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130. Need More Than Weekly Therapy? Is a Therapy Retreat Right for You? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

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

In this episode, Carrie shares the benefits and outcomes of therapeutic retreats, how they are structured, and how to determine if a therapeutic retreat is right for you:

Episode Highlights:

  • The typical structure and process of a therapeutic retreat
  • The use of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and EMDR 2.0 techniques to process trauma and reduce distress.
  • Identifying who is a good candidate for intensive therapy and who might need more foundational work before participating in a retreat.
  • Real-life examples of clients who have benefited from intensive therapy
  • Tips for managing your resources when considering intensive therapy versus regular sessions.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I discuss the benefits of therapy retreats and intensive sessions, a service I’ve been offering for about a year and a half. For those who feel stuck in their healing journey or find that weekly therapy isn’t enough, a therapeutic retreat could be the answer. I walk through what these sessions look like, from setting intentions to deep trauma processing using techniques like EMDR 2.0 and parts work. These retreats allow us to dive deeper and make significant progress in a shorter amount of time.

I’ve seen incredible results with clients who have come from out of state for multi-day sessions. Whether you’re dealing with trauma, OCD, or phobias, these retreats provide the space and time to address core issues that may not surface in traditional therapy settings. We’re able to trace present challenges back to their roots and process them fully, often leading to breakthroughs that would take much longer in regular therapy.

If you’re wondering whether a therapy retreat is right for you, I encourage you to reach out for a consultation. I’ll be honest about whether this approach would be beneficial for your specific needs. Intensive sessions aren’t for everyone, but they can be life-changing for those who are ready for deep work.

Thank you for joining me today. If you found this episode insightful, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps others discover the show and take steps toward their own healing. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Explore Related Episode:

Bonus Episode: EMDR Intensive Therapy Q&A with Steve Bock and Carie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript:

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 130. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I am so excited that you are here with us today to talk about “How do I know if a therapeutic retreat is right for me?”

I started doing day-long sessions about a year and a half ago. Since having the podcast, and not being able to work from clients out of state, I have had people come visit me for multiple days and stay locally and come to the office. We’ve seen great results from that. I want to open that opportunity up to more people. To some of you who are listening, know that you can go online to my counseling website bythewellcounseling.com and book a consultation session. I’ll have you fill out some paperwork and we can talk through what makes sense for you in terms of moving forward. And if it doesn’t make sense for you to take the time to do a therapeutic retreat, or I don’t think that you’re going to get good results from it, I will be honest and tell you, that I don’t take people on for these types of experiences who I don’t think are going to have a good result.

Let’s talk about the structure of an intensive session or therapeutic retreat. Clients will come in in the beginning and we’ll do a mindfulness-type activity to settle. If they are a Christian, we will definitely invite the Holy Spirit into that process. It’s so powerful. The Holy Spirit knows exactly where we need to go, and what we need to work on, and if we trust him in that process, even if it doesn’t make sense on the surface, things always go better.

I also really want God to be speaking into people’s hearts through this process, dropping in truths, not just truths that they know in their head, but also that that can permeate deep down into their spirit. into their body, their heart and mind so that they can love God with everything that they have.

Then what we do is we set an intention. The intention a lot of times has already been set ahead of time. We’ll talk about that In the consultation, what is it that you hope to walk away from if we are quite successful here and have a great therapeutic experience? What do you hope to be different or what do you hope to be responding to differently in your life?

Depending on the state that the client comes in depends on where I go next. Some clients come in. And they’re feeling very hopeless, feeling like why is this going to work, I’ve done all these other things, how is this going to be any different, maybe I’m that person who’s the lost cause who just can’t get any better.

I think it’s important for us as therapists to respect whatever shows up in the room. So if hopelessness is there for a reason, if it’s there to protect this person from trying too hard again and potentially getting hurt, then I can empathetically respond to that. And we can usually move from a state of feeling hopeless to at least feeling maybe open or curious as part of the process.

Other clients come in highly anxious because they know they are going to be working on things that they’ve been avoiding. We may have to take a little bit more time to calm their nervous system a bit before we can engage in the activities, and that’s okay. Other clients come in feeling okay, comfortable with the process, ready to go, ready to get engaged and get started. But wherever a person is at on that initial first day is fine. We just work with whatever is in the therapy room, knowing that things are going to shift and change as we go through the process.

