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Sexual Obsession or Lust Scrupulosity Wants to Know with Steve and Carrie

132. Sexual Obsession or Lust? Scrupulosity Wants to Know with Steve and Carrie

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

In this week’s episode, Carrie brings back her favorite co-host, her husband Steve to discuss the difference between sexual obsession and lust in the context of scrupulosity, offering practical, faith-based strategies for managing these thoughts.

  • The distinction between sexual obsession and lust within the context of OCD and scrupulosity.
  • The different ways men and women process visual stimuli and attraction.
  • Practical strategies for men to avoid falling into patterns of lust.
  • The importance of recognizing and addressing unrealistic expectations regarding sin and temptation in the journey of sanctification.
  • How to differentiate between genuine conviction from the Holy Spirit and compulsive confession driven by OCD.

Explore Related Episode:

118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript:

Episode 133, I am bringing back my favorite co-host, my husband, Steve, because we are talking about an important topic that affects a lot of men and not that it doesn’t affect women, but we wanted him here for the male perspective. So I appreciate him being willing to do this episode with me We’re talking about is it sexual obsession or lust and your scrupulosity wants to know

Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ-follower wife mother, and 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.

If you haven’t heard, we are running a freedom from mental compulsions challenge on August the 5th at noon central time. You can sign up at www. hopeforanxietyandocd.com/challenge. We’re going to be giving away some cool stuff like free coaching with Carrie, and maybe some coffee gift cards thrown in there. You’re not going to want to miss it, so I will see you there.

Carrie: Steve, welcome back.

Steve: Thank you. It’s good to be back.

Carrie: You and I talked a while ago. This episode was really born out of a conversation where I started working with more men dealing with OCD and I came to you and I said one day. Please explain to me this struggle, this battle that men have with lust, just in general. That just really led into a really great conversation. I wish I had a recorder right there and we could have recorded it. But do you remember anything that you said just about how difficult it is like in society for men dealing with lust?

Steve: Word for word, no, I don’t remember. But I do remember the conversation. I agree, men definitely struggle more so with that, it seems because they are visual thinkers. Trying to remember more of the words that we had said, and I just don’t.

Carrie: When I actually came to you and I said, I need you to explain the struggle to me, you said, you’re not gonna get it, was actually the first thing that you said. I just thought that that was really profound. Just talking about how men and women’s brains work differently. Women can see an attractive guy and it’s like, “Oh, he’s cute” or “he’s hot,” and move on versus we’re not necessarily just going to jump into fantasizing about sleeping with somebody or going down that route.

Steve: I can’t say this because I’m not a woman, but I think women tend to think more so on that’s somebody I could have a future with or think a lot of women probably when they look at a man, they might not even be thinking for themselves and maybe simply thinking.

I bet he’d make somebody a good spouse. I bet I got a girlfriend that would just be a good guy for her. I bet. And this woman is probably only seeing this guy shopping in Publix or something hasn’t even spoken to him, he could be terrible, but just by looking at him, he looks nice, he’s probably a nice guy, right?

There’s an innocence there, whereas the guy, he doesn’t give a rip sometimes, I don’t think. Maybe some guys do. I shouldn’t speak for all, but he’s looking and thinking, she’s pretty. Then it goes to, if I were single, da da da da da, or, she’s, man, when I was younger I would, you know, whatever. And that’s never a good way to start a thought. You should just run right there and be done with it. I think that’s a big difference between men and women, not all.

Carrie: Right, and so you’re inundated with it all the time, like, in our culture. They say sex sells, it’s on commercials and billboards. And I had one client tell me that Instagram is basically soft porn. I know that you were trying to, like, follow volleyball at one point and had this.

Steve: That was a horrible idea. I was like, I can’t even see the ball going over the net cause they keep zooming in on who’s playing. so I just stopped. I deleted that. I didn’t want to look at it. I still have Instagram up, but I don’t use it. I mean, I should delete that, but just the same, it was awful.

Carrie: Yes and I know specifically that app, I’ve been told by other people, it targets younger men, like, even if they were just to get on there and depend on their age, it’s, it’s going to show them images that they’re going to want to look at and click on and things like that.

There’s kind of two different pathways in terms of a lot of the men that I’m working with. Some are actually addicted to pornography, and I’m very interested in that overlap between pornography addiction and OCD. I think there’s something to that, the way the brain works, and kind of just getting stuck on things.

That’s not necessarily what we’re talking about today as much. We might touch on it here and there. But those men are saying like, “Okay, I do have this struggle, but I’m working through it. I am Seeking godly accountability or I’m in some type of support group network that’s helping me work through the pornography addiction.”

A lot of times, it’s not something we’re working on directly together But they may talk about it what I really wanted to focus on today is that sometimes men with OCD are so concerned about whether or not they have lusted just by Looking at a woman That then they will go into doing mental compulsions, like, for example, they’re gonna immediately confess that as a sin, like, Oh, I don’t know if I lusted or not, so I better go ahead and just confess it anyway.

This can lead somebody down a loop. They may even just avoid interacting with other women in their life, or I can’t go to the grocery store because then I might see a woman and I might lust and things would be awful. Now it goes from that to OCD is now telling me that I’m going to leave my wife and it’s going to have these horrible consequences because I ran into a 20 something at Walmart, for example.

I wanted for you to give this male perspective on, I know it may be hard to know sometimes, but like, how do you know if “Hey, I just saw someone. She looked attractive. She had nice curves versus it’s going down like that last path.” What do you do?

Steve: Well, and I’ve told you this before. I heard a long time ago that the first look is there’s a person in front of me. It happens to be a woman. She has long hair, whatever. What’s a descriptive look? That’s it. It’s when you keep looking. That’s the problem. When it grows, when you begin to think more intimately of what could or couldn’t happen, and it could start probably innocently, like, Oh man, I bet she’d be fun on a date.

Then it goes from there, and that, I mean, that’s not the worst thing you could think of, but boy, it can really get you down the wrong path, I bet. I think it’s easy to get trapped one way or the other. I don’t know the OCD side so much, but I know on the pornography side, or the thinking lustful thoughts, it would be so easy just to keep going down that rabbit trail.

It just keeps growing. I think God gives you an out all the time, like the little voice, like, “Hey, stop it,” or the phone rings or something. But we don’t stop it. We keep going.

Carrie: I guess your recommendation would be for guys to like look away then. Like if you really think that you’re starting to get into that.

Steve: Stop looking at your Instagram account if that’s the problem. You’re going to make up every excuse to stop, I bet. Just do it. For us. For a lot of the guys that I know, we’ve gotten accountability partners. Whether we had the problem or not, one guy told me, he said, Steve, we’re men. That’s just the way our brains work. We get to stop it. Now, I don’t want to say that because if God made us in the perfect image, I really don’t think he made us, our first words be “Ooh la la.” But, not to be funny, but to be funny, to make the point. I think that you have to be careful. And so, holding one another accountable, I mean, it’s not easy.

Carrie: But what you’re saying is like, lust basically takes a second glance that may not take long, but it does take a little bit of time. So if you’re finding yourself avoiding everybody or just feeling like you’re having a hard time functioning, even Interacting with maybe other women at work or interacting with women at church because you’re afraid like, oh, I might lust after that person.

What happens is a lot of times the fear that we fear we then create, right? So then you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, am I thinking about it? Oh, maybe I am. Well, you know, well, I can’t do that. That’s bad.” And it just creates this mental spiral and you get sucked further down into that OCD. So being able to really recognize what’s actually happening in the present is what we try to teach people.

I also think at the same time, too, that if this is a common struggle, it’s unreasonable to think that you’re just never gonna struggle with it ever again, like, especially if this has been an issue in your past, like, say, there’s a guy that’s come out of pornography addiction or come out of sexual addiction to think that person is never going to lust again seems unrealistic. Sometimes people with OCD will set themselves up with unrealistic expectations. We have to be able to, just like any other sin, we have to be able to deal with that in our life in a healthy way.

Steve: Yes. I think it’s on the addiction end of it. It’s like anything else. You don’t set yourself up to fall back into that. Could it happen? Yes. absolutely. But when you’re not setting yourself up. When you are like, “Oh, I’m going to look at this webcam today. It’s got girls on the beach playing volleyball,” but, you know, to go back to the volleyball thing, but, “Eh, it’s no big deal.” Then before you know it, you’re right back into it, I bet. So, I think you have to really, like, “I don’t need to do that.”

I’m not trying to be guilty here of anything, but, I think I’m going to avoid that today. On the OCD side, I don’t understand that as well as you do, obviously, but I really feel bad for somebody who has that fear. All he’s doing is not wanting to lust, the thing he’s not doing to begin with.

Carrie: Right.

Steve: But the fear of it is telling him otherwise, I suppose. I feel bad for that person. That’s tough.

Carrie: If you have lusted, if you have gone too far, making sure that you’re getting right with God is important. Making sure that you’re confessing your sins and restoring that relationship with God.

I think sometimes we perceive God, get so frustrated with us because We confess some of the same things, maybe that we have the same struggles over and over, but that is how we are becoming more and more like Christ is going through that sanctification process. We have to take that seriously. And at the same time, not feel like, Oh, I just keep running myself into the ground and keep making the same mistakes. You’re still loved even if you’re struggling.

Steve: Yes. This is a little different, but on the forgiving note, I am studying right now in the Bible where Jesus tells Peter, “You’re going to deny me.” He just calls him out flat out. “You’re going to deny me not once, not twice, but three times before the rooster crows.” I guess in the AM hours. Sure enough, he does. And yet, God took that. Peter realized, “Boy, I really messed up”. He felt shame. He didn’t feel worthy. I think of us with our sins. We don’t feel worthy. I can’t break this. I said I wouldn’t do it, and I did it just like Peter did. God uses him. He starts out those churches. Amazing. He is a great encourager to others. So, I think God can flip that script for you, just like he did for Peter.

Carrie: Right.

Steve: You’ve got to make the change.

Carrie: Absolutely, and I would encourage people that if you have been through something similarly like this, that if God gives you an opportunity to share your testimony, to encourage others, maybe who are having similar struggles, to do that.

It’s hard for us to admit things that have happened in our past or things that we’ve done, but God can really use those in a powerful way to impact other people. I would encourage people to think through what type of person OCD is telling them they’re going to become if they don’t obsess about not lusting because we know that OCD attacks people’s character.

Sometimes someone may believe, “Oh, I’m a perverted person because I’m struggling with this. Oh, I’m just disgusting.” Like I said before, there may be this imagined scenario. I’m going to run into some lady at the coffee shop and then run off with her and leave my wife and my kids and just ruin my entire life. It just doesn’t work. It becomes this whole rumination spiral that involves a lot of confessing, maybe reassurance seeking, confessing to your spouse, maybe, “Oh, I lusted after someone today,” and that can then cause some relationship rift.

In ICBT, we’d really encourage people to look at like, what is, we call the feared self. What is that feared self that you’re trying to run from? There are definitely ways to address that and get back to who you really are, the real self, which as Christians, is the amazing integration of like, we know who we are. The Lord tells us who we are. We’re called, we’re chosen, we’re loved, we are forgiven, we are free in Christ.

Just so many great promises and so many identity verses really in the Bible. I don’t know if we were to tease all of those out. And that’s how OCD sometimes gets people roped in or stuck into doing the same things over and over again.

What would you say to somebody who really struggles to see themselves as Christ sees them?

Steve: I would say, talk to people. Talk to someone who is a Good mentor for you, or just a friend who’s going to be honest with you though and truthful. And I think that you’ll find if they’re steering you in the right direction and giving you good godly advice, you’re going to find out that God does have something great for you.

They’re going to name your great qualities that you do have. Now God’s already maybe used you. You may not even realize it, but that he will continue to. And that honestly. You can’t do anything on your own. You need the strength of others. You need the strength of God.

Carrie: Yes, that’s good. If we’re questioning whether or not we have sinned, then certainly like we have verses in the Bible and the Psalms that talk about, you know, inviting God to search our hearts. Search me and know me, see if there be any wicked way and lead me into the way of everlasting. we really can rest and trust the conviction of the Holy Spirit as a Christian. The conviction is actually a really good thing because it means that we’re connected with God and that God is revealing to us things that we need to bring to him, that we need to give our best.

If we’re over-confessing things, it’s almost like saying I’m sorry to someone too many times. You have people who walk around and they’re like, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and after a little while, you don’t know what they’re apologizing for. You have no idea what they’re apologizing for. It’s almost like they’re apologizing for existing.

