or however you want to say that.
There was no awareness of, hey, mental illnesses are actually demonic. Medical and biological. This could actually be something that needs medication or a doctor. There was no grid for that. I started having panic attacks multiple times a day at work because I’m single, never been married. I didn’t have a lot to fall back on financially.
I had to get up every day and go to work. There’s no option there. So I’m having panic attacks. I started having really horrifying, intrusive thoughts. The worst thoughts that you could imagine. Blasphemous, violent, those kinds of things. That was really the breaking point where I thought that my life was over.
I literally thought that my life was over. I don’t know how, I didn’t know what I thought was going to happen to me, but I just thought one night after getting one hour of sleep, I called my pastor. Everybody loved me really well through this, even though they weren’t, but they still love me very well. I called my pastor.
I had gotten one hour of sleep and he just said, sweetie, I think it’s time for you to go to the doctor. I had been involved in a ministry that referred me to this psychiatry practice in my area that was Christian, that they kind of worked in tandem with. I called, I set up an appointment. On my way to work, I dragged myself out of bed and went to work, and on my way to work, a friend sent me an article on harm OCD.
She had been kind of Googling, praise the Lord for Google sometimes, unless you’re using it for a compulsion. Yeah. She googled my symptoms and she found an article on Harm OCD. And I got to work and I read it and I was like, Oh my gosh, not just the thoughts, but the OCD cycle, the obsessions, the looping thoughts, the reassurance and the anxiety coming back.
I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what’s happening to me.” I have this article in hand, and I show up to the psychiatry practice that I still go to, and met my psychiatrist for the first time, such a wonderful man, I’m just so thankful for him, and he confirmed this is textbook OCD, and so I got the diagnosis.
Carrie: Where you more shocked or relieved, or how did you feel at that point?
Jessica: I was relieved to know what was happening to me.
Carrie: To have an answer finally.
Jessica: Yes. I’m very much a solution-focused person, and so I’m like, okay, this is what’s happening. All right, give me the tools. What do I do? I texted my pastor and said, “Okay, this is what’s going on.”
He was really supportive, and I just started devouring anything and everything I could surrounding OCD and how to treat it. I remember that night coming home after being diagnosed and finally sleeping, finally having a good night’s sleep. That’s where my recovery journey started was right then.
Carrie: It’s hard to have mental health issues, but I find it more terrifying to think Evil is constantly oppressing me on a daily basis.
Jessica: Yes, and having an anxiety disorder, and having this thought in your head that this is a demon, well, I mean that, in and of itself, that just runs them up internally. I remember being afraid that my sanity was going to be stolen from me because panic attacks, a genuine panic attack is from what I understand is your fight or flight response, just going crazy.
You feel like you’re going to die. You feel like you’re going to go crazy. I was experiencing derealization. I felt like I was coming out of my skin, like it was horrifying. And so to not know my body’s doing this. I’m not being taken over by some demonic entity and having a panic attack to not know that in that moment. That’s even more terrifying, I would say.
Carrie: How did your theology, I guess, shift after that point? Or did you end up like switching churches or changing things at some point? Like, what was that process like? Because I think that we have different experiences and not that your experience is the litmus test of God. That’s the scriptures, but God works in our lives through experience, sometimes to teach us about him. I do believe that’s biblical. So what was that process like?
Jessica: All of the above. I do go to a different church now. The house that I was living in, the woman who owned it, wonderful, godly woman, loved me so well, was so patient with me.
I guess my church community didn’t have, like I said, a grid for mental illness. I guess. I’m a truth person, I’m a justice person, and if I know something to be true, then I’m not going to say that something else is going on. I’m a very open book. I jumped into recovery headfirst and embraced that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
This is a thing. I started to learn, well, naturally, if somebody asked me how I’m doing, or if I’m having a conversation, I’m going to share. I just got this diagnosis, or whatever. I stayed at my church for a couple years, but these things that I had learned just started not to line up anymore, and the more I understood mental illness, not just OCD, but schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a brain disease. I just started to realize these things that I’ve been taught, they don’t work, they’re not helpful, they’re not necessarily 100 percent scriptural, and I felt such a peace on the inside of me from God. I just started. That hey, this is what’s going on. This is your avenue of healing.
This is where I’m leading you Is to understand these things I slowly but surely just really started to feel like I couldn’t fully be myself anymore in this beautiful church family that I had been in because there was this part of me that was seen as, well, I experienced it to be seen as she’s oppressed demonically.
Carrie: The primary problem is spiritual, not the problem is medical, mental health, emotional And so many of those things overlap, right?
So it’s hard for us to sit here and tease out and determine sometimes, what’s medical? What’s mental health? What’s spiritual? What’s going on? I personally do not believe that we need to be afraid of demons because we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.
There may be times where we are tempted and thrown off track or discouragement comes our way. And we know certain things are clearly not from God. So those pieces are hard to tease out, but I think it removes kind of like what we were talking about before. It removes some of the fear if you’re able to say, “Hey, I know at least that I do have this medical mental health diagnosis, and I don’t need to be afraid of that, I can actually, like you said, embrace it as, okay, this is what I’m dealing with now that I know, now that I can do something different about it. What is that recovery process been for you like, and just kind of share with us where you are now.
Jessica: Like I said, I began to really just devour any and all resources that I could get my hands on.
I found a book by a local pastor named Jeff Wells. It’s called breaking free of OCD and it’s about his 30-year-long battle with OCD and how knowing God as a father and applying scriptural principles and he had a lot of recovery. I read that book and I found Jamie Eckert. She has scrupulosity.com. She has a coaching group. I joined that. I really started to get some tools in my tool belt and really apply the standard OCD tools, like how we treat it with acceptance and commitment therapy, some ERP exposure-response and prevention tools, Jamie Eckert, her materials helped me probably more than any of them.
Things like, I’m going to put this on ice for two days or for a week. I’m having this obsessive thought, you know what? Put it on ice. It’s going to be okay. You know, that kind of thing. So I would just say workbooks, online resources. I do have therapists, but I never sought classical OCD treatment. There are so many resources that are free.
I’m an advocate for therapy, 100%. If you have that, and if you can afford it, and if it’s accessible, 100 percent go for it, but there’s just a lot of online resources. I refuse to be debilitated, and there’s so much hope in the OCD recovery community. No OCD doesn’t get to run your life.
I just really started applying tools. I got to a good place. I was diagnosed in June of 2020. It took me probably about nine months to a year to get it back to like, I would say more normal everyday living. In 2022, I had this reemergence of evangelism, compulsions, and scrupulosity that took me out for a couple of months. During that time, I had been feeling the Lord. He just orchestrated some circumstances that kind of booted me out of my church. I started going to a local church, and Jeff Wells is the pastor of that local church, that book that I referenced before.
So he understood OCD. It’s called Woods Edge Community Church. They offer a recovery group called Regeneration, or for short, Regen. In that place of crisis, I started attending that church, and that first week after I had left my church, I went to a Regen meeting, I signed up, I was like, I need something, I need help.
I don’t even know fully what I’m doing, but I need help. It’s a 12-step program. It’s very biblically based and the basis of it is we are powerless to overcome these things in our own strength with the power of the Holy Spirit. God can transform anything that we might be going through. And so the recovery group was different from other 12 step programs.
It wasn’t just about addiction. It could be codependency, mental illness. I went through the program, and God really confronted unbelief in my life. I had this lie that I lived in for all of these years that I’ve been walking with Jesus that He expected me to fix. My own issues that he expected me to solve my own problems.
I finally got to probably the end of myself realizing I cannot fix this. There are parts of me that just feel utterly broken. There are parts of me that feel disabled, the way that my brain works. When you have OCD, your brain tends to be so black and white that you genuinely at times, at least for me, still can’t discern certain things.
This foundation, the first three steps are admit, believe, and trust. Admit that you’re powerless. Believe that God is all powerful and can change and transform anything that you’re going through and trust that he actually wants to and that he will and that the believe and trust. I was like, “Oh, man, I don’t trust God at all.”
It pushed me into the scripture in a way that nothing else ever had. And if you really look at scripture, there is this ongoing theme of as humans, one, we can’t fix ourselves apart from me. You can do nothing. We don’t have the power to overcome these things. God doesn’t expect us to, and his willingness to help come alongside and heal those that simply look to him and trust.
I mean, it’s everywhere in the scripture. I just came to this point of, are you going to believe what this book says about me? Are you going to believe your circumstances? Your circumstances look really dire to you. They look really big and really hopeless, but is that what my book says? He really started to heal this view that I had of him.
Slowly but surely, I’ve come to a place of, John 15, 4 through 5 is one of my favorite scriptures and it says, “Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” And it goes on to say, for apart from me you can do nothing.
God has really just brought me to this place of rest. Where the situation comes in my life. I don’t have an answer for I go to him and I invite him into the situation and I’ve seen him just do amazing and just mind blowing things with these situations that I just give over to him and I simply make space. I make space for the Holy Spirit to do his work.
Carrie: That trust piece is, it’s so hard and it’s so huge. I know it’s something that God has really worked with me on in my own life. In our culture, there’s so much striving and so much working and so much self-improvement. Even, you know, we’re kind of self improvement junkies.
Sometimes, like you said, what God wants us to do is like, be still and know that he’s God, and take the step back and say, okay, I surrender, I give up trying to do it on my own, and I need you to enter in. But sometimes God has to get us to the end of ourselves. He’s like, okay, you’re ready now. You’re ready now for me to step in and to do that work because you came to the end of you.
Our pastor shared this quote recently by Jackie Hill Perry about trust. And it said this is because God is holy. He cannot sin, and if he cannot sin, that means he must be the most trustworthy being on the planet. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around that because we’ve been so hurt and wounded by other people in our life, just from living life.
It doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, you’ve been hurt and wounded by somebody or something that’s happened to you. Just recognizing that character of God is so different that we can trust him, we can rest, we can let go. But sometimes it means that we have to do the hard work of surrendering and letting go and trusting and embracing that God is here and is with us in the midst of this.
Jessica: Yes, I realized along this journey that I couldn’t actually surrender. I couldn’t even surrender in my own strength because you have these faulty beliefs. It could be because of trauma, like with me experiencing sexual abuse, especially being so young. I was under two. I mean, that shaped your worldview like nothing else does.