Somewhere in that first or second hour, we’re developing a resource if this hasn’t been created previously. The resource is a healthy, adult part of self that can help wounded child parts heal, It’s very significant and powerful for trauma work to get that on board. It helps our brain be able to make shifts to know that you’re an adult now, that things are different. A lot is different than when you were a kid in terms of there being more things in your control.

lessening a sense of powerlessness, while at the same time, knowing when we were children, we relied so much on adult caregivers to meet our needs. Now that we are adults, we can start to learn to meet some of those needs ourselves. And also, we can open ourselves up to allow God to pour in and meet those needs for us.

We have a total of three hours before lunch, so depending on how time flows, what comes up in the beginning? We then are moving before lunch into a treatment process where we’re looking at what memories do we need to target with EMDR. Two pathways that people can go down here. One is they bring in the memories that they know are bothering them.

But another pathway that I often see is people know, okay, for example, I can’t seem to stand up for myself, I can’t seem to set boundaries, or I can’t seem to have any confidence in my life, I want to be able to do things, but I don’t feel good about myself, I feel worthless. And they’ll tell me, I’m not sure where this comes from.

I know that I’ve had some things happen maybe in my childhood, nothing super significant, nothing that seems major, but there’s just something there that I can’t seem to shake and I’m not sure where it comes from. We will take that presenting issue, looking at how it impacts that person in their relationships, in their work, in their social settings, in at home, at school, and we’ll trace that backwards. So there’s a treatment plan process that I do with people. We will go back and we are just allowing that, getting them into that vein of the nervous system through some questioning, allowing them to sit with what’s happening in their body, whatever’s coming up.

If we’re following that nervous system, then God will show us those next places that the person needs to go or bring those memories to mind that come up related to the present issue. It’s important to note that I never dig up stuff from the past arbitrarily. I’m specifically looking for things that are tied to the present issue that are keeping the person stuck in the present right now.

We’re not going on a fishing expedition to see whatever painful stuff we can dig up. No, what we’re doing is saying what’s here right now and what space in the past is stuck and is keeping you from being able to do the thing that you want to do in the present. This is helpful whether people have had a lot of trauma or a little trauma.

If you’ve had a lot of trauma, you may not know what specific things you need to target that are connected to this present issue. You know that targeting everything is going to feel like too much, and we don’t want to do that. We’re not trying to overwhelm your system here. So we have three hours in the morning.

We take an hour’s lunch break in the middle of the day, usually around noon. When we come back at one, we are usually ready to start getting into that trauma processing with EMDR. I found a couple of things that move EMDR along a little bit faster for my client. One of those things is EMDR 2. 0 involves working memory taxation, bringing that memory vividly into the space of the working memory, trying to hold it there while at the same time being distracted by the therapist giving you different tasks to do. It allows your brain to chew that memory up differently and reduce distress a lot quicker.

The other thing that helps people move along in the EMDR process and not get stuck or start looping has been integrating parts work. This allows people to process very painful things with much less distress. Both of these, the EMDR 2.0 and the parts work. It used to be that I would find people were very overwhelmed emotionally when they would tap into these memories. Since I’ve been using EMDR 2. 0 and parts work, people have been able to process without having the intense emotional re-experiencing. This is probably really good news if some of you have done EMDR in the past and you know how challenging it can be and how emotionally draining it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. I’m coming from a space now of doing EMDR for over 10 years, going through the entire process to become the highest level of training you can receive, which is an EMDR consultant.

I have worked my way around EMDR forwards and backwards. I’ve had people tell me, I haven’t been able to do EMDR in the past with a previous therapist or it didn’t do anything for me. They’ve still been able to have good results. There are some times when we go a little bit heavier on parts work because we need to focus on messaging that someone received and we may process through some negative messaging received from caregivers, but we can still add a mode of bilateral stimulation to that.

There are so many directions that you can go in a day-long session when you have the time. For example, with people dealing with phobias, we can look at processing that with something called a future template, similar to imaginal exposure. You’re imagining how you would like to respond to that situation in the future and processing and working through the body sensations that come up related to that feared experience. Some things are easier to expose yourself to in an imaginal sense versus in a real-life context. For example, if someone is afraid to get in an MRI machine, what we can do is have them imagine that process.

I could also play sounds that the MRI is going to sound like. We can look up lots of things on YouTube, and look at pictures. Whatever is appropriate for the person or whatever they’re feeling comfortable with, we can go down some different directions in regard to phobias specifically. We can process obsessions in terms of triggers to obsessions, that feared worst-case scenario outcome, having people sit with what if that did happen and process through the body sensations, emotions related to that, the feared scenarios.