I would encourage you if you’re confessing all the time, you find it like it’s a compulsion that you’re engaging in all the time, to be intentional about pausing once or twice a day, maybe in the morning, at night, and be intentional about your confessional time with God, that’ll get you out of that constant confession.

If you find yourself urging the urge to confess something to maybe shift that prayer into a thankfulness prayer or down a different route so that you can get out of that. And like we said before, too, if it is less than you’re struggling with, if it’s pornography, if you are fantasizing about somebody that you’re not married to, or you’re watching videos you shouldn’t be, you’re on, your Instagram is just full of soft porn, then you need some godly male accountability in your life. There’s Celebrate Recovery, there are other things that you can do to get the help that you need.

Steve: I think too, you were talking about your prayer life, praying to God and you’re saying you’re sorry and It doesn’t seem like the sincerity is there even, or like it’s more fear than realistic. I think there’s definitely something to be said about just sit in peace. Just sit in his presence, don’t say another word. Just sit in peace. See how long you can do that. And I’m not saying meditate solely. I mean meditate on his word. That’s great. That’s good. Just sit in peace. And then when you’re done When time’s up, if you’ve sat there for 5, 10, 20 minutes, whatever it is, what has he told you? What’s the clear thing in your mind? And there’s probably a good answer for you, a good direction, a good conversation with God in a sense, but we don’t listen enough. I mean, we come up and just, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Our daughter, for instance, does that all the time. She comes up to me. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry, Daddy.” “What have you done? You haven’t done anything. You’re okay. You just think you’ve made me upset. I’m not upset with you.” I think God’s the same way with us. You need to just sit and listen and think about what you’re saying. Think about the problem. Think it through.

Carrie: Yes.

Steve: But that’s hard.

Carrie: We have the front porch life now. We have a small front porch with two rocking chairs on it. Love it. Two wicker rocking chairs that you worked really hard to put together. I think about something like that, like you and I could sit out on the front porch, for example, and we might not say anything to each other for a while.

You just relax and kind of sit there and we don’t always need words all the time. So these are contemplative forms of prayer. We’re going to talk about some of that in a future episode, and I think that that will be awesome. So stay tuned in for that one. If you struggle with obsessive praying.

Steve: That’s good. Those are my favorite times, or at the end of the day, or any time that I can sit on the rocker. I’m such an old man now, and I own it. I own it, and all the neighbors that we’ve met know, I like to sit in my rocker and just sit in a nice, peaceful sway, listen to the birds, and rock. That is my life. And I love it. It’s just, it makes me feel good.

Carrie: Thank you for coming on and sharing your male wisdom. I can always count on you to hop in and be a co-host when needed.

Steve: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. As always, I’ve enjoyed it.

Carrie: 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 and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or 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.

Relationship Obsessions Combined with Scrupulosity Pierre's Story - Carrie Bock

131. Relationship Obsessions Combined with Scrupulosity: Pierre’s Story

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

In this episode, Carrie shares Pierre’s courageous journey with OCD, exploring how childhood fears and religious teachings shaped his mental health struggles and eventual path to healing through counseling and faith.

Episode Highlights:

  • Pierre’s journey through OCD and the compulsion to replay past events.
  • The role of forgiveness in freeing Pierre from resentment and anger.
  • Pierre’s discovery of peace through trusting in God’s promises during anxious moments.
  • The power of grace in liberating from perfectionism and fear.
  • Insights into how faith and forgiveness can lead to personal and spiritual growth.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I’m honored to share the powerful testimony of Pierre, who has experienced both relationship obsessions and scrupulosity. Pierre’s journey began in childhood, with an early fear of sin and losing his salvation, which later developed into intense OCD symptoms. His story is one of struggle but also of profound spiritual growth and healing.

Pierre discusses how his fears initially took root when a family friend read a Bible passage about the sin against the Holy Spirit. As a child, this deeply impacted him, leading to a persistent fear of blasphemy and the loss of his salvation. These fears followed him into adulthood, manifesting as relationship obsessions and religious scrupulosity, including a deep anxiety about remarriage after his first marriage ended in divorce.

Throughout the episode, Pierre shares how his OCD journey intertwined with his faith, leading to a complex struggle between spiritual concerns and mental health challenges. His turning point came when he began to understand that his obsessions were not sins but rather a mental health issue. With the support of counseling, his wife, and a discipleship program, Pierre learned to renew his mind and reject the lies that OCD fed him.

Pierre’s story highlights the importance of understanding OCD from both a spiritual and mental health perspective. It’s a reminder that God’s love is constant, even in the midst of our deepest fears. If you’re struggling with similar issues, know that you’re not alone and that healing is possible.

Thank you for listening to this episode. If you found Pierre’s story encouraging, please consider leaving a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps others find this show and begin their journey toward peace and healing. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Explore Related Episode:

118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript:

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 131. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. On today’s show, we have a personal story of OCD from someone named Pierre. We’re not saying his full name on the podcast or sharing any images of him. For ministry reasons, I wanted to bring you this powerful testimony.

Pierre emailed me a while back about his story, and I thought, this is just It’s so powerful. People need to hear what God has done in his life.

Carrie: Pierre, tell me a little bit about your childhood experience and how OCD showed up for you. What did that look like? How did it all start?

Pierre: I don’t know where to start. I wasn’t a fearful child. I wasn’t really somebody who hid in the bed. I was a bit adventurous and I loved the outdoors and I wanted to play every kind of game, but where is when it started really as a child, we had a nanny, a family friend who just came when my parents were out and she would babysit. My brother and I, for bedtime, she would read the Bible to us, and I didn’t even know that it was not the same to do to read the adult Bible to kids.

She would read out of the page, and one night she just read along, and it came to the story of the sin against the Holy Spirit, which at the time, maybe I was eight or nine, I didn’t understand what was it about I just realized that something was off with those stories. Something I didn’t understand. 

I remember when the next day I left by my schoolmates going to school before me. A few seconds in the corridor before the teacher realized, and she grabbed me. I gave my life to Jesus just in case because having heard a story like this, that you can be in danger of hell, even as a child.

Carrie: So you were scared of God after hearing that story?

Pierre: I didn’t understand. What it was about, I just know it was bad. If I found myself in that situation, it was bad. So I wanted to be safe. I had the sense that I could potentially sleep or fall or lose my salvation or something like that, even at that age. I think that was something I carried with me. I had no idea that I could go to my parents and talk about it.

Carrie: Why was that? Were you afraid you’d get in trouble or you weren’t sure that they would understand what you were afraid of?

Pierre: They would not understand. They would not realize it was serious for me. And I had no idea that it would be just a thing to do. When you’re scared, you go to your parents because they’re important people in your life.

They would reassure you. They would explain things. That’s what I do with my own children now. Anything that scares them, I want to talk it over and make sure we’re on the same page. We understand exactly what’s going on and I don’t let it happen again.

Carrie: But there was some teaching in your church that you had told me, like, about emotions and therapy. So maybe there wasn’t this freedom to be anxious or be depressed or have other certain emotions.

Pierre: I grew up in a Christian family, so that’s absolutely fantastic. I even had the privilege of having my parents, my dad is a pastor, and his dad before him was a pastor, so that’s very good. And the flip side is also, I think, the sense that I had very young that I had to be very careful about my behavior in church and elsewhere.

I wasn’t really allowed to be rough and to keep the honor of the family. I would say, something like that. I was very serious about things I heard in church. That was always my belief that He’s a God and we need to be careful not to offend Him. So we don’t sin, we don’t do bad stuff, we don’t use bad language.

Things I discovered later on in life that I never knew, but that’s things you don’t do either. I would say my church has a Pentecostal background. I grew up in the older generation. When I was a kid, these people were still around. I understand now that they came out of the Great Depression and the Second World War period of time, when maybe there was an upbringing of not showing up emotions.

The phrase I heard a lot was put up a smile on your face. Whenever there is some problem in your life, you don’t talk about it, at least openly. You don’t share your struggles.

Carrie: So that makes sense, probably why you wouldn’t share things with your parents if you felt like it.

Pierre: Yes. I can’t really translate that in English, but something I heard is that a sad Christian is a liability to the church. You’re not sad. If you’re a Christian, you have to be joyful. You have to be crazy about God and everything goes well for you. Because the faithful are blessed or something like that.

Carrie: I think a lot of people still believe that today. Like if I’m a Christian, I’m supposed to have joy, I’m not supposed to be angry, that’s another one.

I’m not supposed to be mad, and I’m not supposed to be sad, just supposed to be happy, joy, joy, joy all the time, and that’s just not reality. Thankfully, we have a lot of Christians in the Bible who weren’t happy all the time and who did cry and who did express emotions and thinking, just thinking about David and the Psalms.

I don’t know how people justify those types of beliefs with scripture. When you shifted some of your beliefs on this later in life, I imagine, was that comforting to you to find those places in scripture where Elijah was depressed and David was really sad? I mean, was that kind of comforting like, Oh, you can be sad and be a believer?

Pierre: Now I know, but there was a time when maybe I was starting to develop what later became a full-blown depression. When I was reading the Bible, only the bad bits would jump at me from the page. I would read condemning verses or things that I wasn’t really expecting. And because I would read the Bible as if God is speaking to me, while he’s speaking bad stuff to me.

Apparently, something must be wrong, I must sin somehow and still have that background of, I can lose my salvation, I can fall from grace, you know, I must be very careful. So if I read something in the pages of the Bible that speaks negatively. Therefore, there is a chance that I need to check my track record of going to church, especially being on time.

That was a big thing. At the time, it was all about what you wear. You are a man, you have a suit and a tie. And if you’re a woman for some time, it would be head covering. A lot has changed in my church for the better, but until maybe 20 years ago, I still remember those things being strongly imposed.

Carrie: Did it feel like there were just when it came to God, there were just a lot of rules? Maybe you’re going to mess something up.

Pierre: One thing I also want to emphasize, it’s me, it’s my own understanding of things. Other people might have not viewed the same Bible. Versus the same way. And I changed my views over time also. And then I remember, and when it all started for me, I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to go to therapy if it was not an extra scene on top of all the others.

So my dad was the pastor. He was very. Open for therapy. So I learned later on to really go to him and speak. That was a process.

Carrie: Sure. How old were you at that time where your dad encouraged you to go to therapy?

Pierre: I was 30 years old, nearly. If you remember from the beginning of my story, about 20 years, I had carried that basically fear in me.

Maybe going back that we can change that little timing there. I remember because in the church where you talk a lot about Jesus, about the return of Jesus, that’s what you expect in the church. I was taught about the rapture. So as a consequence, even very in my teenage years, if I could not sleep at night, I would go down and check on my parents to see if there was in their rooms. If I hear them snore, that’s okay. The rapture has not opened. I’m okay. I can go back to bed. But nearly every night I would do that. It became sort of a ritual for me.

Carrie: Yes. A lot of checking.

Pierre: I needed to be sure that Jesus had not left me out. That’s one little episode also. What happened to me was about 22 years old. I got married very early and this marriage didn’t turn out well at all. My wife just left me after one year. I came home to my parents a bit like a prodigal son. I’m thankful to them that they didn’t shame me at all, or they didn’t really blame me for anything that happened, as it was before. And so on top of everything else, I would carry that as a label on me that, you know, I’m done again.

I would read everything I can get my hands on about those two things. The big subject would be the Holy Spirit that Jesus talks about, and divorce and remarriage, that is ever a thing that we talk about in church. I’ve gone through every bit of literature in French, in English, in everything, really.

Carrie: Just trying to seek that reassurance that it would be okay for you to get remarried.

Pierre: Every visiting pastor, you know, about his opinion, one got really fed up and told me to just stop. Oh, man. It was too much. That’s the setting because when God allowed me to meet this girl, she is a British lady, and now we’ve been married for about 12 years.

We have two children together and she’s fantastic. I hope she hears that, but when I was considering talking about my feelings about what I really, I wanted to invite her out and we went to McDonald’s the very first thing. So what about me? I’m divorced. I’m the son of a pastor, and I’m not that poster child of a pastor child.

Thankfully, someone in the youth group got her first, and she was away somehow. She told me, I know your story. That was out of the way, and we could just start talking, and we decided that we liked each other. We started to have tea. She came to France to be an English language assistant, and she wouldn’t find a house.

A mom just suggested that she would write the church, the nearest church to her job. They knew someone who could provide accommodation. The email landed at the pastor’s desk and he said, I have two grown-up sons and they’re out. The bedroom is available. Just come. She ended up in my bedroom.