And I realized I genuinely don’t know how to trust you. I don’t know how to let this go. And he’s so beautiful and so kind. He gave me the power and the strength that I needed to even do that. That’s why I love to encourage and try and share this hope that you can do any of it on your own. And that’s actually wonderful.
We don’t have to, he doesn’t expect this to you. The other day I was reading, I can’t remember what book in the scripture it is. You hear about the Holy Spirit being our advocate. Well, the scripture also references Jesus as being an advocate as well. And I looked up the definition of an advocate, and one of the definitions was one who comes alongside.
That’s good. That just, it just gave me so much more hope, and it was so much more confirmation that I don’t have to do this life by myself. Paul said that I will boast all the more in my weaknesses, my sufferings, when I’m weak, He’s strong. His power has made perfect in weakness. I don’t wish mental illness on anybody or physical illness or any suffering.
I do believe, though, that when we come face to face with our weakness as humans, it’s beautiful because that’s when we really experience God in a sweeter, in a deeper way. I believe at least. That’s been my experience.
Carrie: Awesome. Thank you, Jessica, for being so willing and open to sharing your story, and I’m glad that you have gotten a variety of different support along the way, whether it was people just loving you, even when they didn’t understand everything, to getting more specific help medically and discipleship help through the church.
It sounds like God has really used a variety of different things in your life to bring you. to where God wants you to be. So thank you for being here and sharing all of that.
Jessica: Yes, thank you for having me.
Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.
Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.
Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Join Carrie as she dives into an interesting conversation with Ann Taylor McNiece, LMFT on Incognito Christian Counselors and the integration of faith into mental health counseling
Episode Highlights:
Why some counselors are hesitant to publicly identify as Christians.
How Christian counselors can provide evidence-based therapy while integrating faith and scripture.
Challenges of finding specialized treatment for conditions like OCD and navigating treatment outside of one’s faith.
Importance of asking questions and advocating for oneself in therapy.
Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 93! I’m Carrie Bock, your host, and I’m so glad you’re here with us today.
Today’s episode features a special guest: Ann Taylor McNiece, a licensed marriage and family therapist and the host of the Soul Grit podcast. Ann and I dive deep into the topic of integrating faith with mental health counseling, something we’re both passionate about.
Ann shares her journey of blending theology and psychology, drawing from her own experiences with depression and her early aspirations to combine faith with counseling. We tackle the challenges some therapists face when incorporating their faith into their practice, including the constraints of legal and ethical guidelines.
We discuss why some counselors may be reluctant to publicly identify as Christian and the fear of potentially alienating clients. We also explore how combining Christian principles with evidence-based therapies can be incredibly beneficial for those struggling with OCD and other mental health issues.
For more insights from Ann, be sure to check out her podcast, Soul Grit, and visit her website at soulgritresources.com. There, you’ll find her free e-course on Cognitive Behavior Therapy with Scripture and other valuable resources.
Thank you for tuning in! I hope this episode inspires and supports you as you integrate your faith with your mental health journey.
Welcome to Christian Faitn and OCD, Episode 93. I am your host, Carrie Bock, and I’m so glad that you are joining us today to listen to this show
Today on the show we have Ann Taylor McNiece, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist and podcast host of Soul Grit. I am happy to have her here to talk with us about the integration of faith and Counseling.
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Carrie: Welcome to the show. I think that we share a similar passion in regards to integration of faith into mental health counseling, and we both went to seminary, different seminaries, but how did this become a passion of yours?
Ann: I can actually remember the early years of college just kind of dreaming about this marriage of theology and psychology, and I was just starting to learn more about it. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but I had just recently started to struggle with depression and had my first experience of counseling in my senior year of high school. And just from there, I started having this dream in my heart that more people need to be aware that these two things fit together. God created our minds and God created helpers that understand the mind and wanna help people and just reach their fullness of life to get away from things like anxiety, depression, and other common health problems that we see.
Carrie: This is so prevalent in the church. There’s so many people who are struggling with common mental health issues, anxiety, depression, even things in the church, people who are struggling with ADHD or autism. There’s so much that’s going on that a lot of times we don’t talk about it enough, and so I’m glad that we’re able to talk about it.
Our faith can be fully integrated. I like to say we can have all of Jesus and all of really good psychological teachings because everything points us back to God.
Ann: If it’s something good and true and it works and it’s healthy, and that’s coming from God. Humans didn’t create that stuff.
Carrie: Absolutely, and I think there’s so much more that obviously that God knows than we do about these things because he created our brain and our mind and knows all the intricacies of how everything works. Why do you think some counselors are hesitant to publicly say that they’re a Christian?
Ann: I think it depends if you really are a Christ follower because being a Christian can mean a lot of things. You’re in a different area of the country than I am in Southern California. It might mean something different than it means in the Bible Belt or the South, just to say you’re Christian.
It’s not a very good descriptor of what the person’s actually bringing to the table for one thing. And then the other part is that some therapists are unsure about what are the actual legal and ethical guidelines for bringing your faith into the counseling room. So some people might think, “Oh, I went to grad school. I learned how to be a counselor. I got my license. And I’m never supposed to talk about religion or spirituality or Jesus ever again in my professional context,” and I think sometimes we might get that even from public school kinds of mentalities or separation of church and state. The thing is, there’s nothing about State in my private practice of counseling.
I don’t really have those same guidelines, like a teacher or a politician might have to try to keep those things separate. But I think it comes from people not knowing what are the guidelines and how much can I share with all concerned that will it be ethical for me to share. Will this client feel like I’m proselytizing or trying to evangelize them instead of attending with empathy to their concerns that they’re bringing into the counseling room.
There’s another fear that counselors have just if I put out on my website that I’m a Christian counselor or if I have like a little Jesus cross or a fish or something on my business card to identify me as a counselor or maybe like a scripture reference or something like, Christians are going to know that I’m for them, but am I going to alienate all the other people? Then it comes from this mindset of if I don’t advertise or market myself to everybody. I’m not going to be able to fill my practice and then I’m gonna suffer a financial loss because I won’t have enough clients.
Carrie: I think that’s a huge one. Just in terms of how I was trained. Like if you were trained with really great faith integration, but then you’re also trained as a professional to see everyone regardless of what their needs are. You have to put aside what your belief system is in terms of working with the client from their belief system.
For a long time, I think I fell into what I’m titling this episode, the Incognito Christian counselor standpoint. I wasn’t open about my faith, and it’s actually this podcast that has helped me more than anything step into true authenticity of who I am in my marketing as a therapist, because I thought, well, I never really saw myself as a Christian counselor because sometimes when I think of that, I think of some person that’s opening up a Bible and is, Hey, let’s talk about this scripture and how it applies to your life and your situation.
There certainly are opportunities that I may bring certain things up or ask clients, are you familiar with this Bible story? Or that type of thing. Based off of what they’re saying. But it’s not as, I think formal, maybe as I viewed it. When I came out with this podcast, I thought, this makes no sense. I have a very Christian name if you understand the Bible because my name is By The Well Counseling. People who are familiar with the John 4 story are like, “Oh, well okay. She gets it. She has a Bible.” I did have that and then I would say a little something about that on my website. I might check that I was Christian on Psychology today, and I might have a verse at the bottom. But I didn’t really go into like, Hey, my faith is a big passion of mine and I really believe that we can integrate really well.
I think it’s definitely been a big shift in my practice over the last couple of years as to having more Christian clients or clients seek me out because I am a Christian, especially since having the podcast for the last two years. I do think that some people in the community, even other therapists, probably think, oh, well, we’re not going send certain clients to her if they’re not Christian. I have to say, that’s okay how they’re going to view me and I really can’t control that. I think we spend so much time trying to control how other people see us in all contexts, not just in a professional context.
Ann: I think that the clients I want to see are the ones that are going to want to see me. It’s not so much like you said, bringing out your Bible and telling them what verses are going to apply to their situation, or let’s just sit down and pray about it. All of those things are good things to do.
Those kinds of interventions might find themselves more in a pastoral or biblical counseling setting or where licensed therapists, who, we have a state licensure that’s vetted us. We have done our 3000 hours, we’ve done all the things that we need to be clinical providers, we are going to bring all of that. But what’s gonna underlie all of this as our foundation is a shared value and a shared hope. When it comes down to, I’m doing cognitive behavioral therapy with somebody and they can’t get to that part where they need to create an alternative thought. I’m gonna say, okay, well if you can’t get to it, let’s ask God, what would God say about this? And we’ll find a scripture to that matches what they need to do. And it’s not because I am, well just read the Bible and that’s cover everything that you’re going through. That informs everything that I do as a professional counselor.
Carrie: Another reason I wanted to have this episode too is I think especially for our folks who are struggling with OCD, they have a hard time finding someone who has that training in OCD evidence-based therapies and treatments, while also having the value systems of Christianity. Part of that is because a lot of the OC D treatment has to do with behaviorism, and that’s not that it’s directly in conflict with Christianity. I think it’s just a little bit different way of looking at the world and we see people as more than just higher evolved animals, is a way to say it, but which is a lot of behaviorism is based on those kind of ideas.
I’m curious, for you as a Christian, do you feel like you would ever see a counselor who wasn’t a Christian? Maybe if you had a certain diagnosis that you needed treating or as you were seeking out a certain type of therapy, and how would you navigate that if you would?
Ann: Well, I certainly want to leave room for. Some of us need really specialized treatment and some of us lived in parts of the country where it’s harder to find providers. Like I said, I’m in Southern California, probably an hour’s drive. I can find a specialist in whatever I wanna be specialized in. Right? But if you live in a different part of the country, especially if you’re seeking in-person therapy versus on a screen like we all did for the pandemic.
Sometimes you want a person that you can be present in the room with and you need them to have a specialization is going to help you break through something and that person may or may not be a believer. There are gonna be times when that is necessary, but for me personally, what I struggle with is depression.
That’s a general thing. Sometimes just figuring out next steps in life, or I might go to marriage counseling or something like those things that I’m dealing with, I’m going to want to have Christian counselor because I know there are people who have faith in God who have similar values and similar understanding worldview that have the training that I need to get through the things that I’m dealing with. I think you have to allow room for both when you can see a Christian counselor and when there’s something that just needs specialists, go ahead and do that, and you just make the best of it.
Carrie: It’s okay to ask questions. It’s okay to ask your therapist what their value system is. They may or may not want to answer that for you, just kind of depending on how they work, but it’s fully within your right to ask where someone is coming from or what type of treatment methods they use.