We can have you practice saying things that you want to say out loud, looking at tone of voice, and assertive communication. These obviously are just a couple of examples, but I hope it’s giving you an idea of how much flexibility you have and how many different directions we can go down with those longer time periods and timeframes.

I often find multiple days are helpful for people who have more than one diagnosis. Examples of if they would identify that they have significant past trauma, and PTSD-like symptoms, while also having OCD. I would consider these clients to be some of my favorite to work with, really clearing through the trauma and then helping them with the skills to be able to manage the OCD in the present.

I have found that trauma certainly exacerbates OCD symptoms. Oftentimes, until we clear up that trauma from the past, we don’t know how much that is going to help clear up the OCD or bring it down to a level that is more manageable, where the person can live with it in their day to day life and feel confident in being able to have the skills to manage the obsessions when they come up.

I have named some of them, but let’s talk about what issues are good to cover in an intensive. I’ve helped people with a variety of things. Recent event trauma, traumatic grief and loss, so that if you work through the trauma, then the grief process will be able to move a little bit easier, a little more smoothly. We are not trying to take away anyone’s grief or sadness. We’re just trying to remove the traumatic pieces that keep them from going through that grief process or keeping them stuck.

Helping people with phobias, whether that’s flying, doctors, dentists, or anything medical procedure. I can identify and relate because I’ve had negative interactions with medical professionals. Hospitalizations as a child impacted me later in life when I faced other medical issues or uncertainties. Lack of confidence is commonly something that people seek more intensive or therapeutic retreat help for because it’s such a complex issue. And that confidence can interfere with someone being able to date.

It could be interfering with them getting a job promotion or interfering with their ability to set boundaries. It could be that you have an unhealthy family member who keeps roping you into some of the same unhealthy patterns, and you’re constantly getting triggered by that person while at the same time wanting to maintain a relationship with them.

We work through, what that looks like to heal from the past hurt from this relationship. What does it look like to move forward and have a healthier relationship with someone? You can only control that health from your end. You can’t control the entire relationship’s health. But I’ve seen people be more at peace in stepping back from relationships a little bit or engaging in a different way than they have before.

I find panic attacks to be something that we can target with EMDR processing. The first panic attack, the worst panic attack, how you’d like to be able to go out and not have the fear of having another panic attack. If you have any other issues going on that you think might be appropriate for a therapeutic intensive, certainly hit me up on the contact page.

Let me know what your thoughts are, and a little bit of what you’re trying to work through, and we can certainly always schedule a consultation and talk that through to see if this modality is right for you. Who is not appropriate for a therapeutic intensive if you’re in active addiction? Right now, you’re probably going to need to seek help of some substance abuse treatment.

Obviously, there may be other mental health concerns going on. You may want to find a co-occurring treatment facility where they can treat the substance abuse and the mental health. Eating disorders can be super challenging and you may need some more intensive treatment. If you’re at a level where you need to seek residential treatment, a therapeutic retreat or intensive may not be right for you. That’s something to keep in mind.

Those I’ve found that do the best with this type of therapeutic setting have a level of openness towards the healing process. They believe that it’s possible. They’ve tried other things in the past. They have a certain baseline level of self-awareness. I don’t take people on for these types of experiences that don’t have a connection to their emotions, that don’t have a connection to their body that aren’t sure how to give feedback or express what they’re thinking or feeling. Those types of individuals need a lot more baseline work of mindfulness, of tuning into their own experience, of developing a little bit more self-awareness. And then they might be ready at a later point for a more therapeutic retreat-intensive type setting.

I want to talk to you about other considerations you may have when thinking about this type of therapy. We have three valuable resources. Time, Money and mental energy and depending on how you want to split those resources up in terms of receiving therapy That’s going to help guide your process. Do you have the time to go to weekly or every other week of therapy?

There have been times in my life when I was looking for A grief support group. I was looking at being involved in something like that and I kept running into not being able to find something that was what I was looking for or that would fit my schedule appropriately. I had so much going on with having a very young child at that point in time because I couldn’t find something that fit, and I knew I really did need some type of more grief and loss work to happen, I chose to go to a day-long grief retreat myself. Let me tell you, it was absolutely incredible. I talked about it in a previous episode in terms of my grief and loss journey.