We find out that we have some of the way to work and back in common, we would share that length of a journey on a Tuesday evening and get to know each other a little bit. When I was considering whether we could go further, get engaged, because I was serious about these things, the thought was ever can I, should I, is that something that’s allowed at all?

I would go back and forth. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. I think that broke my brain over it.

Carrie: This whole time you didn’t know that. I mean, this is kind of classic relationship, OCD mixed with scrupulosity, it sounds like. You didn’t know you had OCD at all?

Pierre: No. It’s actually my wife who found out several years later because when she has a question. She Google’s everything and she found OCD scrupulosity symptoms be like this and this and that. And she said, “Oh, that sounds like Pierre”, but I’m ahead of myself. What happened was that I started to have those thoughts in my head and it was an actualization of my fear that I would blaspheme the spirits.

Just as the Bible describes really a flaming arrow, like a shooting star in my head.  I just couldn’t or I didn’t know what to do with that and they became even more present. I think it lasted about two weeks and on the 31st of May 2010.

I remember the day.  I remember the moment it just broke out. It was just us as a damn. A dam had broken in my head and I was in that panic attack that just could not stop. I was in my own flat. I was grown up. I was independent. I was having my life. I ran back to my parents and eat under the bed. I just couldn’t say anything because I just thought, you know, if I speak it, it will become true.

It would become a true blasphemy. So it was unspeakable. In the real sense of the word, I was feeling like I was burning inside of me. My chest was so tight and I was completely shocked. That’s something I wanted to avoid by all means. Something I’m not something I just wouldn’t dream of and it was all happening again.

I’m describing it from the perspective of somebody who’s read every single verse about it. I just couldn’t sleep at night and I just wouldn’t be awake during the day. So to me, that’s a description of hell.

Carrie: That was anxious all

Pierre: The time for no particular reason and I wasn’t about to blame God because the thing just happened in my head.

The very first reaction of my father was to get an appointment with a Christian counselor. I learned that these guys exist. He gave me something to sleep, and we started talking about my story and everything I shared my fears and I shared everything I could remember about my difficult moments, the divorce, the different hurts that I lived as a teenager or young adult, the difficulty about working in the workplace. I had some difficulty keeping a job.

I think everything feeds the anxiety. Every little rejection, whether it’s true or just perceived, it’s all added. And then when it’s completely, when the hole is full, it explodes and,

Carrie: So how did you come to like that realization that this was a mental health issue versus a spiritual issue?

I think that’s something that a lot of people dealing with OCD wrestle with. Is this a spiritual issue? Is this a mental health issue? Is this both?

Pierre: To me, if it’s a spiritual issue, it needs a spiritual answer. In my case, because I thought the sin was too big to be even forgiven. Just read about what Jesus says himself. If truly this is the case, there is no forgiveness, so there’s no need to go to a spiritual answer. 

Carrie: Makes sense.

Pierre: I had to go around the short circuit, the anxiety to be able to deal with it, to really understand what it is all about. When I realized that it’s not a sin issue because I haven’t actually proceeded to blaspheme the spirit because that’s not what I wanted to do in the first place.

That’s through the reading of all the material that I came across. I realized what Jesus is really talking about. I’m able to initiate my own understanding of what’s happening. I receive a lot of help. Other people’s point of view. But that’s particularly important that people just speak into your life at this very moment, then bring hope and bring comfort that no, you’re not actually seeing the problem, whether it’s mental, whether it’s a disturbance in the brain.

I have no idea. I just know that something happened. And so therefore. There must be a problem, but it has others, and God is not angry at you for thinking whatever comes through the brain.

Carrie: You found counseling really helpful, kind of getting that objective point of view on everything and some clarification?

Pierre: What really kept the balance when I got married to my wife, we moved to the UK and someone in the church just grabbed me and took me to a discipleship program called Freedom in Christ, which really helped me a lot.

It takes really the fundamentals of the Bible in a way that engages the person to see themselves as really, they are saved. They are redeemed, they are new, and they can renew their mind, they can change what they believe about God and other people, especially themselves. They can fight those thoughts that come into their heads, and just not believe them as if they were themselves thinking these things.

It might be the enemy just poisoning their minds, and they can just stand up and say, “No, I don’t want to think these things. They’re not me. They’re not what God wants me to think about renewing your mind.”

I remember one of the sessions was about forgiveness. What they ask you to do is to take a piece of paper and on the column, you write the name of a person and next to it, what they did or what they said to you.

The very fact, and next to it, what you felt about it and what it made you believe about yourself, about God or something like that. And when you decide to forgive this person, you realize that you’re not holding what they did against them at all anymore. 

I have a story about this, if I may. I was working for an old Christian lady. She has a big house, plenty of rooms. She needed a cleaner, but it was a particular kind of lady because she had very strong ideas about how she wanted the cleaning done. We always found ourselves at odds about my hoovering the whole thing at once versus her wanting one room at a time.

I grew very stressed and intense, even as far as spraying every morning that would be okay and that we don’t have that sort of, an argument over how the dusting is done or how the beds are made or something like that, which I find ridiculous. 

One time I was working for her and it all became very, just too much. In my head, I kept just thinking about the past. A lot of things just came up from very long ago. What I used to do to deal with these things was to replay the whole story in my head and try to get myself in a different outcome or be able to say, finally, 10 years after the fact, what I should have said or what I wanted to say to that person who’s now dead, maybe, or gone. I didn’t realize that it had no effect. It just feeds the problem.

Carrie: Yes. It’s a compulsion essentially to replay things in your mind.

Pierre: Basically in the same week, I went through this session on forgiveness. This lady’s name was on the list. The next week, I went back to work and the same story again, and she was not happy about the way I cleaned the room.

I remember just looking at her and thinking, what’s going on? I should be in tears now. I should be completely overwhelmed. And it’s just as if, It’s okay. He’s just speaking what she wants to say. I’m here and we can start talking about these things. I said, “You know what? You’re my employer. Yes, but I’m also your brother in Christ, and you have no right to speak to me like that.”  That was one element, one story when I was really at that moment, taking things. Biblically, I could handle things that I was never able to do before.

Carrie: That forgiveness piece is really powerful. Then almost like it freed you up to be assertive and communicate healthily instead of just holding all of that anger inside.

Pierre: I realized that a lot of what I was afraid of were lies. Lies that I pick up very early about not sharing my problems, about being a good boy, not making a mess, not making a fuss about anything. Things that I picked up wrongly from church. I’m sure that nobody ever taught these things from the pulpit, but that was what I received.

Carrie: You just felt like you had to be perfect. That was part of your conscientiousness.

Pierre: I realized also that I can trust God when he says that he loves me.

Carrie: That’s huge. How did you get to that point? Like, you can trust God when he says he loves me.

Pierre: Well, I want to say I’ve come a long way. I was reading the book of Exodus, the Ten Commandments. When I was in that state of really being fearful about being very anxious. So it’s, it’s a long time ago, but I remember I read it in French. I don’t know exactly how you read it in English. It jumped at me that this phrase is not written as a commandment is written as a promise. So in English, it’s, it does say, you shall not insert the comment, you shall not have other gods, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not, in my French Bible, it’s written as a future tense, and it changed everything, saying that, by the grace of God, I shall not do these things. 

Of course not. Why on earth would I go and murder somebody? Why would I even dream about cheating on my wife or something like that? Of course, it’s not me, my own self that’s able to do these things. It’s the power of God in me. But the way you read the Bible also informs the way you live.

I remember and, I’m still able to share it with people that came to free us from the rules and to give us life. It’s not about being perfect and checking all the marks so we can actually have a true relationship with God, brothers.

Carrie: I think that’s awesome. What would you want to say to somebody who feels like they’ve been going through this for a long time and they don’t feel like they have a lot of hope or that things can get better or maybe they feel like they’re beyond help? What would you say to that person?

Pierre: I’d be very careful saying, it’s okay, you’ll get over it. You know, I’ve been there before. I know what you feel. Those things are very dangerous to say. But just encourage people to talk about it, to open up, not to keep things inside as a prison. In my notes, I’ve written, uh, OCD is slavery.

It’s like, we chain ourselves with different fears that we have, the lies that we believe. We give the devil an opportunity to keep us down, but in fact, Jesus wants us to be free and to free others. So I love the song, “I’m No Longer a Slave to Fear.”

Carrie: Yes. that’s a good one.

Pierre: Every time I sing it, I change the chorus a little bit. I’m no longer a slave to anger. I’m no longer a slave to lust. No longer a slave to procrastination, anything. I have found those things about myself. Every time I think, every time I worship, every time I meet other people and we start talking about these things, I just jump on the opportunity.

I was those emotions, I was anxiety, and I was in bondage. I’m not perfect. I’m still on the way. I have moments where my wife reminds me that I’m going on a rant and it’s not healthy, but I’m definitely better than I was even a year ago.

Carrie: Yes. That’s awesome.

Pierre: Jesus loves you and he went all the way to die on the cross so that the fear and the anxiety would be dealt with. 

Carrie: The love of God is so powerful for us to focus on in terms of talking about being free, and you’re not the first person that said OCD is like a prison, I’ve definitely heard that from many people, or it’s like slavery, and when we truly understand and can rest and trust in the love of God, that changes things just dramatically in our lives, I’ve seen that in my life, just knowing like, okay, I’m going through suffering, I’m going through a hard time, there’s difficulties, but I know God loves me, and I know that I can rest in that, and if he loves me, and he’s my father, then he knows what’s best for me, and I can trust him that this isn’t the end of the story yet.

I think your story has so many redemptive pieces, even just talking about your wife, there’s probably somebody listening to this thinking, oh I’m never going to be able to get remarried again. I definitely went through that when I felt like I had the scarlet letter of divorce all over me after I got divorced from my first husband.

I just kind of wanted to say I didn’t want this. This wasn’t even something that I wanted. It happened. God brought you another spouse and God brought me another spouse. There’s hope out there too, for people who are struggling to find love and to find compassionate people that understand struggles. That piece is beautiful in itself as well. Your wife’s being patient with you and walking you through some of those challenges that you were struggling with. 

Do you still have some of the thoughts about the obsessions about blasphemy coming back and are those easier to shake off now?

Pierre: I think that this is dismantled right now. I’m not thinking in any shape or form at all about actually blaspheming. That would be a different story if I did. But anything else that really comes and scares me, any thought about finances, for example, anything that Price to tell me that I’m not going to make it I can’t handle the same way why God would let me down is rescued me from so much can take my little person and carry it to something I never dreamt about I would never have known that I would be married and have two beautiful children and if you’ve told me when it happened.

When we got married, we had nothing no money in the bank that itself is a story that I could also share. how God provided everything and also the fact that we are two in the boat so we can remind each other when one of us has a down moment. We can help each other and pray for each other. So it’s not always my wife who shakes me up. Sometimes it’s me. It’s my turn to say, I’ve been sad before. I’ve been there. I know what you feel, but it’s not the end of the story.

Carrie: Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I think it’s going to be encouraging to some other people who are struggling. I know it can be challenging sometimes speaking in your non-native language.

I appreciate you working through the English with us. We have people who listen all over the world, so I know that we have people that listen in the UK and Australia and other places. It’s always nice to hear from people outside the US too, and their stories.

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 Are you struggling in your OCD journey right now? Are you tired of that endless cycle of obsessions and compulsions? I know some of you are dealing with mental compulsions like rumination that just seem so hard to get out of. Please come join me for the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. It’s a free webinar that I’m putting on. August the 5th at noon central time.

You can sign up at hopeforanxietyandocd.com/challenge. I’m going to be talking with you about how inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy may be able to help you. I’m Super excited to bring the 12 modules of ICBT to you in mid-August. 

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

121. Suicide Prevention: One Life Box at a Time with Heather Palacios of Wondherful

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

In this episode, Carrie delves into the challenges of facing uncertainty amidst significant life transitions. Drawing from her own experiences, she offers helpful tips for coping with uncertainty and finding peace amid the unknown.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of trusting in God’s plan and finding peace amidst unknown circumstances.
  • Insights into dealing with uncertainty from a faith-based perspective.
  • Ways to find comfort and strength in your personal journey through uncertain times.
  • Tips for maintaining confidence and hopefulness despite facing unknowns in life.