Know that you’re in an empowered place regardless of where you find yourself in treatment. I’m thinking that we may have a friends that listen to the show that have had to go to an in-patient treatment, or they’ve had to go to an IOP treatment, and it’s not something that’s covered by their insurance.
It’s probably not going to be a Christian-run facility most likely talking to the counselors about what your values are, these are things that are very important to me and I wanna make sure that we’re utilizing them in counseling in a healthy way, and I wanna make sure that you kind of understand where I’m coming from and what’s important to me. And ethically, whether your counselor is a Christian or not, they have to respect that.
Ann: Exactly. What I really think that God is faithful in this area, that when you’re in a really bad place with your mental health condition, and you need to have some of these higher level of arrangement is made for you like he’s gonna be faithful.
Just be surprised that there’s going to be another patient there, or there’s going to be a nurse, or a therapist or a behavioral tech or something like that. You’re not going to know at first, but then you’re going to find out that person also loves God. And then God’s going to put those pieces together for you so that you can have an experience of getting the healing that you need with that kind of high level of specialty. He is also going be right there saying, “I see you. I know what you need.” As you move down from the higher level of care back into just regular weekly therapy with your therapist, like maybe that might be an opportunity to say, okay, I learned all these kind of technical skills in my IOP or whatever it might be, but now can you help me figure out how I integrate those things that I learned with what I know to be true in the Bible and what God’s doing in my life. And that’s a really good launching point for the next phase.
Carrie: Absolutely. I really like how you worded that. I do think that God is always with us in walking us through situations and just giving us those little glimpses of like, “Hey, I’m here for you. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be able to make it through. This is one of the reasons that you started your podcast because of your own mental health struggles.
Ann: I think I got into counseling because of my own mental health struggles. But I started the podcast because I saw this need in my community. And yes, it’s Southern California, but my particular community is a little bit smaller and so I was looking for people that I could refer patients to when they were requesting a Christian counselor and I was either full or didn’t take their insurance or whatever, and I would reach out to people and a couple of times I got emails back that would say something like, yes, I’m personally a Christian, but I don’t offer Christian counseling. Why not? That just didn’t make sense to me.
I had to go back and think through all of those reasons why a person who had no faith in Jesus wouldn’t want to bring that into their professional setting. Carrie, you and I both had a seminary background. We had classes that specifically taught us, okay, you’ve had bible and theology. You’ve had clinical classes, here’s how you put them together, and here’s how you bring that into your career, into the room with your clients, but a lot of people who were trained either in a secular university or some other kind of program didn’t have that advantage. Maybe they just don’t know how to do it and don’t have the confidence to do that. I started creating resources that would help them learn how to integrate their personal faith into the practice that they already know how to do.
They’ve already licensed counselors or pre-licensed, and they want to be able to do good work clinically, but then there’s this whole part of themselves that they are leaving out. You just said when you started the podcast, you became more authentic in your work because now you’re bringing in this part of you. I wrote an e-course that was my 2020 pandemic project over the summer.
Carrie: We all had one.
Ann: Yes, I put out the E-course and then I thought, you know what? People need an easy on-ramp to find out just to get their toes in the water with this idea about integration. My podcast is for people who do this kind of work like you and I do, but also for people who are just interested in mental health and they want to know, “Is this okay that I’m a Christian and I want to do this therapy thing?”
I’ve done different special episodes on things like brain spotting or transcranial magnetic stimulation or different things where I want to get a Christian perspective on all those clinical things that are out there so I can understand more. I can get the help I need and I can pass on this information to other people that I see in my world or in my church that are needing the help as well.
Carrie: That’s awesome. I think there’s a really, a lack of conversation surrounding these things, which is one of the reasons that I started my podcast too. I had a blog for like a hot second and I realized writing’s a lot of work.
Ann: Yes, same .
Carrie: It’s easier for me to talk, so I decided, maybe podcasting route because it was a lot of work to try to get all these blog posts up there, and then I was like, is anybody rating this thing? But I think this is great. I’ve really definitely looked for a lot of resources and people who are bringing to the table really solid clinical skills and good Christian counseling.
I hope that people will check out your podcast, Soul Grit, and you’ve had a wide variety of episodes on there, different topics. It’s awesome.
Ann: Yes, Carrie’s going to be on the podcast too.
Carrie: Woohoo! Towards the end of every episode, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time of hope that you have from God or another person.
Ann: God has done a lot of amazing things like actual miracles in our family story. I’ll just share where I am right now. I actually had a stroke two months ago and that was very unexpected cuz I’m only 40. I exercise most days. I eat healthy. I don’t have diabetes. I don’t smoke or drink.
I don’t have any risk factors, and all of a sudden I found myself in the hospital having suffered a stroke just in November. I didn’t know what that meant or what my life would look like, and it turns out it could have been a lot worse. I have all of my faculties available. I can walk, I can talk, I can think I can do cognitive tasks.
In the meantime, God had to remove me from a lot of the things as a professional mom, wife, all the roles in ministry. December could be like, this is the big time, right? , the week before December started this past year. God just said, no, actually your job is to lay on the couch. And I thought, but God, I’m the mom and I’m the podcaster and I’m the therapist and I lead a small group and I have to do holidays for my family and all those things.
God just made me rest and taking me through right now a journey of figuring out what is really important. And what is foundational? Do I have big ideas and big [00:18:00] goals for my practice or my e-course or my podcast or my other things that do in ministry or family, whatever. But come down to take care of yourself, rest, read the Bible, and spend time with the Lord. Be there with your family, work on your marriage, eat the right food. It’s come down to just very foundational basic things, and I’ll say, this is why, this is my story of hope because right now I don’t see what the result of that is gonna be, but I really have this sense that God has me in this place of the lane, a solid foundation.
Not that I wasn’t solid in my belief in God, or that I didn’t have a good marriage or anything before. But it’s like he’s laying this new layer of foundation that I need for whatever that launch is in the next season of life, and I have no idea what that might look like, but I have hope that if he’s asking me to slow down and rest right now and take care of these things, that means he has something for me then that’s gonna be worth it when I follow him in an obedience to that.
Carrie: Yes. It’s so hard for us in our cultural context to slow down and to rest, but it’s definitely so needed and so important, so I’m glad that God’s working with you on that. Have you kind of had a lot of reflections on just the sense of Sabbath in the Bible and what that really means to rest?
Ann: What’s really funny is in October I did a whole series on rest and ceasing from busyness and Sabbath. That was what the whole, the podcast in the fall was about. Then I had just moved into a new series that I was doing about the body and what God has to say about the body and how our body impacts our mental health and things like that.
It was almost like God said, “Well, you’re doing good work. I see the work that you’re doing, but I’m going to make this really real for you in short order.
Carrie: Yes, He did. It’s like when the pastor has to preach the sermon to themselves before they give it to the congregation. That’s what they say. They’re like, I had to learn this for myself. Awesome. Tell us where people can find you and we’ll put links in the show notes too.
Ann: My website is soulgritresources.com, and that’s where you can find the e-course. You can get links to the podcast, the blog that I used to write and for your listeners, I’m assuming a lot of people that listen to your podcast are interested in things like those evidence-based practices.
I have a freebie that pops up. It’s called Cognitive Behavior Therapy with scripture, and I’ll walk you through how to use the scripture to replace those thoughts that you’re needing some help with once you identify them, so they can find that there. I’m also on Instagram at Soul Grit Resources.
Carrie: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today.
Today on the show, I am joined by a Christian minimalist, pastor and author, Becca Ehrlich. Becca and I had an interesting conversation about how minimizing and simplifying your life can help with anxiety.
How Becca developed an interest in minimalism
Different aspects of minimalism
How to be more intentional with time and energy
The intersection between Christian faith and minimalism
Minimalist approach to buying things
Small steps to take to minimize and simplify your life
How to tackle the tasks of evaluating possessions and minimizing stuff as a couple.
Hope with Anxiety and OCD Episode 49. If you’re new to the show, I’m your hot Carrie Bock and today we are talking about the connection between having too much stuff or clutter that invades our lives and how that can cause us anxiety. We can’t find things anymore because there’s too much stuff in the way or we have piles around maybe that is crushing our creativity, things that are keeping us, from doing everything that God has called us to do.
Carrie: So here today with me or a discussion of Christian minimalism is Becca Ehrlich, who is a pastor and Christian minimalist. Thank you for joining me today.
Becca: Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun.
Carrie: So you once had what some would quote, call the American dream like I have a spacious house and I have lots of stuff in it. What kind of suffering do you feel like coming from at some point of having too much.
Becca: I sort of bought into pun intended. The idea is that the reason we exist is to have more, more stuff, more time commitments, more things. We use our energy and time for more recognition, all of that like more status. And so we bought a 3000 square foot house and then and it was just me and my husband, and when you have that much space, you fill it with stuff cause it just looks weird to have empty space sometimes or so we’ve been told.
Carrie: Makes sense.
Becca: So did what normal folks would do in consumer culture and filled it with a bunch of stuff. And then we moved, we moved into a smaller place just because that’s what was available at the time where we were moving and we did not have enough room for all this stuff. So we rented a huge storage unit outside of town and we filled it, they call it high and tight.
So it was literally like wall-to-wall stuff, ceiling to floor stuff and we couldn’t even get into this stuff if we wanted to in that storage unit. Then in our new place, it was like stuff was coming out of corners and out of closets and it was just stuffed to the gills with all the stuff. It was just not helpful for my life I couldn’t find anything. It was things that would fall on top of me. We’ve all been there. Right? You open the closet, it is just all down and it was just not good for my well-being. I just didn’t like it and so when I discovered minimalism, which by the way is not just about stuff, right? Our issue was stuff, but a lot of other people could be other things. It made sense to us and we were like, I think we need to start living a little bit more minimally.
Carrie: How did you discover this and develop this interest in minimalism?
Becca: I watched Netflix and my life changed.
Carrie: Wow.
Becca: No one expects their life to change when they’re watching Netflix. But that is what happened. I have a chronic illness, so I was having bad health, and usually, when I have a bad health day, I kinda chill on the couch and watch Netflix or whatever. And I was browsing through, I watch a lot, a lot of documentaries and it recommended the minimalism documentary, the original one by the minimalists.
I’d never heard of minimalism before. I had no idea what I was like, well, it’s only an hour and 15 minutes. So if it’s terrible, it’s only an hour and 15 minutes of my life that I wasted and it was the opposite. Like I watched it and said, oh my gosh, I think this is something I need to do and my husband will get home from running errands and I was like, you gotta watch this and he was like, I don’t know. He eventually sat down with me and we watched it together and he said, you know what, I think this is something we need to do.