I was seeing a therapist regularly, but something still felt a little bit like it was missing. I had such a great awareness through the process of the activities at this grief retreat that I thought I came there for one purpose, and then by the time I left, I realized that there was something else inside that I needed to grieve that I hadn’t yet. That was what I ended up working on. It was an incredible process that I hadn’t recognized or realized through going to therapy on a regular basis.

In today’s society, many people are busy. I talk to people who are literally running seven days a week and they feel like they cannot add one more thing to their schedule, yet they know they have things they need to work on. Maybe they’ve tried to go to weekly therapy and they end up canceling because the kid gets sick or because work then interferes and says, you have to be over here. They just can’t seem to get that consistent rhythm or momentum of weekly therapy so you have to take time into consideration. You also may have something to work through that has a time deadline.

For example, if you’re pregnant and you’re trying to recover from your first traumatic birth, you’re time-limited on how long you have to receive therapy before you give birth again if you’re already pregnant. Maybe you tell your spouse, yes, we’re finally going to take that trip that we’ve always wanted to take for our 10th anniversary across the ocean, but you’re afraid to fly. Now you know you’ve been avoiding dealing with it, but hey, I need to work on my flight anxiety before I get on the plane. We talked about time as one of our resources.

Now let’s talk about mental energy. Usually, when I tell friends or family that I do day-long sessions with people, the initial response is, “Whoa! That’s a lot of therapy.” That sounds like a lot. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that thing on social media that’s like, Choose your heart. Staying married is hard. Divorce is hard. Choose your hard. This is one of those, I would say, choose your hard because I know people that come into weekly therapy that say, Man, it’s hard to unpack this stuff and pack it back up and then go be with my family or it’s hard to unpack something and then feeling like I’m just starting to get hit the emotional nerve or I’m just starting to get going on the processing then the 50 minutes are up, and unfortunately, your brain is going to continue to chew on things. That’s just what it does. It’s trying to find resolution.

When you have a longer therapy session, you’re giving your brain the gift of time. Yes, six hours of therapy in a day can be a lot. I’m not going to lie to you or sugarcoat that. You may want to take a nice, long, happy nap afterwards. However, living with pain day after day is also exhausting. Let’s talk for a moment about money.

On the surface, a therapeutic retreat is more expensive. However, when you remember that we’re actually saving time by condensing the process, I believe that people save money in the long term. I remember one client that I did a one-day session with, and She had so many memories that she just needed to process through and unpack that was holding her back in her day-to-day life, things that she couldn’t get off her mind.

It was a very rare sort of intensive in a lot of ways because the targets she essentially picked and knew what things were bothering her. A lot of times we have to go back and do a process and dig for those, but she knew what she needed to process. I remember we just went through the day and I was like, okay, what’s next? She would process it and go to the next memory. Okay, what’s next? At the end of that session, I told her this would have taken you a year in therapy to get through all of these memories. I honestly believe that. But her brain was just so ready and her nervous system, she wanted that healing. She was open to it and we just were able to go through it so that she didn’t have to keep carrying around the pain of those memories over and over and over again.

I can tell you from the therapist’s perspective, I enjoy the longer sessions because we start to see a thread running through very quickly. In all of these different memories, you experienced this, and that is the piece that has followed you around for your whole life. Today is the day that God wants to break that chain for you. Today is the day that you can say, I don’t have to live. Under that lie anymore, I don’t have to live with that limiting belief. It stops today. There is not anything else that lights me on fire more than that, guys. It’s so incredible to see the work that God has done in people’s lives over these longer sessions.

I know for some of you, this episode really landed and you resonated with what I was saying. If that’s you, I just really encourage you to reach out on bythewellcounseling.com and click on the contact form. I would love to get in touch with you. Or you can go on there and schedule a consultation and we’ll talk more about if this is right for you.

Do you want to be the first to know what’s happening on the podcast? podcast. Join our email list at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. We have got some free downloads on there, and you have to actually click the download from your email to sign up for the list. So make sure you take that one extra step.

Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be back next week.

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

Find out how to find the right therapist for your personal situation

14. How to Find a Therapist Who is Right for You

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 14. How to Find a Therapist Who is Right for You

On this solo episode, Carrie shares about how to find a therapist who is right for you. 

  • Carrie shares her own experience searching for two different counselors and how she made the decisions she did in her search.
  • How to evaluating your personal situation with time, scheduling/location, and budget before beginning the search 
  • How to start the online search for a counselor and what to look for

Resources and links:
For more detailed information on finding a counselor who is right for you, check out Carrie’s ebook:
Finding a Good Fit on the First Try: The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Therapist

If you are anywhere in the state of TN and would like to see Carrie Bock, click here.