Episode Summary:

I’m excited to share a deeply moving conversation with Heather Palacios, the founder of Wondherful. Heather discusses the intense shame and isolation she felt, particularly as a pastor’s wife, battling suicidal thoughts and actions while feeling trapped by societal and religious expectations.

Through years of therapy, medication, and unwavering faith, Heather has not only survived but has thrived, turning her pain into purpose. She founded Wondherful, a nonprofit that has sent nearly 15,000 life boxes to people struggling with mental health issues across the country and around the world. These boxes, filled with items that have helped Heather stay alive, are a lifeline for so many.

Her testimony is a powerful reminder of the importance of mental health support within the church and the healing that can come from sharing our struggles openly.

Tune in and explore how God’s love and the power of community can transform our deepest pain into a powerful testimony of hope.

Check out related episode:

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. My name is Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee and the host of this podcast. Today, I have an interview with Heather Palacios, who is the founder of Wondherful. We’re going to hear about her story of her own mental health struggles and what led her to start and continue. It’s just grown and grown and grown. 

Carrie: We’re glad that you’re here today.

Heather: Thank you for having me, Carrie. You’re amazing.

Carrie: Thank you. I wanted to hear a little bit about your own journey with mental health. When did that start for you? How did that show up? What did it look like?

Heather: Great question. It started when I was eight. That was a minute ago because I’m 50. It started in 1981, and at eight years old, I started having thoughts of suicide, but then I actually penned it in a letter and mailed it to my grandparents. You’re the first to know this. My mom and dad found that letter recently and mailed it to me.

I’ll be using that as a prop, especially when I speak to students, but yes, it started when I was eight and has been a struggle for me up till today.

Carrie: What caused you to get to that point where they’re challenging social relationships you were dealing with in elementary school or things going on at home?

Heather: I’ve struggled with suicide for the entire timeline of my life from eight to the current, but I haven’t been in the same season, obviously, this entire time. As an eight, nine, ten-year-old, it was moving schools all the time and brutal bullying. I have a wild imagination that remembers very traumatic details. That’s always corroborated by all the journals that I’ve kept all these years. The bullying was intense and would drive anybody to want to take their life.

Carrie: Kids can be so mean and cruel and they don’t realize how that affects other kids and students. Were you bullied in elementary school and did that continue in middle school?

Heather: It started when I was eight and went through high school, but I think it was only being bullied that made me want to take my life as a child. I think as I moved into my teen years, it was being bullied, but it was also compounded by just didn’t love myself and didn’t see other options. My brain has never been able to compute other options. Other than just take your life when there’s any kind of crisis or trauma, but it was pretty purely bullying as a kid.

Carrie: As you got older, how did this constant suicidal thoughts affect you as a young adult? And, uh, did you have suicide attempts during those periods?

Heather: Yes, great question. I have attempted suicide three times and had the plan countless times.

I have been Baker acted, which in Florida’s mandatory 72 hour confinement in a psychiatric ward and was hospitalized.

Carrie: I was just wondering how things affected you as a young adult. What were some things that were going on there?

Heather: As I said, I’ve battled with suicide over every season of a person’s life, barring elderly senior citizens, because I’m not there yet.

As a child, as an adolescent, as a high school student, as a college student, as a young career, as a wife, as a mom in a pandemic and with unexpected grief, those are pretty much the mile markers in my life where I have attempted suicide or wanted to. The young adult season was a lot around relationships. Dating and being with a guy for five years and him saying, after five years, “I’ll never marry you. You’re not the kind that I would want to marry.” And that just set me off.  I took a bottle of pills and tried to take my life. I saw that as the only way out of that.

Carrie: There would be these big stressful events and whenever we have stress in our life, that tends to increase our symptoms so that makes a lot of sense. What would you say was your lowest point rock bottom? You know, the only place to go is up from here.

Heather: The lowest point would have been July 30th, 2000. That was when I had been married for one year to a pastor, which made me a pastor’s wife. I just couldn’t, after a year into the marriage, reconcile kind of being the crazy lady, but being married to a pastor. A new divorce wasn’t an option for a pastor. Again, my brain only saw suicide as my way out, and that would be a gruesome attempt where my husband showed up to the scene and was unable to stop me. The 911 first responders surrounded my car and were unable to stop me. I had become manic to the point of supernatural strength, almost like a rabid animal, unstoppable.

They were forced to tranquilize me and knock me out so that they could strap me down on a gurney and rush me to the hospital where they treated my injuries, and then they shipped me off to a psychiatric ward. It was mandatory. I didn’t have a say in the matter. I was put in isolation in the psych ward on July 30th, 2000.

When you’re in isolation in a psych ward, I had vomit on me. I had blood on me. They didn’t feed me. They didn’t clean me up. It was deplorable conditions. This was 24 years ago. It was the lowest point because not only was I locked in isolation as a pastor’s wife, but as a failed suicide attempting pastor’s wife.

That was such a low, low that I didn’t even think there would be an up and had actually pretty much determined that once they released me from the psych ward, I would do it again. And I would succeed this time because in my mind, there was nowhere else to go with the coming together of being a pastor’s wife and failing at killing yourself.

Carrie: This sounds like an immense amount of shame that you were carrying for having mental health issues in the church as a Christian. Also, lso interestingly, like shame that you weren’t successful at what you set out to do.

Heather: Yes and you don’t have this Facebook group or women’s golf club society of people like me.

There was nobody, not only just in my circle, but in, to my knowledge, the country that understood what it was like to perpetually want to die, but not be able to because you’re married to a pastor. So it was a lonely existence and shameful.

Carrie: How did you go from that to starting Wondherful?

Heather: Obviously, God keeps me alive despite my efforts. Finally, once I was able to get medication, get into a regular psychologist, and maintain that to today. I identify that I have a chronic weakness in my brain, which I don’t distinguish from any other chronic weakness in any other organ in the body, so I embrace that and I take care of it. I would, if I had been in an accident, rendered to a wheelchair.

That has opened up a lot of doors—just my candidness about that, willing to talk about it—and that launched a lot of opportunities to go and speak, share the story. But it was during COVID, during 2020; I was cut off from being able to go to people. You know, our country was in a shutdown.

Carrie: Right.

Heather: By this time, I’m 20 years into using my weakness to help others, but I couldn’t go to people and they were reaching out to me. They were dying by the dozens by suicide and overdose.

Carrie: Yes. COVID was huge. 

Heather: Yes. Huge and I’m not hearing about people are reaching out to me because of COVID and them dying of it. They’re reaching out to me because of the pandemic and they didn’t want to live anymore.

In my dining room here, where I am right now, some friends and I started just shipping what I would normally take in person when I get asked to go visit people in psychiatric wards, detoxes, sober living homes, hospitals, ICU units, funerals. I would always take what I call a “life box,” which is all the things I’ve needed to still be here. Instead of taking them, we just started shipping them. It became a nonprofit and we’re three years in now. We’ve had to move offices twice. I think in three years since its inception, we’ve done almost 15, 000 life boxes to every state and 15 countries.

Carrie: Talk to us about that process of moving from being so ashamed because I work with a lot of people who really struggle over having mental health issues.

As a Christian in the church community, going from that to being able to be open and allowing God to use your story, was that like a process that God really worked with you on? Or as you started sharing it, you saw the benefits of sharing it?

Heather: It was so instantaneous that the leadership was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s have you heal a little bit.

I remember getting out of the psych ward and I had kind of made a deal with God in the psych ward. That’s all I had to talk to. I mean, I was in isolation. I was a threat to other people so they wouldn’t put me in a room with other people. I just lied there and it was like, talk to my demons or talk to God.

I was like, “God, if you could just get me out of here because it was deplorable.” It was everything you’d think of in a horror movie for a psych ward. But I was like, “If you could get me out of here, I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to help people not end up here. “ 

I was able to be discharged a little bit earlier than I was slated to be. I took that as a sign from God and I wanted to own up to my end of the commitment. I just wrote out my story from that experience, got on medicine, got under the supervision of a psychologist, and then went to the church leadership and said, I want to share my story. They were like,”Okay, not yet. Let’s have you get a little bit better.”

I waited a year and proved myself worthy of being able to share my story because I really wanted to. They put me up on stage and I shared my story about a year after getting out of the cyborg.

Carrie: What are some things that you do on a day-to-day basis that just really help and supports your mental health moving forward?

You said, this is a chronic issue. It’s not something that has just gone away. It’s something that you’ve struggled with for a long time. What are some of your strategies or things that you do to stay healthy?

Heather: I love it that you asked that because my formula is unique, but it’s working because I’m still alive and I’m so glad you asked it.

It has seven parts. It’s medication, which “certain Baptist circles love it when I say that.” it’s medication, it’s Christian counseling, it’s journaling. I even have my journal here to show you.

Carrie: Awesome.

Heather: Reading my Bible, regular church attendance. Church regularly is a free full fill up on an empty tank for me, outdoor activity, knowing my worth and having boundaries.

Carrie: Wow. So good. I’m sure you could write a book on all of those principles because I think that they’re each important. I like what you said about valuing church attendance. You feel like there is something that that does for your spirit and the sense of being in Christian community. 

Have you found some strong community through the church that’s been supportive for you?

Heather: Yes. I mean, we underestimate what the church can do for our minds and God teed it up pretty well. He said, Love me with all of your body, heart, mind, and strength.” Where do we love him tangibly? Where do we love him audibly and visually in church? 

I feel like it’s never returned void for me. If I show up and love God in his house for an hour on Sunday, he fills my cup to the overflow, which gives me the fuel to go the next week.

Carrie: I love that you have boundaries in there too because that’s something that a lot of Christians struggle with. We think that we have to be all things to all people, to bend over backwards, to constantly be volunteering for every single thing that has a need, and we can get burnout and not be in a healthy place mentally and emotionally from not setting good boundaries.

We’re allowing other people to speak into your life that really have no business and no need to be speaking into your life. It’s like, I don’t really need to take that from you.

Heather: Right? I mean, I take my cues from Jesus for a lot of these parts of my formula that I follow. There were thousands of people that needed him critically. They were mentally psychotic. They were spiritually lost. They were medically incurable. I mean, these are thousands of people who he loves that needed him. Yes, he did walk away from them after a certain point to go alone and be with the Father. I take him at his word literally and I understand that the harvest is plenty of people that might need you or me or the church or the pastor or the therapist, but the workers are few.

The Bible says Jesus doesn’t say pray for the harvest. He says, pray for the workers. He modeled that by showing that boundary that there are still thousands more that need me today, but I’ve reached my limit. I’ve done what I can for today. Now I need to go refresh.

Carrie: You talked about sending out life boxes.

What different kinds of life boxes do you send out to individuals?

Heather: Good question. Okay. I actually have one here. Now this is a mini life box and we use the mini life boxes for traveling and events and bulk orders because it costs less. We’ve shrank everything that we would normally send to an individual down into a mini size, but we do life boxes for anything, for anybody, anywhere.

We curate it to their plight. Plus, I’ve discovered suicide is not in a vacuum, it is not in a book. Anybody, anywhere can give up over anything. I know that personally. I didn’t try to take my life because of bullying as a married woman. There’s always different reasons. At Wondherful, we receive these requests through our website.

We not only all the options that people can have a curated life box for, but we have a big comment section because if we don’t have it listed, they can put in the comment what their plight is, what their pain is, what their despair is, and we’ll curate it for them. Specifically, the ones that are listed in the most popular are anxiety way up there. Trauma, loneliness, addiction, suicide attempt, grief ans depression would be the ones that are the most requested.

Carrie: That’s incredible that you’re able to personally tailor those to each individual and what you feel like their needs are. What’s in the box that you have there?

Heather: In a life box, the presentation is very important to me. Our team is awesome because they know my heart that I see the value of every single person, even if they don’t just now driving home. I saw the guy begging for money at the intersection and I prayed for him. I saw him because I saw him as someone that God created. This guy begging for money. He wasn’t aborted.

He wasn’t a miscarriage. God wanted him here. And so he has value in and of itself with that. So the box’s presentation has to show value to that person. We take it seriously. Like we don’t just throw crap in a box. The girls know like this, this would drive the team nuts that this tissue is wrinkled here.  Take out the tissue, put a different piece in because the person opening this Carrie, this might be the only time someone somewhere has expressed their value. They open it up. This specific one is for loneliness. 

After the surgeon general came out with a report saying loneliness in our country is an epidemic. We decided to add loneliness to the drop down options for a life box. The first thing that they see when they open it up is, What the heck is this that I just got? Because a lot of these are requested by other people. 