Carrie: That’s good. You definitely have to get your spouse on board if you’re married and are going to do this.
Becca: Yeah, I will say though, that like both of us have very different ways. We live out minimalism, which I think is also okay. So you don’t necessarily have to be completely on the same page and agree with all the things you just have to know. Be okay with each other, living out a very simple life.
Carrie: So you said that it’s not just about the stuff. Can you tell us about some of the other aspects of minimalism?
Becca: Yeah. So basically minimalism is a focus on the aspects of life that matter most and intentionally removing everything. So at its core, it’s living intentionally and getting rid of anything, that’s keeping you from focusing on what’s most important. So that can be anything, right? Like for a lot of people, it’s stuff, because of how consumer culture works, we’ve accumulated too much stuff, but for other people, it could be time commitments. Like maybe you said yes to all the things out of obligation or because you felt like you had to, or were expected to, or whatever.
It could be chasing wealth and status and fame. That’s also something that’s glamorized in consumer culture. So paring down your life to be more intentional and focus on the most important things like relationships and self-care, passion, and things like that.
Carrie: It’s interesting that you say that about not chasing fame and fortune. I just had a conversation with another entrepreneur this morning that we just get together and have business chat. She told me, everybody’s trying to chase this six to seven-figure thing. She’s like, I just don’t need all that. I just, I mean, I need a few thousand dollars to pay my bills and live okay.
She’s like, what do I need to make six figures for us? That’s not what’s important to me and so that’s kind of exactly what you’re saying. Like finding what’s really important and really valuable and this individual also has a daughter. So obviously it’s important for her to have time to spend with her and to have self-care and have enough rest. So do you feel like having the chronic illness or receiving that diagnosis affected this?
Becca: Oh yeah. I think for folks who don’t have an infinite amount of energy and health that’s everybody really, but especially folks who are living with illness, living more simply and more minimally, it just makes the most sense because you’re just more intentional about what you’re using your time and energy for.
So it was a no-brainer for me as someone with chronic illness, because I just have to be more intentional about how I’m using my time and energy throughout the day. Because if I don’t, by the end of the day, I’m just going to be dead meat and maybe the next day I’m going to be dead meat.
Carrie: It’s interesting because my husband, I got married last year in October and my husband calls me a minimalist, which I find kind of funny because I wouldn’t necessarily put that label on myself, but he really sees how I interact with stuff specifically for buying.
Like, I may see something and say, oh, that’s, cool or something, but I really don’t have space for that extra gadget in my kitchen. I mean, where would I put that? I just don’t know that I would really use that a whole lot, or I just don’t need that. You think about how many people have invested in multiple kitchen appliances that don’t pull them out of the cabinet or don’t use them.
I watched the documentary as you did as well and it really made me. Actually, the minimalists have a podcast I’ve listened to some of their podcasts episodes as well. And I appreciate some of their values that they repeat a lot to like using things, not people, the memories are not in the stuff like they talk about, not having to hold on to every family heirloom that you have because of your memory with your relative.
So even though I don’t think that they say anything specifically about their faith, I do believe that some of those values can be translated over and aligned, with Christian values. And I imagine that you, you found that same thing and, and that was how you started, like writing on your blog.
Becca: Yeah at the time. So when I discovered minimalism, it was the end of 2017. So there, there really wasn’t like. I researched it afterward because I was like, oh, they talk the minimums, talk a lot about meaning and so the implication being, you’ll be able to find more meaning in your life when you’re living more simply and focusing on what’s most.
Which makes sense and I was like, oh, that’s really interesting because usually meaning is something that you find through religious tradition. And for me as a Christian, I found that a lot of what they were talking about aligns very well with Jesus’s teachings and what’s in scripture. And so I was like, I want to read more in-depth about this and at the time there really wasn’t anything out there. There were a couple of articles or blog posts or maybe a YouTube video here and there, but there was nothing in Greece and that’s so that’s why I ended up writing about it. Because I was like, okay, well, I can’t be the only one that’s interested in this intersection between the Christian faith and minimalism and I wasn’t, which is great, but it’s really interesting because like when you write, you really discover things about yourself while you’re writing, it’s like, that’s why people journal and things like that.
So the blog has really helped me discover things about why I accumulated stuff in the first place and why I say yes to things when I really shouldn’t and really helped me get at the core reasons why I do things that are not serving me well And that’s helped me live more minimally.
Carrie: Talk with us a little bit about that putting the pause button on getting new things, because everyone can go through their stuff or their closet and be like, yeah, I don’t need this. I’m getting rid of it, going to give it away, whatnot put it in the garage sale. But then next thing you know, six months later, they’re back in the same place with too much stuff.
So I’m curious, like what that process was like for you, like in terms of your evaluation of buying things or having to approach things differently.
Becca: Yeah, one of the big things for me, and this is what I always tell people is that you have to find your why, your reason for, to live more simply because if you don’t do that and it’s just so like the decluttering movement. For example, it’s super trendy right now, basically, it’s just about getting rid of stuff which in itself is not bad. But like as you said, it’s not going to last, if you don’t get at the core reason why you want to simplify in the first place, because you’re just going to accumulate back the things that you got rid of eventually. So finding your personal why.
Like, for me, it was spending more time with friends and family. It could be other things for other people. Maybe you want to go back to school or whatever. There’s a wide range of wise. You want to do this but find your why, and that will also help keep you motivated because it’s not super glamorous to minimize. It sounds cool and you get halfway through and you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m going to die.
Carrie: A lot of work and I appreciate the transparency there. That’s good.
Becca: Yeah. Like everybody gets a wall at some point because it just works and it’s going a lot of times, it’s going counter-culturally and it’s going against what, how you lived previously. So it’s not only physical work, but it’s also mental, emotional, spiritual work because you’re literally shifting your worldview and your lifestyle.
So knowing why you’re doing it in the first place is going to help you get motivated to continue that process and then live it out, continue living it out. Because that’s the thing like decluttering is a one and done process. Like you get rid of stuff and you’re like, you’re done, but like you’re not done right.
It’s a constant journey that’s why I always call it the Christian minimalism journey because you’re constantly figuring out what adds value to your life and what matters most and how you can focus on that. Because a bachelor bachelorette is going to live out the minimalist lifestyle differently than someone who’s married and has three kids like that and that’s normal. So you have to kind of shift depending on your context.
Carrie: I think that’s great. Hard for people with children who may receive a lot of gifts from grandparents. He has an uncle and next thing, birthday parties, Christmas, next thing they know, there’s just piles of stuff everywhere and kids typically do not want to get on the minimalism board.
So it’s like, if you can ward some of that off ahead of time, it’s probably helpful in encouraging relatives to buy experiences instead of things. Different opportunities for that time to spend time together.
Becca: Definitely and the earlier you can start the better, but it’s never too late with kids. Joshua Becker actually has a great book called clutter-free with kids kind of outlines a lot of this or younger to older kids, which I think is great. So I think there are ways that younger children and teenagers do actually want a more simple lifestyle. But you just are so used to the consumer culture around them, that it may be a little bit of a shift for them, just like it is for us. Right but I think it’s definitely something that can be incorporated with kids.
Carrie: For you, what does being a minimalist look like on a practical day-to-day level?
Becca: Yeah, an intentional living which sounds kind of cliche, but I’m literally aware of how I’m making decisions around consumption and spending and money habits and ways. I use my time and energy and resources. Like I’m just very much aware of how I do that and how I make decisions around that. How I make those decisions has completely shifted since becoming a minimalist. It’s not that I don’t spend money and I don’t own things. I think some people hear you’re minimalist and it’s like, they picture this like room with one chair and that’s it, you know?
Carrie: Right. No pictures on the wall.
Becca: Right? Like obviously I own stuff. I have pictures on the wall. I’m currently packing to move. So I own things, but I own less things because I’m much more intentional with what I bring into my life and that includes all things. That includes things that include people that include time commitments. Media usage, I’m just very intentional with how I use all of that. And so for me, it’s a good productive day if I’ve been intentional and I made some time for rest and renewal as well.
Carrie: That’s good. Did you use to have a lot busier schedule and just kind of say yes to all the opportunities and pile them on?
Becca: Yeah, 100%. Like I was like, I was one of those I’ll rest when I’m dead type people and it was not good for me. I mean, I felt awful all the time. I was exhausted. I felt burnt out. I just wanted to disappear on a desert island and that’s not normal. We shouldn’t feel like that.
Carrie: Right, so much goodness there in terms of rest and Jesus getting away to reflect, spend time with God and really, if you look at the life of Jesus, He was very intentional about how He spent His time, who He spent His time with. I always find it interesting that in one of the early chapters of Mark, where people were coming to be healed and they were trying to get to Jesus and Jesus, looked up and left and we look at that and we’re like, that doesn’t seem right.
But it was just, He couldn’t do everything in his humanity. Like He couldn’t meet with every single person, he would have been there for years and years just doing that. He could have set up a little, but, and just had people come to Him. But that wasn’t the mission. So you had to get out and be on the move and I look at that and I think, a lot of times we try to help everybody with everything and we think that that’s like a Christian thing.
Oh, well, I’ve got to do all these good things for other people. But the reality is we need to be intentional to like our calling and what God has asked us to do globally as Christians, but also specifically. And if we miss that, because we’re looking at every single opportunity to help people, then we’re missing the boat there.
Becca: I think especially like churchgoing folks tend to be like over overextended. I don’t know why that’s a thing in Christian culture, but it totally is and that’s not even what Jesus said when God created the world. God gave us the Sabbath as a gift to re-ask and connect with God and our loved ones. And like, so we’re not even created to keep going 24/7 all the time. Like we’re not made to do that and so if we do that, we’re not, it’s not going to go well for us.
I learned that the hard way and especially with my chronic illness, that is not even doable for me. So making sure that there’s built-in time for rest and renewal, even when it’s a busy time, obviously we go through spurts where it’s busier than others. And so making sure that you build in that time, so you’re not getting burnt out.
Carrie: Sure. So we talked a little bit about some small steps that people can take to get started and you talked about I think before getting rid of stuff, like finding your why, why do you want to live more simply or more minimalistic. Looking at that, maybe what domains need to change? Is it about the stuff? Is it about how I’m spending my time? Am I overextended financially? And then what are maybe some other small steps that you feel like people can take if they’re just really beginning this journey?