Other sites for finding a therapist:
Psychology Today
Open Path Collective (low cost option)

Support the show

More Podcast Episodes 

Transcript Of Episode 14

Hello, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 14. 

Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to find a therapist who is right for you. Maybe you’re in the process of looking for a therapist or you’ve thought about looking for a therapist in the past and the process seemed really overwhelming. Hopefully this will break it down for you to make it a little bit easier. 

I have found that finding a therapist is much different than finding a medical professional. Unfortunately, a lot of times people approach it the same way, ending up in disappointment and frustration.

I want to start by telling you about a couple of different times that I tried to find a therapist to start us off.

Many years ago before I got divorced and I was still married, I was dealing with some work stress and my relationships stress. I decided that I wanted to go to counseling. I was looking for someone who was a Christian not because I was concerned about being given advice that wasn’t Christian or somehow being led astray from the faith, but I thought it’s just going to be a lot easier on me if this person has that shared experience. There will be a lot less that I feel like I have to explain to another person because to explain my faith to someone else is going to take a lot of time and so pretty important dynamic in my life. 

I also was looking for someone who was within say about 30 minutes of my house. I wasn’t particularly concerned about driving, but I didn’t want to drive too far. I was thinking that I was probably going to be a little bit more comfortable talking to a woman than a man at that point. I was also looking for someone who would be able to take my employee assistance program which if you don’t know what that is, it’s something that’s usually a part of your benefits package with your employer and that allows you to have three to five, sometimes all the way up to eight sessions for free. Because at that point in time, my budget for therapy was zero. So free was good. 

The other thing I knew was that I was going to have to go to therapy probably in the morning because the majority of my work responsibilities were taking place in the afternoons and evenings. I was seeing kids and so I needed to be able to see them after school got out. 

This led me to a few different people. The first counselor that I tried, I didn’t have a good connection with. In fact, I felt like she was rather judgmental concerning my situation and what I was dealing with and coming in for. So I only went one session to her and did not go back, but I ended up finding another counselor who met those criteria and I did really great work together. She was the main one that actually helped me through my divorce process because I saw her before really during and after for an extended period of time and got a lot of my own stuff worked through.

I’m definitely so thankful that God led me to her. Then I had a therapeutic break. Life was pretty stable and going relatively well, but I got to a point as I talked about in episode 10 with Steve, where I wanted to get back into dating, but every time I tried to, my body basically completely revolted against it, and my mind was all over the place. So that was not going to work for me. I knew that there was probably still some past residual stuff from my last relationship that I hadn’t fully worked through. 

And at this point, I was still looking for a counselor who was a Christian and I was looking for a male. I decided to go see a male because I wanted to get the opposite sex perspective on dating. I didn’t know how healing and therapeutic that would be for me to end up with a male therapist, but it was so beneficial for me. I’m glad I went in that direction.

I wanted to see someone online via telehealth therapy. There were really two reasons for that. One reason was that I had recently started providing telehealth therapy to some of my clients and I wanted to see what the experience was like on the other end. The other reason I wanted to do telehealth was because I did not want to see any of the therapist near me. Therapy circles are relatively small. I didn’t want to have to worry about seeing this person at local professional gatherings or local connections of different EMDR therapists.

I was looking for EMDR trained therapist because I am very familiar with it. I have done EMDR in the past and it was very helpful. It turned out in the most amazing way. That’s not mainly what we did. We ended up doing some somatic experiencing work together, which was also very healing and very therapeutic for me. That was an unexpected blessing of this particular therapeutic journey.

I was looking to pay cash because I did not have health insurance at the time. I had health sharing through medic share at that juncture. I knew that counseling wasn’t going to be covered anyway. I had to kind of figure out what my budget was going to be, what I was going to be able to afford to pay and decided to go every other week to help with the cost factor. I also didn’t necessarily need weekly therapy. I was looking for someone who worked on Wednesdays because Wednesdays at that point was my filing paperwork day. I didn’t see clients and had more flexibility to do personal appointments. 

In each of these examples, I was looking for some things that were similar and some things that were different, but I had to go through these processes of what I was looking for before I got lost in the search process.

You know how it is when you go to Google something, and next thing you know you’ve clicked on 20 different links. You don’t know how you got there. You have a huge list of people to choose from, and it can become super overwhelming and hard to narrow that list down. 