Carrie: Right. They’re like, “Oh, I got a box.”

Heather: “What the heck? Who’s stalking me?

It’s got a QR code and it goes right to a video of me and I share my story and explain why they received this and then if they don’t want to, they can’t do QR codes. It says it in text right here. That’s the first thing they see, but the second thing they see is a handwritten card. 

Somebody on our team wrote them a card. We’ve had people actually frame this and send us a picture that they framed it. We always include the 988 because I am assuming that whatever this person’s going through, I need to hook them up with resources that I am not qualified to give them.

This came inspired by a male executive, he said, I had your list of some life versus that I could keep in my wallet. I would. So I was like, that’s it. So we have wonderful with life versus that guys can keep then a notepad, a devotion on loneliness and Rick Warren. What on earth am I here for? This really is covers every reason for suicide. This goes in every box. A refrigerator magnet with 988. These are the staples because I spoke into this, I said, these are the things I’ve needed when I’m struggling with wanting to give up. I need a stress ball.

Carrie: Yes.

Heather: I need practical things. I cry a lot, so I need tissue. My lips get dry because I cry a lot, so I need chapstick so these go in. I have mints because I am crying. I do have probably bad breath. I also just need to suck on something that’s savory or sweet to get the starkness in my mind at least freshened up with some mint, right? They’re also called life savers. So let’s play on words. There you go. A Bible and a journal and a pen.

Those are essential. Those are non negotiable. They go in every box. This devotion says, “I just want to die.” It’s a faith based devotion and then I put like an herbal mask because this is a female box. Okay. We want her to feel comfort and then a staple that every single one gets is a never-give up wristband, inspired by my youngest brother who died last year and struggled with suicide like I did and finally got him.

I remember one conversation I had with Chris, he was so ashamed of his scars on his wrists from years of attempting suicide. Then we get a lot of, Sober Living Homes. I speak to a lot of addicts. They have so many track scars on their wrists. There’s a lot of shame with that, Carrie. Whether it’s a suicide attempt or a track scar, your wrist can be a point of shame.

I was like, “Not anymore.” They have a wristband that says never give up, that is going to be able to go over their wrists. Hopefully they’ll see that and not be shamed of their scars.

Carrie: Yes, it’s a positive reminder to keep going. Man, that must have hit you really hard your brother dying from suicide.

Heather: Yes. Very painful. It’s been my most recent biggest test for not wanting to give up myself, which is a whole nother podcast, but grief is a beast.

Carrie: Well, what do you do when you have suicidal thoughts come up now?  Beause a lot of people that are listening to this podcast, whether it’s suicidal thoughts or they have obsessions that pop it in their mind that they don’t want to have there.

How do you handle those? I think there’s a lot of different directions we can take our mind and in our body and our spirit when those happen.

Heather: Well, I have to make sure that I’m doing my seven things- the formula. I have to make sure I’m doing those, but in a moment I can shift gears and a moment I can go from wanting to live to wanting to die.

The first thing that I do and the first thing that I tell everybody to do, whether they’re children, adults, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, or anything is you get to call someone. I mean, that’s backed up with research, but that’s also backed up with Jesus. Again, I take my cues from him in his darkest mental hour, where he was in such hopelessness and despair that his body was reacting by bleeding sweat.

He called somebody. Now he had followers in the thousands. He had a tribe of 12, but in his darkest hour, he called someone and the text says in the gospels that he called three, Peter, James, and John. I take my cues from him and I call someone and I actually have three in case one doesn’t answer.  That’s good. That’s helpful. My first thing is I need to call somebody.

Carrie: That’s good. It’s Definitely a good advice for everyone. 

I wanted to ask you one more question before we got into some stories about how life boxes have impacted people. I know a lot of people struggle with journaling. What types of things do you journal about?

Do you journal about thoughts and feelings or do you journal prayers? What kind of things do you journal about?

Heather: I don’t follow a guide. I follow my head. I have journals from when I was eight up until today. I’ve kept them all. Yeah. So I got a lot of journals. There’s never a pattern, but my brain doesn’t operate in a pattern.

Like I said, I could be wearing a smiley sweatshirt, doing this podcast, beautiful South Florida weather. And by tonight something can happen and I can want to die because I don’t have routine in my head. I don’t have routine in my journaling. What is important is that I journal simply because I can wake up or I can go to bed with all this stuff in my head, or I can put it on paper and just get it out. That’s why I’m always advocating journaling.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. Tell us about some stories of hope because this is hope for anxiety and OCD. What are some stories of hope of how life boxes have impacted different people that you’ve heard of?

Heather: Oh man, anxiety. We get so many for anxiety and I’ve had that. My pendulum swings between depression and anxiety. That’s a real thing and it really is a struggle beause it manifests in your mind and your body in such an intense way. There’s 15, 000 light boxes we’ve done. There’s so many stories, but one in particular is during COVID a friend of mine, she’s a homosexual Jewish addict, just had so much anxiety during COVID that she became suicidal.

Now she’s got so many issues, but reached out for a life box. We sent her an anxiety, suicide prevention, life box. She asked her coworker to record her opening up the life box. I can’t put it into words what it was like to see this homosexual Jewish addict open up this life box with anxiety resources and a Bible and a journal and all these things, and she was weeping, but more importantly, she was living and still to this day.

Not only did she continue to live and I don’t take the credit for that. That’s God and her and things that I’ll never know on earth, but she still lives to this day and is a catalyst between us and our life boxes and all the addicts. that she does life with. She’s continued to live and she’s continued to use these life boxes as ways of helping people that are struggling just like her.

Carrie: That’s awesome. If somebody’s listening to this and they want to request a life box for somebody or if they feel like, hey, I need that myself. Like I’m on the edge here. I’m really, really struggling. How do they do that?

Heather: Well, it’s easy. You just go to wondherful.com.

Carrie: Yeah. We’ll put that link in there too. We’ll put the link in our show notes if anybody’s just listening on the audio here.

Heather: You click on Lifebox and you can request it for yourself or you can request it for someone you’re concerned about and we will curate it and priority ship it. If you’re a really rich person, feel free to make a donation for your Lifebox request. We do send them out for free to everybody.

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really incredible. Well, thank you so much for being vulnerable, sharing your story and talking to us about this organization. I think it’s so important that we talk about the hard subjects that we talk about. things like suicide that people are struggling with and letting them know there is hope and there is help and there are people that care about you and want to let you know that you are valuable and you are important and we want you here.

Heather: Yes, we do. No matter who you are, no matter how hard it is, No matter how many people don’t understand, if you wake up breathing, that’s your proof to keep going. There’s a reason you’re still breathing. That should be enough encouragement for all of us. 

114. Vagal Nerve Stimulation for Anxiety with Dr. Hool

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

In this episode, Carrie interviews Dr. Nicholas Hool about his personal struggle with anxiety and how it led to the development of VeRelief™.

Episode Highlights:

  • How vagal nerve stimulation works and its effectiveness in relieving stress and anxiety.
  • Why VeRelief is a good option for managing anxiety
  • The evolution of the VeRelief product line, from its initial design to the upcoming third generation.
  • The differences between VeRelief and other anxiety relief devices on the market.

Explore VeRelief through our affiliate link.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 114 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. Today’s episode features a unique guest, Dr. Nicholas Hool. With a PhD in biomedical engineering, Dr. Hool is here to share his personal journey with anxiety and the innovative product he developed to help others manage their anxiety.

In our conversation, Dr. Hool reveals how his experience with anxiety began in high school while pursuing a career in competitive golf. As he faced intense pressure and performance anxiety, he explored various methods to manage his stress, from sports psychology to medication. Despite some initial success with visualization techniques, he found long-term solutions challenging to maintain.

Dr. Hool’s quest for a more effective solution led him to study biomedical engineering. His research focused on the vagus nerve, a key player in regulating our stress response. He explains how vagus nerve stimulation can quickly balance the nervous system, offering a non-drug approach to anxiety relief.

Dr. Hool’s breakthrough came with the development of a handheld device that stimulates the auricular vagus nerve using gentle electrical impulses. This device aims to enhance heart rate variability, a measure of nervous system balance, helping users recover from stress and anxiety more effectively.

Tune in to discover how Dr. Hool’s innovative approach could provide relief for those struggling with anxiety and how his personal journey led to this groundbreaking solution.

Summary

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 114. I am your host, Carrie Bock, and on the show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. We have a unique interview today. Here I have with me Dr. Nicholas Hool who has a PhD in biomedical engineering, and he can explain a little bit more about that later. He’s going to talk about his own personal experience with anxiety that led him on a journey to develop a product that will help others with their anxiety as well. 

____________________

Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Dr. Hool: Yes. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: What is your experience with anxiety being on a personal level?

Dr. Hool: I have some experience that’s going to be different than a lot of other people, but my kind of first taste of it was in high school.

I was a competitive golfer growing up, played golf since I could walk basically, but decided I wanted to really pursue golf as a career. Probably when I was, or maybe around 14 years old, I thought I want to do this. I want this to be my sport. It would be awesome to go pro someday like a lot of kids think when they play sports, they want to go pro.

And I was good. I won some tournaments, traveled the country in high school. And then for whatever reason, probably when I was 16, 17, maybe it was just suddenly like the thought of this is real. I got a couple of years left and then it’s like, it’s the real deal. Suddenly I started thinking about it more. I started contemplating the future.

I started contemplating my own performance and everyone’s watching you. Like now is the time you have to perform well. I never thought about the future before.  It was just exciting, right? When you’re a kid, you’re just having a good time, but then suddenly, I mean, I think that’s what anxiety is, right?

You’re thinking about the future in a negative way. You’re afraid, you’re worrying about things that you don’t either typically worry about, or I guess what they say is a typical person doesn’t really worry about it that much to the degree that you’re worrying about it. I just started worrying about the future all the time.

And I’m just like, “why am I worried so much about this?” It wasn’t so much the worry that affected me. I think everybody to some degree worries about their future, right? What if I fail? What if it doesn’t work out? It started manifesting as these. I want to call them panic attacks. They were just severe stress responses.

When I was on the golf course, I would be on the first tee and just heart beating out of my chest. I think it’s normal to be nervous, right? Like everyone gets nervous, but I’d been nervous before I dealt with that in every tournament. This was a lot more severe. Suddenly college coaches are watching, maybe they’re not even watching it.I’m just playing by myself. Suddenly I’m in my head. I’m going into that stress response again. I’m just like, what the heck is going on?

Carrie: It’s a lot of pressure in those sports arenas, the better you get, the more competition you encounter. All of sudden you’re playing around people that are as good as you are better. And there’s a lot going on there.

Dr. Hool: There is a lot going on, but when you think about it, you’re still just doing what you do. It’s me playing golf. That’s it. I’m not playing another person’s golf round. I’m playing my golf round. I’m the one that put all that pressure on myself by thinking about it, by worrying about it.

I think that’s what a lot of people do with just life in general. People are so worried about what if I fail or what is this person going to think of me if I say this or do that. And that causes the stress response that causes an anxiety.

Carrie: Almost like your body is responding as though there’s a bear or a lion in front of you instead of a gold tee.

Dr. Hool: Yes, exactly. And a lot of it, it’s just in your own head. I mean, it’s so hard to just get that out. It’s not like you can just say, “Oh, well, don’t think about it.” Obviously that’s not how it works. If left undealt with, it will have a major negative impact on the trajectory of your life. So for me, I kind of burned out and I didn’t pursue golf after I graduated high school.

I could have gone to play at a lot of different schools.  I was still good, but it was just knowing how good I was. At the time when I graduated, how much I was struggling, it was just like, “man, I don’t feel like this is going to work out. The guys that were going pro at the time were so good.”

And looking at that, I’m like, “man, I’m so far from that.” Even though I’m good,I  just kind of struggle with anxiety and the fear and all that just took a toll. It’s like, “yes, it’s probably best to do something different.”

Carrie: What did you try to manage it or get rid of it or deal with it?

Dr. Hool: When I was 16, I went to a sports psychologist and did the whole thing like lay on the couch, let’s go through progressive muscle relaxation. It lets get you a nice state of calm. And he would lead me through these visualizations of just being on the golf course and playing perfect golf. If I hit a bad shot, what does that look like to recover from that? And then even if I’m in a high pressure situation, trying to visualize my body responding in an ideal way compared to how I typically respond.