Becca: Yeah. I always encourage people to start small. I think it can be very overwhelming. Like if the problem is stuff and you’re looking at a whole house filled with stuff, obviously, you’re never going to get started if you’re like, oh my gosh, I have a whole house full of stuff. I can get this big paralysis by looking at all the things you need to do. So for us, it was stuff for us. We started literally 10 to 15 minutes a day and it was easy and it was quick and you could see results really quickly and it helped motivate us to continue more because you can see tangible results.
And then when we had more time on our hands, like a Saturday, we like tackled that storage unit. I talked about it before it took many Saturdays, but finding ways to set aside time to do it and even if it’s just 5, 10 minutes a day, just start. Like, if it’s your social media usage, for example, I’ve had some people start there and being like, okay, I’m going to let myself scroll through social media for a half-hour tonight, and then I’m done.
And just being more intentional with that, because we’ve all been there over scrolling through, and it’s been like an hour and you’re like, where did that hour ago? Then you’ve lost an hour. You’re never getting that hour back and it’s probably not the best use of time. It might be if you found some cool stuff, but it’s still an hour out of your life. Just find ways to be intentional and start small.
Carrie: Yes, that’s good. So we were talking about when I intro the episode that oftentimes having a lot of stuff can lead to anxiety. Have you seen in terms of other people that you’ve interacted with or yourself personally, like a reduction in anxiety from reducing the amount of stuff or living more intentionally?
Becca: Oh, definitely. Yeah. I have a lot of folks who either have anxiety disorders that are diagnosed or feel anxious regularly. And once they cleared their space, whether that be physical, mental, emotional, social, they find that they have breathing space basically and the anxiety has lessened a little bit. Obviously, if you’re diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, it takes a lot more than that, but it can at least help the process of finding ways to handle that anxiety.
I know that for me, I feel a lot less anxious when I don’t have as much stuff or clutter in my brain or around me. They’ve done some studies around this to show that when there are less clutter people feel less anxious, less stressed. And so finding ways to make that space for yourself is really important.
Carrie: I find that true in my office, now I have a home office. And if it’s got a lot of paperwork stacked up or things that I’ve put to the side and haven’t dealt with, I just noticed that I feel more cramped in there, less free. I find myself trying to work in other areas of the house instead of being in the office, which is where I need to be in. So I can definitely attest to that. That’s true for me. And obviously, I think what we’re talking about here as well. We’re not necessarily diving into hoarding or anything of that nature, which is something that’s more extreme.
We’re just talking about the normal day-to-day American westernized way of living, unfortunately, that we often so easily, because it’s all around us in our culture. We just kind of fall into it and we don’t even realize how it’s affecting us until we get to a certain point
Becca: And actually the typical American house on average has 300,000 things.
Carrie: Wow. Isn’t that a lot of things?
Becca: It’s insane.
Carrie: Wow. I did not know that. I know for me, I’ve gone through different seasons and periods of my life where I had foster children and I had this kid stuff around. And then you wouldn’t know what ages of children you’re going to get. So I had these different toys and clothes in the attic. Then I went through a divorce and then I got remarried. My husband moved in. It’s interesting. Now we’re in kind of a similar season where we’re trying to decide what’s most important and I’m trying to be sensitive to his stuff and not just say like, ah, we don’t really need that.
So I’m curious for you, maybe you could talk a little bit about relationally in terms of working with this with your husband. Like how have you two been able to come together to achieve the common goal? Did you have certain criteria for things as you were looking through them?
Becca: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I always tell people, it’s funny, you bring that up because I always tell people do not minimize another person you’re living with stuff because it doesn’t end well, never ends well, let them deal with their own stuff.
So I always encourage people and this is something that we did is we dealt with our own stuff because obviously, we were dealing with stuff first and our own time commitments. Obviously, time commitments when we have them together. We have to have those conversations. If it’s stuff that we both use, obviously we talked through it and see if it adds value to our lives and if we want to keep it in our lives.
But keeping communication open is really key and that’s for anyone you’re living with. Right? So like it could be any family member. It could be a roommate, especially if I’ve had friends who started the minimalist lifestyle and live with. And their roommates are not minimalist, right. Finding ways like, okay, well, my own space is going to be my own space, but then also like trying to find ways to live in this way in communal spaces where other folks may not be living the same lifestyle. So just finding ways to do that and what we’ve actually seen is that a lot of times when people start living more minimally, other people see the benefits and then they start doing it after the fact.
So even if the folks you’re living with aren’t on board right away, they may be doing it later. So just do what you’re doing and they may see for themselves that it’s worth it.
Carrie: That’s good. We had a yard sale recently from just combining two households of two adults. And obviously, we couldn’t keep everything and we redecorated the house. I got let go of my office and just have my home office. So that was definitely a big downside and it was interesting to see my husband go through this process. Because I think he struggles a little bit more maybe than I do with getting rid of things. And he said, I really like such and such picture, but it just doesn’t fit with the decor of our house anymore.
Or I really enjoyed that and I think maybe somebody else will enjoy that as well. So there are, there’s something about being able to let things go and bless other people maybe that can use it more than you can.
Becca: Yeah, that was a big thing for us. So we have a son who died and we moved a couple of times with all the baby stuff because we knew we were planning on adopting at some point probably. But we didn’t know when and so we were just holding on to all this. And we realized after a few years of that when it was sitting in a storage unit that I talked about like there are families that could use this stuff right now, and we’re just collecting dust over here.
And so we don’t eat it at all and know full well that when we do adopt and we’ve started the adoption process now that we would most likely have to get it again. But we knew that was going to be a few years down the road and that we could save up to do that. So we made sure that helped us let go of it because we knew that there were families that would be using it right now and getting used out of it, as opposed to us holding onto it for years and years and years for when we’re going to use it again.
Carrie: Yes. That was something that I had to help evaluate for myself after, the foster kids left and everything. And I said, well, I have to have my space according to the life I’m living right now, not the future life I hope to have. And I don’t want my house to be full of stuff that’s just representative of the past life that I’ve lived. It has to have this balance of just being present and being in the moment. And what does this fit in with the life I’m living right now was a question that I asked myself a lot and it helped me determine which stuff needed to stay and which you could go.
Becca: That’s fantastic that you did that naturally because most of the time we hold on to it either because it made sense in the past or because we think it might make sense in the future. And like in reality, most of those in future things don’t actually happen in the past. It doesn’t, it’s not serving us now. So being like, okay, is this serving me now? Is this adding value to my life right now? And if it’s not, if it’s asked for the future, it’s okay to get rid of it.
Carrie: Right. I might need this one-day mindset.
Becca: Yeah. And like that just in case thing, like never ends up happening like 99% of the time. Right.
Carrie: Right. So as we’re getting towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Becca: Yeah. So, I went on a three-week retreat to Costa Rica, which was not a Christian retreat. It was an alternative wellness retreat, which was a whole new experience for me. I had not really dealt with the grief around not really being able to have biological children. So my chronic illness, I have mast cell activation syndrome. It’s genetics. So it’s past, it’s 50 50 shot. that’ll get passed on if I were to have a biologic and try to have another biological child again, and it’s more severe every time it’s passed on.
So I could in all consciousness, like give birth to a child that would be disabled. So I don’t feel comfortable doing that personally. So we had felt called my husband and I to adopt at some point. Anyway, it’s just, we’re just adopting up. But I didn’t feel, I wasn’t ready to let go of the fact that I wasn’t going to have biological children, and in Christian circles, there’s a lot of weird baggage around, women and childbirth and weird stuff around that had to work through.
And I just kind of stuffed it down and not dealt with it. And so when this opportunity arose to go on this retreat, I said, okay and I did it. And I came out of it and I was ready to adopt, like I had worked through all that stuff, which was really cool.
You can actually watch this retreat and my experience, it was filmed. It’s called Last Resort. It was filmed. It was originally aired on PBS network, so you can watch it on demand there, but now it’s also streaming on HBO max. If anyone is interested in watching that, but that gave me so much more hope because I just wasn’t ready to take the next step to adopt.
And now, we already started the process. We’re really excited. We did all the educational classes and we just really excited to see what child God wants us to parent.
Carrie: That’s great. We have to be able to allow God to fully close one door so that we can be ready to receive and open that next door. I’m glad that you were able to just receive from God on that and be able to fully process through those emotions. I’m sure we’re pretty.
Becca: Yeah. And like it was interesting for me because I think there’s this mentality sometimes in Christian circles that like something needs to be Christian in order for God to work through it. And in reality, like God can work through, like God’s God. And so like, I, even though the retreat I went to wasn’t necessarily Christian and like it had indigenous cultural practices and it like, God worked through that so that I could then be ready to adopt. So I think finding ways to listen for God in places that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
Carrie: Yeah. Yes. That’s a good point to bring up. I’m glad that you talked about that because God works in all kinds of different ways through different people and even people that don’t know him. Well, thank you for giving us the gift of your time today and I’ve really enjoyed having this conversation and I know it’s going to be a positive impact on so many of our listeners.
Becca: Great. Well, thanks so much for having me and I hope everyone is able to live a little bit more simply.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production By The Well Counseling in Tennessee and our original music is by Brandon. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
This episode is for those who are curious about what it’s truly like to be a therapist. People wonder things like, how can you listen to so many people’s problems?
Today’s show is also unique because my husband Steve took over my role for a day as a host and prepared the set of questions himself. It’s always fun and exciting to have him both on the show and in my life.
What is it about therapy that I enjoy most?
My life as a therapist and scope of work
Difference between private practice and working in a community mental health setting
How I get through my busy day feeling good
Balancing my analytical side and creative side
How I feel when I got to the end of the whole process with my clients.
My goal for my clients
Steve and Carrie share their most recent personal story of hope
Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 33. This is your host, Carrie Bock. And in case you’re new to the show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today is a very special show as I am joined by my husband, Steve Bock, he is saving my bacon because we had an episode that I was going to come out and the recording just didn’t come out very good. And I didn’t feel comfortable putting it out there into the world for you guys to listen to. So he decided to come up with some questions that our listeners might be interested in related to being a therapist.
Carrie: Welcome back, Steve.