The first advice that I would give you if you’re a Christian, if you believe in God and prayer like I do is to pray that God will lead you to the right person. God knows exactly what you need. If you need a therapist and you need somebody that can walk you through the speed bump of life that you have hit then I believe that God is going to be faithful and open up that door and lead you to the right person at the right time. 

Before you start searching and get lost in the internet jungle or the phone calling jungle, you want to think about several different considerations. One is who do you think that you would be most comfortable talking to about these personal issues? Would you be more comfortable talking with someone who is a Christian? Would you be more comfortable talking with a female or a male? Does it matter if they’re older or younger? Some of these may seem superficial to you but they’re legitimate.

As I explained in my stories, there was a reason I went to see a female at one point and there was a reason I went to see a male at another point. That’s nothing against female therapists out there. That just wasn’t what I needed at that time. I don’t think there’s any shame in saying, “Oh, I think I would be more comfortable with someone older” if that’s the case. That doesn’t mean you’re negatively judging younger therapists. 

The second thing that I encourage you to think about is what do you want to get out of therapy? This is really important, so crucial. Most people don’t think about it and the reason they don’t think about it is because they’re in a crisis. All they know is they’re feeling awful and they want to feel better. 

Sometimes I’ll have people fill out in their paperwork comments like, “I just want to be happy.” What in the world does that mean because happy to me may look completely different than happy to you. So you need to get really clear about what it is that you’re hoping to accomplish. Is it something where you would say, “okay, I’m looking to learn some new tools to manage my anxiety in a healthier way” or “I’m looking to gain more insight into myself because I’m recognizing that I keep getting in situations or patterns that aren’t a good fit for me?” “I want to be able to communicate in healthier ways with my husband.” All really good goals.

Now in light of that, you may be looking for a counselor with specific training in a certain area whether that’s some kind of training with OCD or training that has to do with processing past trauma. Maybe you need someone who has experience working with addiction because that’s something you’re struggling with right now. Whatever it is you want to make sure that your counselor is going to be able to treat you for what you’re bringing in. Counselors typically don’t work with all issues they tend to after they graduate, get more specialized training. We all have to get a certain number of continuing education hours and so we tend to funnel those hours towards things that are interesting to us.

I like to tell younger therapists that your specialty finds you. You don’t find your specialty. For me, I believe that was God leading me in the direction that I ended up going because I had an interest in trauma early on when I was working with children and that caused me to get trained in several different types of trauma therapy to be able to help them.

Now that I’m working with mostly adults and a few teenagers, I’m really working on childhood trauma but it’s just manifesting in adulthood. I ended up getting some additional training in OCD that I’ve found interesting because I had clients who were presenting initially with anxiety and then after some time we found out that their symptoms were really related to OCD. So it seemed like a gradual shift for me to get more training in that area. 

If you see a counselor who looks like more of a generalist, and they’re saying that they treat a lot of different areas. You may just want to ask them if there’s a theme of what their continuing education has been in, or if there are certain diagnoses or types of clients that they feel like they work the best with.  

You want to consider the location of your counselor. This may or may not be important to you. I think many times people pick a counselor who is close to their house, which is not a bad place to start looking. It may make more sense for you to look for someone closer to your work or in between your home and work that you could see on the way to work or on the way home from work.

I would also encourage you to consider telehealth counseling because if you are willing to see someone online via video, then that opens up your network to any provider who’s licensed in the state that you’re in. This can specifically help If you have a hard time finding someone in your area who is on your insurance panel. So the people closest to you may be full who take your insurance, and then you can expand that search out and possibly find someone maybe in your surrounding area that’s accepting new clients via telehealth. Telehealth is also really helpful for people who live in small towns. Maybe you’re concerned about confidentiality or you have personal relationships with the counselors in your town. There may be some ethical boundaries that might be crossed if you were to go see them. So definitely consider telehealth as an option for you. 

Now let’s talk about budget, the dreaded B-word. You need to think about what your budget is for counseling before you ever go. So sit down, look at your finances, talk to your spouse, if you have one. Crunch some numbers and figure out what could I afford to pay either weekly or every other week to be able to see someone. Your budget for therapy is really going to help you determine whether or not you want to find someone who accepts your insurance or whether or not you need someone who does sliding scale or whether or not you can afford to pay for therapy out of pocket.