And just doing that over and over in the mind was sort of reprogramming my thought process. It worked incredibly well when I was practicing it. The key is that I did it for about a month, probably a few times a week, and it would take me about an hour to do this. I would lay on the couch. I go through my progressive muscle relaxation, get in that optimal state of visualization, and then I would actually do the visualization, which took time. And because it had an almost like a pretty immediate effect, I would do a visualization and I go and play golf. I’m really calm and focused. I thought like, Oh, I cured myself. I’m good. I don’t need to do this anymore. So I stopped doing it. And of course, once you stop doing it, the tendencies come back, especially if you’ve only done it a few times.

I kind of just lost discipline, I guess. I didn’t commit to it. It takes a lot of time and mental effort to do that visualization, to do that relaxation. You have to go find a quiet environment. I got to lay down. If I have racing thoughts, I have to first calm those down before I can even focus on the positive.

That’s hard to do. I was actually prescribed clonazepam for a month, which is a benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug. Which is really powerful, and I have no idea why the guy prescribed it to me. I did not need that like it wasn’t so bad, but the protocol is you would take it about an hour or so before you go do something that is supposed to freak you out and cause a lot of anxiety, because it takes about an hour to kick in.

It worked really well to get off the first tee when I would take it an hour before taking off. But then it stayed in my system for four hours and I was sluggish. I wasn’t cognitively focused and I wasn’t performing my best mentally. And I was like, that’s not a good option. Like, I don’t want that in my system when I’m trying to play golf.

The available solutions that I tried just weren’t effective, really. They weren’t what I needed. The most effective was the visualization, but, it’s just so hard to commit to that long term because it takes so much time. And like in today’s modern world of just always on the go, who has an hour to just sit down in a quiet space and meditate and focus, even if you had the time to do it. You have to have the ability to do it.

Carrie: It’s a Yes. It’s a skill that you have to learn and train

Dr. Hool: It’s really hard. You can’t just download a meditation app and be like, “Alright, I’m going to do meditation now.” That’s not going to work. It’s a skill. It’s something you get to practice all the time. If you’re not disciplined, it’s just not really going to work out long term.

Carrie: How did this lead you into studying biomedical engineering and learning about the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation?

Dr. Hool: I just had this thought of if I’m on the golf course and I’m fine, and then I fight or flight response can kick in in a matter of seconds. It just hits you out of note. I was thinking, I’m like, if it can just turn on like the flip of a switch, why can’t I turn it off like the flip of a switch doing these meditations and these progressive muscle relaxations and this breathwork stuff that wasn’t the off switch. It just wasn’t having that deep immediate effect that I needed. Neither were drugs, right? Drugs still take an hour to kick in. Those don’t even have very solid effects, but in those moments, it’s not gonna have any effect on me. I thought, let’s go study that response.

There’s going to be something out there that can shut it off fast. I always liked math and engineering, so I chose biomedical engineering because I literally just wanted to study that what is happening in your body physically when that fight or flight response flips on and ultimately to understand it. So I could turn it off.  I just turn it off on command. It was 8 straight years of biomedical engineering went into undergrad. So for four years, I learned all the basics, and then in my PhD program, that’s where I got really specific and started doing actual research with different technologies and ultimately arrived at the one we have today.

Carrie: Tell me about the vagus nerve and its role in that fight, flight, or freeze response. I was doing a little bit of mild Googling on the vagus nerve, and it turns out that the term vagus is Latin for wandering, which I found interesting. So this is a nerve that wanders in our body.

Dr. Hool: The vagus nerve, it’s one of the 12 cranial nerves in the body. It’s called the wandering nerve because it wanders throughout your entire upper body. It’s the largest and the longest of your cranial nerves. It plays a role in essentially maintaining what’s called homeostasis, keeping your body and your nervous system in a state of balance. There’s a lot of things that it covers, right?

It helps digestion. It helps with heart-related issues, cardiovascular things. It helps with mental health. It just keeps your overall nervous system in a state of balance. And the nervous system is made up of two separate components. You have the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is your fight or flight response.

When your sympathetic is active, it sends a signal to your body saying it’s time to speed up and to tense up. That’s where you get that racing heart rate. Your hands are jittery. Blood pressure might go up. Breathing rate goes up. You’re familiar with it, right? It’s that fight or flight response. Not comfortable to be in unless you’re actually running for your life.

Carrie: And then it’s helpful and purposeful and useful at that point.

Dr. Hool: Parasympathetic is the opposite. It’s the rest and digest. It’s what helps you stay calm after you eat a nice big meal. Usually, you’re really sluggish, and you don’t want to move around because you’ve eaten a meal.

That’s the rest and digest state. Your body’s going into a state of just chill so that you can digest your food. You can recover from stress. You can rest. Those states are always fluctuating all the time, no matter what. And so what? The vagus nerve’s main job, it basically shifts you out of fight or flight.

So when your fight or flight is really active, the vagus nerve’s job is to help bring that down to rebalance the nervous system. In my research, I learned that it’s not so much that the vagus nerve increases parasympathetic, but instead, it decreases the sympathetic, and so that’s how it balances. That’s why it’s also really good if you’re in a fight or flight state where you’re having an anxiety attack or panic or just stress stimulating your vagus nerve is an almost instant way to bring that stress response down because that’s its main job. And I learned that in research, just reading all these research papers, learning about the vagus nerve. And to me, it was like, that’s what I needed right there. If I had something that could just stimulate my vagus nerve on the golf course, It would pull me out of that response, and I could focus again.

I could be calm and perform. I can fall asleep finally, or I’ll be less irritable around my loved ones after I’m stressed out or something that kind of became what I committed to was. Let’s dive into vagal nerve stimulation and see if we could develop this out for the high performing individuals like the athletes, but really the everyday person that just wants something safe, nondrug, and effective to calm them down quickly.

Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit more about how the product that you have is used for vagal nerve stimulation?

Dr. Hool: We developed a little handheld device. This is kind of what it looks like if people are watching the video, but what it is is it uses electricity, so gentle electrical impulses to directly activate a small branch of the nerve found just under your ear.

There’s two areas you can target the vagus nerve noninvasively.  That’s what’s called the auricular vagus nerve, which is around the ear, and then you have the cervical vagus nerve, which is on the front side of the neck. The cervical region of the vagus nerve is a little deeper in the neck, and it’s close to baroreceptors, which control blood pressure, and it also has direct projections to your heart.

It’s a higher risk location to stimulate because it can cause a sudden drop in heart rate and the pressure applied can also cause a sudden drop in blood pressure, which, if you deal with any type of heart condition or have a blood pressure condition, it can be dangerous to do that, whereas auricular is farther away from those regions. So there’s no risk in dropping blood pressure, and there’s no direct projections to the heart with the auricular. There’s no heart-related side effect. That was my first kind of focus was safety first. We know the vagus nerve can have this effect, but we need it to be safe. So, auricular was the obvious choice.

Now, the other benefit that we learned later in research was when you stimulate the auricular vagus nerve with electricity, You see an increase in, it’s called heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is just a way to measure your heart rate in such a way that it reveals the state of your nervous system.Heart rate is just measuring how many beats per minute your heart rate is beating at. Heart rate variability is a measure of the fluctuation of your heart rate over time. So, when you have a large fluctuation in your heart rate, that’s a good thing because it means your body is in a state where it can adapt to changes very easily, but if your heart rate is not changing over time, it’s like kind of stuck in the same heart rate over some period of time. That means your body’s not capable of adapting to change. If you go into that fight or flight state, you typically stay there for a long time. That’s why you can’t recover. If you have a low heart rate variability, what a regular vagal nerve stim does is literally in 60 seconds, we can see, we could double your heart rate variability, depending on what it is when you first start. That’s just an indicator that we’re shifting you out of that fight or flight state, literally within seconds versus cervical. We don’t see the same effects of heart rate variability.

Carrie: If you have a low heart rate variability, does that mean that you usually have a more elevated heart rate? You’re more anxious and it stays at that higher heart rate?

Dr. Hool: Not necessarily. If you think about a true fight or flight response, you’re walking in the woods and suddenly you see a bear start chasing you. Your heart rate is going to go up, but it’s going to stay up. It’s not going to come down and then go back up. It’s going to stay there. So the variability is tiny when your heart rate is beating really fast.

When you’re just chilling at home on the couch watching TV, if you monitor your heart rate, you’ll see that it might be 60, and then it might go up to 70, maybe 80, and then it might come back down to 60, and it’s going to do that over time. That’s just how it is, but if you’re chilling on the couch and your heart rate is just stuck at like 70, that’s not good. That means your nervous system is kind of in that fight or flight state, even though your heart rate may not be high. The variability is really low, which suggests your nervous system is not balanced. You’re not in a healthy state. Beyond just being stressed and anxious, an imbalanced nervous system affects your ability to heal from other conditions, from sickness.

You don’t digest things properly. You can’t recover if you have an injury. And so heart rate variability is just a great way to quickly take a snapshot of, “Is my body in a rest and digest state or am I in a state where it’s being resistant to healing and I’m more prone to getting stressed and anxious?”

Well, we’ve been able to demonstrate on almost all of our step patients and research was when you stimulate the auricular vagus nerve, you see an instant increase in the H.R V., which is why we always get people saying the device helps them fall asleep faster. They recover from a stressful experience faster.

We have a lot of patients with PTSD and panic disorder that use our product, pull them out of that panic attack. And then when used as part of a daily routine, it definitely helps decrease the effects of anxiety. And I say the effects of anxiety because it’s not going to eliminate your worries. If you’re someone who’s a lot and you’re always afraid of the future, you’re contemplating negative thoughts, it’s not going to drive those away.

However, it will lessen the impact on your body that those negative thoughts have, which is still a good thing for things like general anxiety. I highly recommend people learn meditation like the right way, but you can use verily to accelerate your meditation sessions because the problem that I was having was it takes me 30 minutes just to calm my mind, calm my body before I can actually do a real meditation. With the very late device, it does it. It does all the work for you. It’s literally pulling my body out of fight or flight and putting it into that ideal meditative state in a matter of minutes. And now I can meditate again. We have a lot of psychologists and counselors who will sit with their patients in a session. “Here use this for the first five minutes of our session, and then I’ll walk you through our counseling, and we’ll get to the core issue of your anxiety.” It’s a great supplement or something like that.

Carrie: I liked what you talk about in terms of chronic health conditions and our body having difficulty healing.

If our nervous system is out of balance, there are a lot of people out there that they’ve been to several doctors and the doctors are saying, “I don’t know how to help you anymore,” or “we’re not really sure where this is coming from.” Yes, we can say that you’re having these symptoms. I think there’s a lot that goes on in a day-to-day in our nervous system that we aren’t necessarily always cued into or aware of.

When people are having heightened levels of anxiety, sometimes they’re recognizing that because it’s coming in the form of an anxiety attack or a panic attack. Sometimes they’re not aware of that because they’re just living at a state of chronic stress and it’s now taking a toll and they’re having things like headaches or digestive issues or other chronic pain or health conditions.

I think that’s important for people to recognize that mental health piece in there. I like what you said about utilizing this to help wind down for sleep. You and I got connected some time ago, and you guys actually sent me a Verilief device, and when I started using it was before I went to bed, kind of to help, like, wind down my mind, like wind down my body.

Sometimes it can be hard depending on what you’re doing before you try to go to sleep to get yourself to a more wound down state. But I’ve also used it if I have a really difficult session with a client or we’ve just processed some really hard trauma and maybe that’s something that I still feel like I’m carrying around with me.

It’s nice for me to be able to release that stress and take those few minutes to just be able to breathe and let go. And so I have found it helpful and have recommended it to some of my clients. Now, I know that you guys are doing pre-orders for the third generation V Relief. So can you tell us about some of the changes that you’ve made over time to kind of tweak and make perfections to the product?

Dr. Hool: We’re a team of engineers and designers, core, which just means we are obsessed with building the best product. It hurts us to launch something that we’re like, “Oh, we can build something better.” Although we still have to ship a product. We can’t just sit in our lab all day and just keep making stuff. But the first product we launched was just a handheld device.

I want to say maybe late 2021, early 2022. That was just through word of mouth and connections we had with local doctors, but the usability of it was not great. It was a little bit big and bulky before we were ready to really launch this thing. Let’s redesign it. Let’s make it smaller.

We’re taking pre-orders for that. We weren’t expecting to take pre-orders this early, just because our gen twos sold out way faster than we thought they would over Christmas. We thought we’d have an easy transition into the next gen. But people are rushing to buy this because they’re starting to realize like, “Oh, man, this thing is legit.”