Steve: I’m happy to be here. You did not ask me to be here, which makes it different this time. I had suggested it because as with anything we get in a pinch sometimes. As your husband, I have an obligation to try to help where I can. So I suggested, well, why don’t you just let me ask you a bunch of questions and see how it goes.
Carrie: You’re very helpful as always.
Steve : You’re all too kind.
Carrie: So what’s up? I haven’t seen these questions ahead of time. So what do you have for me?
Steve: Okay, well, Carrie, today is your day to be on the couch. As a therapist, you have people on the couch, right? And you talk to them and they just opened up to you.
Carrie: Now they’re on their own couch online
Steve: Now they’re on their couch online and they get to be in the comfort of their own home or their own car. Today, you’re on the couch. The questions are for you. I’m not per se trying to help you in that sense. I’m no therapist. God knows I’m not a therapist. So Carrie, what is it about therapy and helping people being their therapist? What is it that you like about that?
Carrie: Wow. The biggest thing for me is just the life transformation that I get to see in people like watching them come in. A lot of times, pretty hopeless. I feel like I’m at the end of my rope and everything I’ve tried. I just haven’t gotten better. I’ve done maybe some self-help or talk to some friends, or maybe just try to do everything internally themselves. And then they get to this pivotal point where they reach out for help to someone. And as you get to know people week after week, after seeing them on a regular basis, there’s just an element where you’re care and concern for someone that you have in the beginning. It grows obviously over time, the more time that you spend with people. I want to see my clients succeed, I want to see them do well. And so when they come in after working with me for some time and they have a smile on their face and they haven’t been smiling in a long time or they say, “Hey, I had a win this week. This is what happened. I was able to have an OCD thought come in. And I knew it was OCD this time.” And I just was like, “okay, I’m going to let that thought pass” or they come in and say, yeah, that situation that normally would have really triggered me and made me anxious. It didn’t make me as anxious this week. I was able to kind of catch my breath and breathe through it. So it’s all these little opportunities to see people, really change the directory of their lives.
And I know it’s not just for their lives, it’s for their kids’ lives. It’s for their marriages that are being changed. And that just lights me up and makes me want to go to work every day.
Steve: Okay, well, for those who maybe haven’t listened much to you, or like me. They’ve heard it, but haven’t really listened. What is it that you do? Do you just give everybody therapy?
Carrie: I definitely don’t give everybody therapy. That would be out of my scope of practice. And it’s funny because I used to get calls all the time for marriage counseling. I think because I was a Christian and I would have to tell people I don’t do marriage counseling at all. In fact, I haven’t done marriage counseling since I was in my practicum in graduate school. And I’m pretty sure those couples are not together anymore. I would not be a good person to do marriage counseling. I also don’t work with addictions or anybody that has a severe anorexia or something of that nature I don’t work with
My tagline that I tell people is that I am a Christian therapist who helps people with anxiety and OCD overcome wounding childhood experiences in order to live more full lives. And I do that now in the comfort of their own homes via online therapy.
Steve: As Carrie Bock, you wake up and I know this pretty early in the morning. You’re not a lazy person. You get up, you put a lot of preparation into what you do. You have a plan, you have ideas. You don’t share those with me because in your world, you can’t. So you keep that all mustered up inside somewhat.
The first person that you meet with comes along and something’s already probably gone wrong. Somebody at the front door knocking on the door while you’re trying to be in session or a cat walks in or out or whatever the case is you deal with that, not a big deal. You handle that. Things go on all throughout the day though that are out of your control and you have to somehow keep enough sense about you to help someone. And you do very, very well at it I think.
The first session goes by and you’ve absorbed everything that that individual has said. Now you’re going to session two, the same thing. Session three, session four. Maybe you get a lunch. I don’t know. Maybe you’ve just scarfed down lunch, you’ve tipped your food in your mouth, and now you’re running back to go meet with someone, how do you not go nuts like how do you take all of that in absorb it all and then calmly say, and how does that make you feel because I’ve got that in my head and I bet that you never say that.
Carrie: No, therapists don’t just have one line that they say that’s so annoying. Wow. So how do I get through the day to day seen multiple people with multiple problems and hearing all their stories?
That’s a really good question. Well, first thing I will say about the lunch. I’m not a person that scarves down food and runs back to work. For me, my lunch is more of a time. A lot of times now that I’m home, I get to go in and I’ll cook a little something. It doesn’t have to be anything major, but lunch is kind of my downtime, my relax time, where I can clear my head a little bit or shift gears and think about something different.
As far as seeing one person and the next, sometimes sessions can be really heavy like you’re talking about some pretty traumatic things or the person was very emotional and that can be hard. I think, to transition and shift gears, for me, it can look like a lot of different ways. It can look like maybe getting up in between sessions and stretching. Sometimes it’s just going to get a drink of water. Obviously, I have to go to the bathroom throughout the day. You know, those types of things that I do in between session to kind of help reset. One of the things that has helped me probably the most is that therapists that I realized a long time ago was that these are not my problems.
There are other people’s problems because I was such an empathetic person that I would take on other people’s problems as my own. And even when I was in the early days of working in community mental health. Essentially, I felt like the message was you’ve got to fix these people. You’ve got to make them better like whatever you have to do to do that. You have to bend over backwards. I really got burned out in that job. And I didn’t even realize that I was burnt out. I didn’t have the self-awareness to know that. Through that process though of going to my own therapy, I realized I have to take a step back and take the wide-angle view really to say at the end of the day, these people are living with these problems on a day-to-day basis and I’m here to help them. I’m here to support them, but I’m not here to fix them and I’m not here to fix their problems. I’m here to be kind of the guide and the person that walks alongside them and shows them potential different paths that they can take, but I can never make anyone do anything.
There’s something really freeing about recognizing that, that everything is optional. People want to dive in and do the work then I’m happy to help them do that. If they’re not ready to do that, that’s okay. And I can be patient and wait with them until they are ready to dive into some things. I think for me because my therapy is less of insight-based and more action-based that the people who aren’t quite ready to take action, they either don’t tend to see me or they tend to drop out one of the two, but I hope that answers the question.
Steve: Yeah, it does. And that leads me to another question actually. We all need help from time to time, right? You’re around me enough, you know that I tend to store things in. I’m not going to tell, I’ll tell y’all complained to you all day, but I’m not going to tell people my problems. I’m not good at that, right? There are people who I am sure have a problem, and they don’t recognize it. There’s an outcome of it. They’re aggravated and they don’t know why or they’re doing something to themselves that they shouldn’t or saying things they shouldn’t or treating a spouse or a family member, whatever, in a bad way or whatever it may be. But what do you tell them to notice those types of things? Like at what point should a person notice that? If that makes sense.
Carrie: Are you talking about how do people become self-aware enough to realize that they need therapy?
Steve: Yes.
Carrie: Okay.
Steve: See? You put it so much better than I did. I say it in like 5,000 words, you say it in like 10 or less, but yes.
Carrie: Well, we always look at the different domains of a person’s life. And I think that you just named some of those off. So when you’re looking at what are your relationships look like, are you satisfied in your relationship with your spouse or significant other? What is your work like? Are you getting in trouble at work because you can’t get along with your coworkers and then the other would be maybe school. If the person is in school, a lot of times when kids are failing, it’s not just because they don’t understand the subject matter. Sometimes they have emotional things going on or mental health struggles that they’re dealing with.
So we look at those kinds of different domains of life. What’s someone’s functional level at home? Are they just laying in the bed all day, depressed on a Saturday and really all they can do is go to work and go home. That might be an indication that someone needs therapy. Usually, people seek help when one of those domains is impacted in some way, shape or form like, okay my anxiety is at the point where it’s affecting my ability to drive to and from work because I’m afraid of driving on the interstate or my OCD is impacting my relationship with my spouse because I’m having all of these obsessions about my spouse. And then I’m seeking reassurance from them. Just some couple of examples there
Steve: On a similar question, what advice would you give someone if they had a family member or a friend. Of course, we all think the other person needs help and not us, Sometimes you see people and you’re like, man, they really need some help, honestly.
And not in a mean or a cruel way like, “oh dear. Oh my, go get some help.” You’re not trying to be mean, but they really do need help. What advice do you give somebody? Because that type of a thing is usually, I would think you bring up that topic and they are going to let you have it. I don’t have a problem. Who do you think you are? And that it’s one of those things that probably could split a family or a marriage or whatever up. What advice do you give somebody to reach out to their friend or their family member and say Hey, you need help?
Carrie: If you know what the barrier is I think that it’s a little bit easier. For example, if someone’s saying, well, I don’t have time to go to therapy, then you might present them with some different options. There are therapists that keep all different kinds of hours. Well, maybe we can find you someone, that works on the weekends. Maybe we can find you someone that works late into the evening.
If it’s a financial barrier, trying to figure out, okay, well, are there some things that we could look into, some lower costs, sliding scale university counseling center, EAP program through your work. Okay. Let’s try to remove that barrier to therapy. if it’s a matter of ”I’m not really that bad.”
I think that’s probably the thing that keeps most people out of therapy is like, “well, yeah, I’ve got some obsessions, but there’s that person over here that I’m comparing myself to and they really can’t function. They’re washing their hands 20 times a day. I’m just over here, ruminating about stuff, staring off into space.”
It’s not really affecting me as bad. It’s not really great to compare us to other people. It gets us in all kinds of trouble in a variety of ways. But I think that’s probably the biggest thing that keeps us out of therapy is pride because it takes a certain level of humility to say, “I really might benefit from getting out of my own head and talking with someone and maybe I do need some help.”
It’s hard for people to admit. I think if that’s your family member, really my first step would be a spiritual one would be to pray about it and to say, okay, God, I believe that this person really could benefit from help and will you please soften their heart so that when this opportunity prevent presented itself then they might be more open.
One of the nice things about having the podcast is it’s really been a bridge for some people to seek out therapy. I’ve had emails from various people saying, “Hey, I heard your podcast. And this was what I realized about myself. I was listening to someone else’s story. Then I realized, Hey, that’s me. I have some of those same thought processes in my head or I’m going through some of those same struggles with anxiety.” They hear a story about how someone else sought out help and hey, this person sounds pretty normal. They sound okay. And I consider myself pretty normal. And Hey, this therapist, lady, she doesn’t sound awful or weird or kooky. Maybe I could go seek help.
So really that’s one of my prayers, I think, for the podcast and one of the beautiful things that’s come out of it, as people are writing and saying, you know, Hey, I am going to go to therapy after listening.