So let’s talk about each one of those. If you are using your insurance for therapy, please, please, this is so important. You need to understand your benefits before you are thinking about utilizing them on a regular basis. We’re not talking about when you go to the ER because you’re in a dire emergency and you hand someone a card and you get a bill later. You’re going to have a patient responsibility. When you show up for counseling, it’s important for you to determine what that is. That also helps you figure out the whole budget thing as well. You need to know who the carrier is for your mental health benefits. This is not always the same as your physical health benefits.

I know that’s very confusing and sounds bizarre for some of you listening to this, but I promise you if you flip your insurance card over and there is a different number for behavioral health than there is for physical health, you probably have a different company that is covering those mental health benefits. Most people don’t know this. So they will seek a provider that takes the coverage where their medical benefits are and sometimes that gets discovered by the counselor ahead of time. Sometimes it doesn’t get discovered until billing comes back and you’ve been denied. Then next thing you know, you owe that counselor for the rest of the balance of those appointments. So don’t let that happen to you if you’re looking at using insurance, be a good consumer and understand all of your benefits before seeking services. When you call the insurance company or go online, you’re going to want to ask about your mental health benefits specifically for outpatient therapy. You’re going to want to know if you have a copay or if you are meeting a deductible. Oftentimes if you’re meeting a deductible that’s shared with your medical health deductible. So it’s coming out of that same fund. This is important because if you get knee surgery in February and you know that you’ve met your deductible or almost met your out of pocket max, you’re probably going to be pretty golden to go to therapy and not have to pay If you have your out-of-pocket max met. On the other hand, if you have a super high deductible and you hardly ever use your insurance, it may not necessarily be cheaper for you to use your insurance in that case. You’d want to really cost compare and look at that. 

The last thing I want to point out for consideration before you start looking for a therapist is time and scheduling. You need to look at your time that you have and what you have scheduled with work childcare, responsibilities, etc etc. You need to think through when would I actually be able and available to go to therapy? Now we have time for what we make time for. I have clients who see me before work. Clients who get out of work early towards the end of the day to see me. I have clients who meet with me on their lunch break. So I know that you can make it happen if you want to make it happen. This may mean making some kind of special arrangements with your employer to work something out one day a week or one day every other week. You can do this. If you absolutely are on a very rigid schedule and you can’t do that with your employer, then what you need to do probably is look for a counselor who does evening or weekend appointments. So you’ll want to make sure that you clarify that as you’re calling and as you’re looking at websites, you will want to try to see if you can figure out the hours that that therapist works, or when you call them, ask if they work evening or weekend hours. If you think about what you need ahead of time, you’re going to be able to advocate for yourself and weed out people that aren’t able to accommodate your schedule.

So you’ve looked at the various considerations and now you’re ready for your search.

Is there a pastor or a church leader that you can ask for a counseling referral from? Do you have friends that you know that I’ve been pretty open about going to therapy? If you’re looking for your kids, does maybe the guidance counselor at your school know some referrals? Or you could just pull up your insurance list if you’re looking at using insurance and just seeing who the available providers are.  

Now as far as with getting recommendations from maybe friends or family, what they’re looking for in a therapist may not be what you are looking for in a therapist, but sometimes it’s a good place to start and you can at least check that person out and see if they might be a good fit for you.

Since we are living in the age of the internet, there is so much information that you can find out about therapists online without ever having to pick up the phone and call anybody. I know that that’s really hard for some people who are anxious to make those phone calls. So the beauty is often you can reach out via email or through someone’s website. Also sometimes it’s difficult to reach therapists on the phone if they handle their own phone calls and are not a part of a bigger office, then oftentimes you’ll end up getting their voicemail because they’re in session and aren’t able to answer the phone. 

When you’re doing your online research, you may want to keep some type of list or a spreadsheet with who you reached out for and reasons that you may want to contact them or not contact them. For example, maybe you find out that Susie Smith doesn’t work with OCD, so they might be ruled out for you If you’re looking for a counselor who works with OCD. You may find that John Smith doesn’t do couples therapy and that’s what you’re looking for is couples counseling. He was referred to you by a friend of yours who’s seeing him for individual therapy, but then you realize he doesn’t actually have what you’re looking for. Maybe you rule out another counselor because they don’t take your insurance and you can’t afford their self-pay rate. 

There are many different places that you can look online for a therapist, probably the most popular one is psychologytoday.com. Psychology Today has a magazine. They’re a secular entity but there are many Christian therapists on there if you’re looking for a Christian. Just because it’s a popular place to post a profile and it’s relatively inexpensive on our end to be able to do so. You can narrow down the searches on Psychology Today, which I really like. You can narrow them down by location, insurance, male, female, the issue that you’re coming in for and that really helps you narrow down your search. 