There’s not a lot of great options out there to take care of your nervous system, right? There are these really expensive machines that are good, but not affordable. And then the low-cost ones are ineffective. You’re just kind of getting these knockoff products that don’t have any major impact on your nervous system. It’s definitely a powerful, effective product. And for the price point, it’s kind of unbeatable.

Carrie: Yes. That’s awesome. You guys have it discounted right now for the presale and you’re expecting to ship around April. Is that right?

Dr. Hool: Yes, so right now we’re offering a $100 discount for those who pre-order. That discount will start to be reduced as we get closer to shipping.

We want to reward customers who wait the longest with the best deal, but yes, for now, you can just get it and save $100 to get it for $299 as opposed to $399. They’re being made right now, about 50 percent of the batch is complete. We just have to wait on some other manufacturing things to come through, but yes, they’re coming.

Carrie: This is one of the things I think that impressed me the most about your company and caused me to become an affiliate was your 60-day money-back guarantee. Tell us about that.

Dr. Hool: Basically, every product that we looked into for calming people down, helping the nervous system, they’re giving these 21 to 30-day warranties or money-back guarantees. I’m like, “That’s so small”. If you don’t have time to use it in every situation, right? People are traveling or doing stuff, so  we give people 60 days just because we know 30 days is not enough. Use it for two whole months. If you don’t get the improvements at some point within two months, probably not going to have an impact.

It’s like you’ve got plenty of time to try it. We talk to everybody that reaches out to us. If they have any challenges, any help at all with understanding how to apply this to their own lives. We’ll literally chat with you. We’ll say, tell us about your routine. What do you do currently? What’s your day-to-day look like? We’ll create protocols for you. We recommend using it. Combine it with this modality or that supplement and you’re going to see great results. We’re here to really make sure that this works for people and it does, right? As long as you just don’t give up trying, like we’ll make it work for you.

Everybody has a vagus nerve. Every vagus nerve responds to stimulation. You just have to work with it a little and get a feel for how to optimize it for each individual. And we work with people to do that.

Carrie: Also I wanted to mention to you when you’re talking about the electrical stimulation, it’s not like you’re getting zapped. For me, it feels like a little vibrating, like tingly feeling near your ear, so it’s not painful or anything of that nature if you’re using it properly. 

Dr. Hool: That was our big engineering feature that we came up with. At the time we were designing them, all these electrical stimulators were very sharp. For the auricular, there were all these ear clip electrodes and tiny little surface area electrodes that just shock your ears. It’s so uncomfortable. And we’re like, “We have to make it feel good.” We tested a bunch of different materials. I mean, we shot ourselves all day long, trying to find something that was comfortable, and we found a really good mixture of materials. We use a certain ingredient that kind of hydrates your skin, so when you’re using it, it’s actually got a skin hydration component to it, which is what makes it a lot more comfortable than a standard electrode that doesn’t have those properties.

Carrie: The high cost of being an entrepreneur, lots of electrical shocks to ear.

Dr. Hool: Yes, all kinds of stuff. I’m not as bold as my electrical engineers. He has done things. Hey, you have some scars that are going to last forever. That’s like, “Dude, you’re crazy, man.” Those people, they love doing stuff. 

Carrie: Gotcha. Are you familiar with the Apollo device?

Dr. Hool: Yes, very familiar. I see advertisements for it on Facebook. 

Carrie: I really know about zero about it, and I didn’t know if you wanted to say anything about that or just leave that out of it, but I’m curious, what does it do compared to what VeriLief does?

Dr. Hool: It’s a different value that they’re delivering. What Apollo does, at least what their technology does, skin vibration, it’s more of a mild calming effect for a long time. Think of it like an SSRI. An SSRI is something you take every day, has a long, mild effect, keeping you calm, but it’s not like a rescue drug. 

If you’re in the middle of a stress response, you don’t take an SSRI, you take a Benzodiazepine. The Benzos are strong. We’re going to get to it, calm you down fast, even though those still take time to kick in. That’s really the difference. 

Apollo is something you wear kind of all day, and if you’re not someone who has a lot of anxiety attacks, probably a fine thing, but if you’re someone who gets those moments where your body goes into that fight or flight state, VeRelief is that’s what it was designed for, but you can use both. That is the benefit of technology is there’s no side effects. You can stack as many as you can and just enhance the effect. I tell people that all the time. Wear your Apollo and do this at the same time.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for sharing this information with us. I hope it’s valuable to some of our listeners. I know that I talk to all kinds of people all the time who are just looking for different options to help them manage their anxiety. Maybe they’ve tried medication or they’ve tried certain meditations, they’ve tried a variety of stuff, and they just feel like they’re not getting the relief that they’re wanting or they’re needing something, like you said, in the moment right before they go perform or speak in front of people, or even if it’s just a presentation to a few people at work.

If that really makes you nervous and this is something that’s going to help you before those types of situations.  If going into your job makes you anxious, I mean, there’s just so many different applications for this product. We’re going to put our affiliate link in the show notes for everybody and make sure that you can check out the product and take advantage of trying it out and get in the full 60 days. Hopefully you’ll love it. For some reason you don’t, you can contact the staff and they’ll help you troubleshoot with that.

Dr. Hool: And we’ll troubleshoot too. And. If it really, really doesn’t work, we do refunds as well. One thing to note is this is kind of a newer space. There’s not a lot of products like this on the market. There’s definitely a temptation for people to want to go to Amazon or buy some Chinese knockoff that is like an ear clip for 30 bucks. But those things will do nothing. They have no impact on your nervous system, unless you’re someone who’s extremely chronically imbalanced. It might have some effect, but our product is the real deal.

We spent years developing this. We tested everything out there. This thing is by far the most effective out of any other auricular vagal nerve stem you can try. So it’s worth the wait. Definitely worth it. And with that 60-day money-back guarantee, it’s as low risk as possible.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much and we’ll be in touch.

Dr. Hool: Thank you, Carrie. I appreciate the time.

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

111. Using Humor with ERP with Judy Lair, LPCC

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

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

Episode Highlights:

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

Customizing ERP techniques based on individual interests and strengths.

Strategies for incorporating creativity to confront OCD challenges.

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

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

Related Links and Resources

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

Explore related episodes:

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judy: All right, Carrie.Thanks!

__________________

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

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

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

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

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

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

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

Episode Highlights.

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

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links and Resources:

www.gregatkinson.com

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

Tune in for another inspiring episode:

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

96. Theology of Suffering with Jon Seidl

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

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

Episode Highlights:

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

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

Related links and Resources:

www.jonseidl.com

Explore related episode:

95. Healthier Theology of Healing with Pastor Mark Smith

95. Healthier Theology of Healing with Pastor Mark Smith

Transcript

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

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

Carrie: Jon, welcome to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Having enough faith. 

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

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

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

Carrie: Absolutely.

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

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

Carrie: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Absolutely true. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Right.

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Yes. Very good. 

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

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, may be comforted by God’s great love for you.

92. When Ministry Becomes Toxic with Steve and Carrie Bock

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

On today’s episode, I have an interesting conversation with my favorite guest, my husband Steve Bock about toxic church culture

Episode Highlights:

  • Warning signs your church is becoming toxic
  • The danger of putting church leaders on pedestals
  • The importance of knowing the difference between your calling and your desire
  • What happens if you lead your church as a micromanager

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 92! I’m your host, Carrie Bock. If you’re new to the show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others.

A few episodes ago, in episode 89, KJ Ramsey shared her story of spiritual abuse and how she and her husband left an unhealthy church where they both worked. I’ve been reflecting on that conversation and wondering: how do we know when ministry crosses the line from healthy to toxic? To dig deeper, I’ve brought my husband Steve back on the show.

We discuss five key warning signs that ministry might be becoming toxic. For instance, it’s crucial to recognize when someone might justify inappropriate behavior under the guise of ministry, or when the need for admiration and respect in leadership roles becomes problematic. We also touch on how focusing too much on numbers and external validation can lead to ego issues and unhealthy practices.

Join us as we delve into these topics and offer guidance on maintaining a healthy and balanced approach to ministry. Whether you’re involved in ministry or observing from the outside, these insights aim to help you navigate and address potential challenges effectively.

Related Podcast Episodes:

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 92. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, and if you’re new to the show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Back a few episodes ago, on episode 89, we had KJ Ramsey come on, talk about her story of spiritual abuse and how she and her husband left a church situation that was really unhealthy, where they were both working there.

I was thinking about that episode and processing, what are some warning signs, maybe, how do we know when ministry crosses this line from healthy to toxic? And I brought on the show back. On the show again, my amazing husband, Steve. Steve, welcome to the show. 

Steve: Hey, it’s good to be here. 

Carrie: Everybody, forgive Steve. He’s a little bit under the weather today, but he’s making sacrifices for me and is super supportive. In this podcast journey. You and I have been involved in various ministries. We also grew up in a context of our families being very involved in various ministries. I actually wrote all these, but I thought it would be good to get your feedback on it.

What you’ve seen experienced and what your thoughts are on this. I have five different things that I came up with on when ministry becomes toxic. For example, sometimes people will say, well, I just really believe that God is asking me to leave my wife and go have a relationship with this other woman, and obviously that is in complete contrast to the Bible. Anything biblical Or maybe it’s kind of not to that drastic level there, but someone you’re attracted to or you find yourself sharing things maybe you shouldn’t about your personal life or your marriage, and it’s getting to be some kind of slippery slope, but you’re saying, “Oh, well, you’re justifying it. This is a person I’m ministering too, and I need to be the one to minister to them because I have the relationship.” Have you seen this? You don’t have to go into specific examples of how people have justified sin in the name ministry. 

Steve: I have, I won’t say names because I don’t want to offend anyone, but I have seen that and it’s difficult because I don’t think that God’s going to tell somebody, Hey, leave your wife and get with this other woman that would go against what the Bible says. He wouldn’t go against himself. That just wouldn’t happened. I don’t know. That’s a really tough area. I have seen that and I’ve seen people leave the church because of it. So the downside of it is terrible. 

Carrie: We’ve both survived our share of moral failures, ministry, and fallouts. People that had to resign or got fired, and it’s just a tough situation for sure. Whenever that happens, these are kinda warning signs, not for people who are involved in ministry, but also if you see this happening in the ministry that you’re with. That’s why we’re wanting to talk about it today.

Steve: I think sometimes people, there’s your calling and your wants and desires and it’s great if the two all, if all that goes together, if God calls you to do something that’s also what you want, that’s wonderful. But sometimes I think there are people out there who they really want to be a pastor.

They like the idea of it, they like the prestige of it. They like something about it and they do it all in the name of, “Yeah, I’m called to do this.” But sometimes you wonder without being judgemental, are they called or is this something that again, they’re just, they like the concept of it. I don’t know if that fits what you’re saying.

Carrie: Yes and I’m curious about your perspective on how this is somewhat a weakness for men. I think more so than women like this need for admiration. Not that women don’t need that at times in validation, but for people to look up to them, I would say that’s more of a male need than a female need. 

Steve: Sure.  Absolutely, and I’ve known pastors who they really demanded that respect and you should respect your pastor. But I don’t know, sometimes the context of it made it difficult. 

Carrie: I think there’s this balance between we don’t wanna put someone on a complete pedestal because at the end of the day, they’re still a human being and they still have human struggles like we all do. But I think that is a very dangerous thing that can happen in ministry situations is where we elevate people almost too much and it’s interesting because I had a pastor share one time with the congregation that he was on LinkedIn and God really convicted him about being on LinkedIn because he realized that he’s like, this is for people who are looking for a job.

I’m not even looking for a job. But he was almost kind of getting this little high over people, like recommending him and the connections he was able to make on there. And that was just an interesting realization that he had and was able to kind of get himself in check and go, okay, I don’t even need to be on this website right now cuz it’s contributing to something that’s unhealthy.

I think for ministry you really have to dig deep and examine your motives. You’re giving a sermon or a talk, and you don’t get positive feedback. Do you feel still satisfied? Like, okay, well I did what God wanted me to do, or do you feel disappointed because you didn’t get like that? That pat on the back or that kudos of like, “Hey, you did a good job.”