Steve: That’s actually helpful. And I think a lot of your listeners would probably think that very same thing because I think we all have people in our lives that we come across. And maybe even ourselves. Maybe we were thinking of someone and it turns out, “oh, maybe I need some help.” So that’s good.
I’ll ask you this. What is something that an individual should do prior to getting therapy they’re looking for that therapist. And do they call just any therapists? Do they start by calling the therapist first? What do they do?
Carrie: Yes. Thank you for asking me this question.
Steve: I knew that one. That was actually the first question I wanted to ask you.
Carrie: This is something that Steve has to hear me vent about a lot because people often do not do their research before they just start kind of calling willy nilly. The closest person to them that they can google. We have an entire episode actually on this, and I can’t remember the number, but it’s how to find the therapist who’s right for you. I also wrote an ebook about this topic that you can find in the store on finding a therapist who’s the right fit for you on the first try.
I’ll give a couple of key points you need to kind of think through what is it that you’re looking for in terms of what you’re looking for from a therapist, as well as how are you going to pay for therapy over time. Is it something that you are trying to get your insurance to pay for? Can you afford to pay out of pocket?
What’s your monthly budget? All of those factors really need to be taken into consideration before you start calling people. Please, please, please use the internet. It’s a beautiful tool out there. Do your web searches find out as much information as you can online. If you need certain requests such as scheduling, insurance
You know, you’re going to have to ask your boss to leave early at the end of the day. You know, get some of those things in place and so forth. Know what your therapist that you’re looking at specializes in. That’s a big one. I just talked about people seeking me out for marriage counseling and there was nothing on my website or anywhere in anything that said anything about marriage. So like I said, a lot of times people just start calling numbers and honestly that’s going to lead you to more frustration in the long run if you don’t do your research. Use websites, get as much information as you can from there and then start calling or email.
Steve: Fair enough. And for the record, I probably sit on the wrong side of that. I have this wonderful wife who is very good in helping me find doctors and find what our insurance covers and what it does not. And I am very, very thankful for that. And my advice to you, if you were the one sitting there like me and saying, “oh my gosh, I’m terrible at that. I am all the bad things that she just named.” Get help from your spouse, your friend, somebody cause it’s worth it. So thank you for helping me on that.
Carrie: And I try to be patient and remind myself that people are in crisis. And when people are in crisis, they don’t retain information very well, but they read, or they don’t always make the best decisions.
Steve: Sure. So let’s get back to you. We talked earlier about your day to day, when you get up and you, you plan and oh my gosh, 15 things have already gone wrong in my day. Then you do all this therapy throughout the day, then you’re finished. You have to put up with this husband of yours who comes home and says, “oh my goodness, let me tell you about my dandy day.”
And not that I want to complain about things, but we all do. And then you say, well, all right, let’s eat dinner, let’s talk. And then you have work to do, or you have an idea or you have to, whatever it is because we’re busy. Our lives are busy. Where do you get your go? I don’t know. Another way to put that. Where do you get your energy to continue?
Carrie: Exercise is a big one for me. I really try to exercise three times a week and you know that because you live with me and you see me do it. And I have streaming workouts that I do sometimes we’ll take walks as well, and that’s always good. The walks for clearing my head. If I’m with you, I’ll talk to you about different ideas that I have for the podcast or things that I want to do business-wise. And then if I’m by myself, I’m usually either decompressing or I’m praying about situations in my life that are going on. And it’s just been a really great release for me. That gives me energy. I try to eat decently. I am definitely not perfect in that area, but I tried to make sure that I have time for myself to do things that I enjoy lately. That’s just been paint by number here and there when I have the time, we’re obviously doing some house redecorating right now. So that’s taking up both of our times. It’s been a lot of work.
Steve: You do stay busy. There’s no doubt about that. We both do, but you definitely stay busy and there are days I wonder, how is this woman still standing up? Because as you said, you do all those things and yes, you exercise and yes, you know, there are a lot of paint by number, which I think is actually really cool that you do that.
I don’t think I could do that for multiple reasons, but I appreciate that you’re able to do it and it seemingly takes away the stress a little bit. Do you feel that that does help a lot doing things like a hobby like that?
Carrie: I think so. One thing I’ll tell you when I used to do community mental health work and just to give people an idea, I talked about this on a previous episode on the EMDR episode, but we were literally going into situations where we had no idea what we were going to find. I mean, we were going out to people’s houses. So someone could have just gotten in an argument before you walked in the door and you’re experiencing the fallout of that. You show up and the kids you’re working with just got suspended from school for a week for bringing something to school they weren’t supposed to. Just endless amount of stress and nothing was predictable. I would bake a lot during that period. What I realized was that I was baking because I knew that if I followed all the steps, I knew exactly what result I was going to get. And that was therapeutic for me at that time to do that. I realized that was why I was doing it.
And now something I’ve realized about myself is that having some type of creative outlet for me is helpful because I’m so analytical and so consumed with problem solving and thoughts and things of that nature that to shift gears over and to do something that’s more creative and fun and spontaneous is a good balance for me to balance out the analytical side and the creative side, which has been a great thing. I went through a season of rock painting a little bit before the pandemic and a little bit while we were dating, I’ve kind of gotten away from that and now, but that was fun. I like arts and crafts a lot. So I tend to do some type of artsy thing.
Steve: Yeah. It’s fun to watch. I think you do well with it. So let’s go back. Let’s talk for a moment. Young Carrie, let’s go back, At what point did you make that decision of Hey, I think I’ll be a therapist? That seems like a dandy idea for life. Let me try to help other individuals with their problem. When did you decide that? Why did you decide that?
Carrie: When I was in high school, I was super interested in sign language and there was a college. It was actually a junior college at the time near where I grew up that had a sign language interpretation program. I had been to a church in the area that had a sign language interpreter. That was my bent of where I thought I would be going with my life. And it was a two-year program I could get out and do interpretation. Then I was in a psychology class in high school. And I thought this is the most interesting stuff that I’ve ever read in my life. I just wanted to digest all of it and read everything I could get ahold of. I’d get a hold of old psychology textbooks and just read them. I knew that there was something to that. So when I went to college to study psychology, my professors were either involved in research or they were counselors. I didn’t like research. I thought I could do counseling. And so it wasn’t this big aha moment or calling.
I think like with so many times in our lives, God uses the little pieces and puts them all together. And then later we look back and go, oh yeah, God was really in all of those little situations that I didn’t realize he kind of steering me on this path.
When I remember that when I saw my first client in practicum. So we had one semester. And then our second semester, we were already doing therapy. That was terrifying. I didn’t know anything at that point. However, when I got done with that first session, there was just this feeling that came over me of like this is why I’m here, like this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. This is why I’m alive. That moment for me just solidified everything that I was doing. And That’s how I became a therapist. I couldn’t imagine really doing anything else.
Steve: Do you remember your first case, your first person?
Carrie: I do.
Steve: And how was that? Were you like terrified and don’t let them know you’re terrified, but were you like scared?
Carrie: I’m so appreciative of this woman. She was very gracious to me. And I think that she got something out of it, even though I didn’t feel like I was able to give her a whole lot. And I think it was more just about her showing up, saying some things out loud to someone that she didn’t talk about to other people. Receiving some type of supportive feedback and just having a safe environment that she was able to go on and do different things in her life. I guess is the best way to explain it. And it was also where I learned that couples counseling wasn’t for me, that wasn’t with her. I was seeing her individually, but I saw a couples and I was like “I don’t really feel comfortable with this. This doesn’t seem like my cup of tea.” So I stayed away from that.
Steve: Wow. And then from there, you worked with another company for a while. And then at some point you went into your own private practice. Was that also scary?
Carrie: Yeah, it was terrifying. It really was to go out and start my own business. I don’t come from a family of business people.
I don’t rub shoulders in my day-to-day life with entrepreneurs. So thinking about leaving a very stable job that it didn’t pay great, but I knew exactly how much I was going to get paid. I had health insurance. I had benefits and to step off and leave that for something that was less certain was scary.
Funny story, I had a couple of different side jobs while I was building my practice initially. And one of those was that I was a grocery shopper. I was a personal shopper for Shipt before people really knew what Shipt was. They would see my shirt in the grocery store and they would say “Shipt, what is that?” Because places weren’t doing that. There wasn’t a Kroger pickup. This was several years ago. So it’s kind of a funny story that I was probably one of the first thousand shoppers for Shipt. I was done. I had shopped on a Saturday after working. I think my full-time job during the week because I was still at the full-time job.
I shopped for maybe 10 to 12 hours on Saturday to make some extra money. And I was in a JC penny store kind of saw this little ring and it said on the ring, if God brings you to it, he’ll bring you through it. I wore that ring until we got engaged, actually. So from that point, I start med started my practice.
It was always an encouragement for me that I knew in my heart and in my spirit that God wanted me to do this. And if he called me to do it, he was gonna bring me through it.
Steve: That’s really cool.
Carrie: Yeah. I remember when I started my practice, I was actually mad at God because I had a good situation in with a group practice for a couple of years. So what I was talking about with the ring was when I became fully self-employed, I was working in a group practice, but I was a 10 99. I didn’t get benefits. And when I jumped off and started By The Well Counseling in 2017. I was mad at God because I had become so comfortable in my current life. I didn’t want to leave it.
I was like, okay. I finally, in two years I had built up my practice. I had a consistent, steady flow of clients and then things change with the group practice. So I was kind of at this fork in a road where I was forced to make a change. I’m so thankful for that. Now I’m thankful that I did branch off and start my business, but I remember going out to the parking lot, praying walking around the parking lot of this big office complex that we were in just saying, God, why, why God, I don’t want to go do something different like I just got used to what I’m doing right now. What I felt like the Lord was trying to teach me in that moment was comfortable is for when we get to heaven. And if we want to follow Christ, we’re going to have to be okay with being uncomfortable, stepping outside our comfort zone, when he calls us to the water like Peter. I don’t know how this is going to go, but I’ll take that first step.
Steve: Yeah. So, you had to walk and you did not sink. Did you?
Carrie: No, I didn’t. And I will say too that I had two supportive friends that were therapists at that time. One was my friend, Sarah that I had on the EMDR episode. And the other was Jessica who was on one of our early episodes on diagnosis. I asked both of them, do you think I can do this? And they said, absolutely, you can do this, Carrie it’s not going to be that bad. And I was like, okay. You know, so I had God on my side, but I also had supportive people who knew that I could do it.