You can also look for counselors through a specific professional organization. For example, the AACC has a counselor search on their website. If you’re looking specifically for EMDR therapy, you can go to the EMDR international association website. I’ll post these websites in the show notes for you guys, just so you can kind of see. If there’s a specific type of therapy that you’re looking for, you can look for a therapist who has training or certification in that specific therapy. 

Hopefully, your search has led you to maybe about three different names. If you can narrow it down to just a few people and then reach out to those few people and see who contacts you back. Unfortunately, sometimes counselors are really bad about getting back to people. I don’t know why this is because I think of everyone who contacts me as an individual who is brave enough to reach out for help. And so even if I don’t provide what they’re looking for, at least I try to steer them in the right direction or be kind enough to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” That would be a good thing. But if you don’t have people call you back just know that that’s not on you and it’s not an uncommon experience fully. One of those three people will call you back and you can either ask them additional questions that you may have, or you can go ahead and schedule with them and try it out.

Even with all the work to find a therapist, you may end up in that first session feeling like this is not going to work for me for one reason or another. I want to let you know that’s okay. Sometimes, as they say, it’s quote just a “not a good fit.” So if it’s not a good fit or it’s not gonna work for you for some reason, don’t give up, go back to your list. Go back to the search process, get back up on the horse, and try again. I can say from my own experience that I’m really glad that I kept trying until I found somebody that I could trust and a place where I could get exactly what I needed. 

I’d like to end with a story of hope as I normally do when I have guests on the podcast. This story is actually about finding medical help. I had an issue that I had been struggling with for several years. I had convinced myself that this issue was psychological and that somehow it was my fault and I needed to just fix it psychologically. It turns out that wasn’t the case. I actually had a physical medical condition. So when I finally got brave enough to talk with a doctor about it, they referred me to another person. And after a little while, I was working with that person and we really weren’t getting anywhere, unfortunately, and I said, “Hey, what we’re doing is not working here” and they said, “well, I’m just going to send you back to the doctor that referred you over here.” And I said, “that doesn’t even make any sense to me like they didn’t know what to do with me so they referred me to you. How are you going to refer me back to them?” And when I went back to that doctor, I actually saw a different provider in the office. I had to advocate for myself guys, because sometimes you have to do this in medical situations and I had to say, “I’m not at all getting what I’m needing here from you guys. This is why I came in and I’ve been on this wild goose chase that’s now lasted a couple months and nobody’s helping me.” I was almost like to the point of tears. And he said, “Okay, let’s do this test or let me look at this.”

And he said, “I think I may know what’s going on with you, but, you know, I don’t really have that much experience treating it.”  He was just so wonderful in the sense that even though he wasn’t able to help me. He was able to let me know there is something physically going on with your body that you need taken care of.

I just didn’t give up guys. I just think that’s so important. Just don’t give up. If you aren’t getting the help that you need, keep searching, keep going forward, keep looking.  

I did some online research and I found this doctor in the next county over and I made an appointment with him and he was able to help me to the point where I’m not having that issue anymore. I was just so thankful and so blessed but it was a journey that took me months. It took me time, energy, money, three different medical professionals, test after test, but I got to where I needed to be and I’m so thankful to the Lord for that. First of all, that he gave me the courage to keep going and the hope and the strength to not give up, and that he steered me in the right direction for the people that could help me so that I didn’t have to continue in that suffering anymore. The only regret that I have about going on that journey is that I didn’t start it sooner. I really wish that I had.  

So if there’s something that you’re facing and you can’t do it alone and you need to get help, if the first person doesn’t help you, try the next person, and if they can’t help you, try the next person. Don’t give up guys.

Would you like to share your story of hope? You can do that by going to hopeforanxietyandocd.com and clicking on the contact link. 

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 was completed by Benjamin Bynam. 

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

Should I Take Medication for my Anxiety or OCD?

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD. No Comments on Should I Take Medication for my Anxiety or OCD?

Maybe this is a question you’ve asked yourself. Perhaps you have concerns about side effects, becoming dependent on medication, or wonder if this option is for you. My response to this question is always the same: It’s a personal decision. Each person has to decide what is best for their body depending on their own symptoms. Some of my clients are able to tolerate medication with little side effects while others try several different medications and react negatively to all of them. Some want to try counseling first before starting medication. I respect and honor each individual’s decision.  

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