Steve: What would you tell a young person that is thinking maybe not even as young as 10, maybe they’re in high school and they think “Maybe I’ll be a therapist.” That’s a great idea. You know, I don’t know why I have to be crazy, but what would you tell them?
Carrie: Wow. If there is a high school or out there that wants to be a therapist, my biggest thing would be to encourage them to go sit down with a therapist for their own work individually.
I honestly think that is what has made me the best therapist that I am today is going to therapy for myself because it’s allowed me that opportunity to be on the other side of the couch like you said, and experience what it’s like to go through some of those hard and painful moments. The days that you don’t want to show up, and you don’t want to talk about your problems or you question, does this therapist really care about me or she just kind of like cashing and paycheck here? What’s that really about? I think that would be my biggest recommendation because you can get all the trainings in the world, but if you are not self-aware yourself, that’s gonna hinder your work.
I really believe that you can’t take clients to places that you haven’t been yourself.
Steve: You’re saying did you a therapist that you admire and listened to them or, you sit on the couch? And talk to that therapist.
Carrie: No, I’m saying you get therapy for yourself because that would be a good indication of what it’s like to hold that emotion in the room, even though it’s your emotion, you’re not holding someone else’s emotion.
I mean, certainly, you could
Steve: It’s a start.
Carrie: It’s a start. And I have had people contact me that were interested in becoming a therapist and had a question here or there had needed to interview someone for school. And I’ve done some of those as well. Don’t 50 people email me now about how you want to be a therapist. I don’t have time for all of that, but I think it is helpful to talk to people about who are interested in doing what you’re interested in doing. I will say that It’s a process to become a therapist besides just going to school, you do have to go to school, but then on top of that, there’s a whole licensure process afterwards. It takes you depending on what state you’re in. It takes you about two to four years to complete.
Steve: For the licensure.
Carrie: For the licensure process after schooling.
Steve: How long for the schooling? Or does that vary?
Carrie: You would go to undergraduate school and get a degree like in psychology or social work, and then you would go to graduate school and get a master’s in counseling or a master’s in social work, If you wanted to be a licensed clinical social worker.
Steve: That’s good. I just feel like there’s probably someone out there that they’re listening and maybe it’s not a young person, but maybe a mom or grandma, like, oh, that’s a great idea. So yeah. Hey, try to help them out. But obviously, you don’t tell me what happens day to day, per se.
You are very, very basic. You do not tell me individual’s problems. You are very HIPAA compliant for that listener that thinks that maybe you tell me everything you do not. It’s usually a scenario of I sure wish people would go and look at what their insurance covers or something very broad that way.
But in the idea of not breaking any HIPAA laws here.
What is a difficult personality for you? What is a challenge even?
Carrie: A challenging person to work with?
Steve: Yeah, not just that I’ll make it a two-part question because typical me, I have 50 questions that go to one. Yeah. What is a typical, like what’s a challenging person to work with, as you said, and also what is challenging about your job and maybe that’s one in the same, but something that every day you have to deal with it, it’s just part of the deal.
Carrie: Hmm, that’s a good question. I think probably what’s funny about this question is clients that are listening are probably like, “oh, I’m the difficult one.” And they’re probably not at all like, no, you’re not the difficult one. I think people who want to stay married to their symptoms and say, oh, well I just have anxiety. This is the way it is. And this is the way it’s going to be. I tend to not have those people because they’ve read my marketing and they’ve probably gone somewhere else. I don’t tend to keep people who have poor boundaries because I have pretty good and strong boundaries myself. So if there are clients that don’t respond well to boundaries and I have to set a boundary with them, they tend to self-select off and not come back, which I’m okay with.
I think that’s the thing about this job in terms of being in private practice, where I was before you have to work with whoever comes in the door when you’re working in a community mental health setting. However, when you have a private practice, you’re marketing to a certain type of clientele, it’s very different feel.
So you tend to attract people that you enjoy working with. And I would say that the same is true for me. Ultimately, people who don’t want to change probably are the most difficult to work with. And I probably am not the best fit for working with them either because I tend to work well with people who say, “Okay, I know this is going to be hard and I know it’s not going to be easy.
And I know I have a lot to work on, but I really want to get better. I really want to heal and I’m willing to do what it takes to do that, to get to that result.”
So that tends to be who I end up attracting and working with as far as like difficult situations that happen with the job. Sometimes it’s difficult when you enjoy working with a person, but then they drop out of therapy for whatever reason.
So sometimes you might be working with somebody for a long time and then they move out of state and it’s hard to say goodbye because I’ve had people that I’ve worked with for a couple of years, and then you feel sad because they have to find a new therapist and start telling their story over again.
But also I feel a sense of loss of not being able to work with them anymore. And I think people don’t really talk about that or think about that from the therapist perspective a lot of times, but we have feelings too. And I think about people that I haven’t seen in years, but I remember working with them and if they come to mind, I just pray that they’re well and that they’re doing good wherever they are because a lot of times I never hear anything back.
I don’t know how life is for them now.
Steve: Sure. And I imagine that must be difficult because most of us like to be around people who are well off doing well, not well off, but doing well. Maybe that too, but doing well. But most of us, I think we gravitate towards people who are healthy, who are life’s great, life’s dandy, they’re upbeat, whatever it is. And yet, in your case, you’re helping someone. And then when they get to the point where life’s dandy, well, you don’t hear from them anymore. Just the same. You get to hear the issue. Whereas the rest of us, maybe we get to hear how great life is and what they’re not saying.
So that would probably be difficult.
Carrie: Yeah. When you finish working with someone and you get through the whole process. It’s a little bit like a graduation. There’s this closing of the chapter and it’s bittersweet and it’s like, yeah, I’m so proud of you for all the hard work that you put into this. And you’re ready to like spread your wings and fly now. So it’s sad to see them go, but at the same time very happy because it means that they’re functioning well on their own. And that’s always the goal for me for therapy is to have people functioning well on their own.
Steve: Sure.
Carrie: So getting, it’s kind of weird, like in this career getting fired as a good thing, you know, for the right reasons.
Steve: Right. It’s reversed.
Carrie: Yeah.
Steve: It’s reversed for sure. And that’s neat for Carrie. I have enjoyed interviewing you. It was definitely on the fly. I think I wrote down five, six questions maybe. And just kind of ad-lib through. I’m not the type for those of you who know me. I am not the type of person who just does things on the fly like that I like to prepare them a little bit.
Carrie: I do too.
Steve: Yeah. And you need to so for us, this is very different. And I just thought what a neat concept, what a funny thing for us to do because neither one of us are alike, and so for you, that’s very daring because I can come up with some off the wall questions and it can be a bit on the ADD side or all over the place if you will.
I hope didn’t have to hone me in too much. I hope the questions were good.
I had fun and I hope that you did it as well. And most of all, I hope that the listener enjoyed this a little bit.
Carrie: Yes. I think that they will. I think probably a lot of people have questions about what is it like to be a therapist.
So this was a little bit of a glimpse into that, but you know, there’s one more thing that we forgot.
Steve: Oh, no.
Carrie: The story of hope. Would you like to tell our listeners about the story of hope? I think it’s a joint story really between the both of us. Can we tell them about your job?
Steve: Oh, yes. By all means. For those of you who can’t see inside this speaker that you’re listening to, I had this look at Carrie like what are we talking about? Where are we going? Is this a famous question I should be asking or answering? I’m a little lost.
Carrie: So at the end of every episode, as you know because you were on before, we like to tell a story of hope, which is the time where you received help from God and another person.
And I guess there’s two sides to this story. So I can start and tell some of my side and then you can finish up the story from the point where we were dating
Steve and I were praying and praying about him getting a new job. That was important for multiple reasons. One of the reasons was that for him to once they started going back into the office, he would have to drive from where we’re at in the suburbs into downtown Nashville.
And that was going to be an hour minimum, probably each way for him to make that trip. We knew that that commute was going to be stressful, but also he was just looking for a change. There were very specific things that we prayed for. And always we knew that it was going to be in God’s timing.
Whatever happens, we’re like, okay, God, we know that you’re good. And we know that you have a plan for Steve, and we’re just asking for you to come through at the right time.
Steve: Yeah and that definitely happened. Things work. And I spent a long, long time in the search process. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening have, if you’ve ever looked for a job now is not the easiest time, but it’s not an easy search anyways. That process isn’t easy.
I did want just any job. Sure. I wanted to be particular. I wanted to enjoy what I was doing and to have a challenge. I’m just that type of person. I like a good challenge. I was able to find that and I enjoy it. I like it. I go in each day and every day there’s something new to learn. And of course, maybe you’re thinking, well, you just started this job not that long ago. So you’re in the honeymoon period here, Steve, and that’s true. However, there’s always something I like. And also I like being around people a little bit. So I get to see people. I get to smile. I get to see people where I work who have been healed.
And so they come. I see them on one side, come in and they’re looking a little, you know, sad or in pain or whatever. And then they come out the other side and I can’t promise you that if they feel a hundred percent, because chances are, they just had something done that didn’t feel too great, but they get relief.
And so I like seeing that. I like seeing, you know, people getting help. And so I found some of the things that I could do And be useful in that way. So nothing against my former job, just, you know, sometimes we need to change. sometimes that’s just the way life is. So anyways, that is my hope. I don’t know if that was a perfect way to answer that, but we’ll go with it.
Carrie: I think it’s a great story of hope because it’s about keep praying and keep believing that God has good plans and good things for you. And he’s going to show up when you least expect it, at just the right time to answer that prayer. So we are both very thankful and very blessed.
Steve: I will say this because it’s just a thing with me. Carrie’s going to roll her eyes at me for this one but it’s okay. If this went well today, you can thank Carrie. If it went bad, well, you can email me and gripe and complain. It’s all my fault.
Carrie: He always says this about food, whatever we take food somewhere. That’s what he likes to say. Well, Steve, we’re going to have you back on episode 50 because it’s around our anniversary. And so we’re going to do things that we learned in our first year of marriage.
Steve: Oh. So many things.
Carrie: And then we’re going to go eat seafood.
Steve: That’s my favorite part. I cannot wait. We need a moment of silence just for that.
Carrie: Well, thank you so much for listening, our faithful listeners. And if you know anybody that wants to be a therapist, maybe you can pass this episode along to them.
They might like to know a little bit about what a day in the life of a therapist is like. God bless everyone.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