Steve: Sure. I’ve seen where, and I’ve even had a pastor long time ago, he had an altar call, said I felt like God said, have this altar call and no one came forward. And he said once again, three or four times the music’s playing. And after like 15 minutes I’m thinking, I don’t think anybody’s going to come up, but that’s not my call. That’s not my place. I guess you wait as long as it takes for maybe that one, I don’t know, but afterward, he was so beaten up by it and he says, I don’t even know why I bothered. What was the point of that? And I remember thinking, you don’t know what God is going to do in somebody’s life, so they didn’t go forward. That doesn’t mean you didn’t reach them. I think it was really easy for them to kind of get their ego hurt a little bit. I’m not a pastor, but I would think for a pastor it would be really easy for your ego to get in the way and think, look at how many people I’ve saved. I do an alter call and all these people come down and look what I’ve done and just it gets to you.

I was at a leadership conference a couple years back and the guy who’s a pastor, I think that was leading the conference had said, if you’re a pastor, especially if you’re a pastor or in leadership, you have so many people coming to you with their burdens and you have so many things that you’re trying to lead and delegate and just you’re trying to be that sheperd.

If you don’t have a therapist, and I think you probably agree, if you don’t have a therapist in your life with that amount of pressure on you and all of that you’re dealing with, it’s very easy to let that ego get no way, to let the problems bring you down, sort those things out, because otherwise you begin to take over and you push the spirit out of the way.

Carrie: That’s definitely huge. It’s so hard because it’s kind of a slippery slope that I try to work with people on this, okay, well you don’t wanna be in this extreme of, “Whoa, I’m a sinner, I’m a horrible person, and how could God even use me?” You’re completely on one side of the thing. I do believe that we can have confidence in Christ and in what we are called to do.

I think it’s who do you give the credit to. Where does the credit go? Even how you say it, I get kind of nervous, I think like you do when church is focused too much on numbers, because it’s not really about that. If one person got saved, there’s a party in heaven, that’s awesome. But churches, a lot of times, you know, we had 1000 kids at VBS and 50 of them made a decision for Christ. And I’ve already cheered and we’re all excited, but I just almost wish that they would say, we really saw some kids that were impacted by the gospel and we did have some kids make decisions and we’re following up with them and making sure that this is something that’s gonna stick. And they weren’t just doing it because their friend wanted to or anything like. I think that some of the numbers, games and things can kind of feed into the ego. I see this podcast as my ministry, and even in the beginning I was remember being kind of frustrated or just not frustrated as much as just feeling kind of lost because I wasn’t really getting any feedback.

I was asking for people to contact me, and I was like, “Okay, what’s going on? Am I doing this right?” But obviously, like over time I’ve gotten that feedback and I do know that. It’s making a difference and people are appreciating it especially the things that we talk about with kind of a strong clinical focus and having a strong Christian focus that it’s making a difference. I have to be able to step back and say, This podcast is reaching so many people because God has allowed me to have it, and because God is the one that’s bringing them to be able to hear it, and he’s done just amazing things and done the work and put a lot of pieces together in order for this to happen and that I’m trying to stay in a place of humility because as I’m studying and doing this deep dive into Isaiah, there’s a lot of information in there about pride. The dangers of pride and how it can essentially lead you to down a negative path and destruction. It’s not good. So that’s something that I think especially ministry leaders can fall into.

Steve: I appreciate that you don’t let that get your head, that you don’t go around. “Hey everyone, I’m a podcaster” with your pinky in the air and your nose up and putting others down who are not podcasters or not as good as you or not as whatever, but you take a very humble approach and I appreciate something you said that you went to others to ask them questions. And I know that you do that. I know that you ask, Hey, how can I do better? What would you think of the podcast? Or would you listen to it or whatever? I appreciate that. I think that’s healthy because you’re not trying to do it all on your own. Sometimes we get thoughts in our heads that we’re better than we are.

I hate to put it like that, but I think we get that idea and we take the credit of what God’s done, but we take it. It shouldn’t be that way. So I appreciate the concept of, looking at what God has done. 

Carrie: Your quiet times with the Lord are all about preparation for a Bible study, teaching time, you’re not really taking that time to examine your heart. Seek confession for your sin, and apply the word for yourself. I can tell you, Steve, this is one I’ve been guilty of in the past for sure. 

Steve: Sure. I mean, I think everyone has, if we’re honest, and I think the best leaders are the ones who are honest. The ones who say, “Guys, I’ve messed up, or I’m not where I need to be with the Lord. I’ve got the series figured out. I’ve got the sermon figured out,” but you could talk all day long behind a podium or behind a mic or what have you, but people are at some point, they’re going to recognize your walk and who you are.

They’re going to begin to see the difference between what you did and are doing versus what God is doing through you. I think it has to be God doing it through you. 

Carrie: That connection to the Holy Spirit and what he wants you to share is important, but you have to preach it to yourself before you can teach it to anybody else.

I was thinking about a pastor, I’m trying to figure out how to explain this, but essentially due to being in college, I was in one part of Florida at one point and another part of the year because it was summer or Christmas break or whenever. I was in another part of Florida and I heard this man who was part of this denomination preach the exact same sermon twice and I thought, this must be something he can have passed in a file cabinet somewhere. He just kind of pulls it out and this is like my top 10 sermons and I think I’m going utilize this one. And it caused me to be like, there’s just something that feels inauthentic about that in terms of making sure that you’re bringing what God wants you to bring.

I could be judging this completely, inaccurately and he could be praying and connected to God and feels like that’s what God wants him to share. But I just thought, I just don’t know about that. I mean, to the point that it was the same sermon, there weren’t answers on it, and I was like, “Wow, this is very interesting.”

Carrie: This is one that we’ve definitely talked about this in the past.

Steve: Yes. I’ve got a lot of pastor friends and I think that’s probably one of their biggest struggles. They know the direction of the church somewhat. There’s a direction in their mind. To relinquish a duty to someone else, to let someone else do that, I think is very difficult. It’s hard. I, know pastors who may want to be in charge of the music, what’s going on in small groups and to the point where everything that’s said is controlled.

I think that to me, I’m struggling because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I don’t want to call anybody out on your podcast here. I don’t think that would be right, but I just think that they have the best of intentions. I think sometimes you might want to pray about that and see if God put this person in this role, and I think God’s in control.

God can show them what he wants in you and what he wants in that small group for that whatever God has to control the foil. I think that’s the best way to say it. 

Carrie: Yes,

Steve: You can’t paddle all the little boats going the same way, if that makes sense. You can’t control everything. You can’t micromanage it all. God doesn’t need micromanagers, he needs leaders. 

Carrie: The reality is we’re supposed to be living in community and thriving off of other people’s strength. When a ministry leader or a pastor identifies like, “Hey, this piece is not my strength.”

Steve: Sure. 

Carrie: I need to hand that off to somebody else who is going to do a way better job because that’s more in their spiritual gifting and that’s just so important. 

Steve: Sometimes I think that the person that should be doing it isn’t even the most qualified, but the most called. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Steve: If you’re trying to control things, you get in the way of that. So a good example, if you open your Bible and you look at the story of David and Goliath. David certainly wasn’t the most qualified to sling that rock. There’s no way. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Steve: He was the smallest guy. We know that story most of us. So if the bigger guy, the more qualified person, the more whatever would’ve slung that rock. It wouldn’t have worked out the same, but David did it and it won the day.

I think you have to look at your church whatever it is the same way. Whatever you’re leading, I think you have to see it the same way. Don’t look at it solely as you got be in charging and no one else can do it, or I got to have this person because they’re way more qualified even though they don’t have the time or the want to do it. And then you got this other person who doesn’t seem as qualified, but they got a heart of God for it. Pray about it and let them do it. Let it go.

Carrie: I think we were just talking about pride, and for me personally, I feel like when I’m in that space of thinking, I can do it all myself or I should do it all myself.

I don’t need anybody else to do this. To me that’s pride, and I’ve certainly been guilty of my sense of trying to control things and we have to be able to know when to let things go. Especially, this is so crucial for preventing burnout in ministry. It’s easy to get into that place. And there was something that happened at a previous church where I was asked to take charge of something and that was going to take a lot of time. I said, “let me think about this. Let me pray about this. I’m not saying yes or no right now.” And I went down. I went back and I wrote down, okay, here’s everything I’m doing for the church and this ministry. And I said, “Okay, well if I’m gonna take on this other role, then some of this stuff needs to come off my place,” which was great because it allowed other people to get involved who had been sitting on the sidelines a little bit, and they wanted a task. They wanted more involvement. Mm-hmm. , they wanted more connections, so it was just a really great opportunity. Whereas we grew the ministry in the sense that we added people that were serving.

I didn’t get burnout and I was able to get some things delegated. Also, some things probably that I wasn’t as passionate about as this project, where I was pretty passionate about that project. I think that’s just a good example of when this can work out well for us. We talk about in churches all the time, what is it? 20% of the people do 80% of the work.

Steve: I’m just thinking about that. That’s funny. You got your 80-20 rule. I think that sometimes the 20% do it every single time because I don’t know if it’s because they’re the extroverts that stand up to do it, or if the 80%, a lot of them just aren’t asked to do it. They’re just waiting for someone to ask them, which doesn’t make them right, but maybe they need a little nudge. “Hey, I’ve got something. I want to entrust it to you.” It would be a good way to start that. I think on pastors, it’s a hard thing. I do have to give them some credit. In the past, I was a manager before and I’ve led other things, and it is easy to ask the same person all the time to do the same stuff because you know that they can do it. But in ministry, that’s not necessarily how that should work. God calls us, we have to do it. 

Carrie: Ultimately not sustainable for that person. I have had experiences in the past where I recruited some people for different tasks and at first they were funny like, “I don’t know if I can do that.” And I was like, “Well, these are the skills that I’ve seen that you bring to the table. You have some of these things that you’re doing in the context of your work, or you’ve been around the church a while, and so you have this level of being a Christian for a while. You have this level of experience and knowledge, and so forth.”

Sometimes people do need that little extra push of encouragement to get more involved and end up really enjoying the service in the ministry over time, once they can get in there and get their feet wet a little bit. People have two different perspectives. There’s some people that go, I have to do this because if I don’t do it, nobody else will do it. And then on the completely opposite side, you have people who say, they don’t need me, they’ve got this kind of under control, and I’m not really needed over here.

Steve: Yes and there’s that side too of similar to what you’re saying, where people will say, I’m too young to do it or I’m too old. I really hate to break this news to you, but there is no retirement plan in church ministry. It’s just, well, maybe there is, but when God calls you to do something, I don’t care if you’re five years old or 99 years old, you do it.

Carrie: I think my grandmother has been a good example of that through the years and when my grandfather died, she got involved in helping other widows as they were grieving the loss of their husbands thought that was kind of a beautiful thing about how she used that experience to help other people who are in a really sad place.

Carrie: Sabbath rest is definitely biblical. We see more pastors taking sabbaticals and we just need this rest to become mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. Have you seen some ministries? 

Steve: Oh my goodness. 

Carrie: That didn’t value rest?

Steve: Yes. Not to interrupt you, but Yes. I had one youth pastor one time that I knew that said, if I don’t do this, no one else will. And if I stop now, it’s all going to fade and go away. I’ve put too much work into this to stop. I just finally said, listen, if you don’t stop and get the rest that you need, even Jesus rested, right? If you don’t stop and do that, how are you hearing God? You’re putting all your time into doing the work. 

Carrie: Yes. That’s huge. 

Steve: How are you getting the energy up to continue? You become your own worst enemy. You’re just going through the motions, but you’re not listening to God and you’re not resting to get the energy up. It’s not a healthy thing to me.

Carrie: I have definitely seen situations and was in a smaller church context and had really challenged the pastor. “When do you get a Sunday off? Who’s able to preach for you?” I think a little bit of pushback of need to be here, need to be involved. And then later there was some other leadership that pretty much kind of forced some time off, I think, which is healthy.

It’s just we need that time away not just to recoup, but also to know. I think that the walls aren’t going to fall down when we’re not there. I feel like that’s really crucial for leaders to know if you raise up other leaders under you in your ministry as you should. You should be able to miss a Sunday and it not crash and burn or fall apart. You don’t need to be the glue that’s holding this whole ship together.

Steve: It’s a leadership position. It’s not a dictator-type position where only you can do it and you tell everybody what they’re doing. God put you in charge of a flock. So help the flock, help them grow and listen. When there’s an area that’s struggling, your job as a leader isn’t necessarily to fill the void. It’s to help someone else grow into that void and fill it in a lot of cases there too. Like I said earlier, I don’t think being a pastor or a leader in church, it’s not easy. I think it’s very easy to fall into that, what we’re talking about today, those problems where you’re trying to do everything and you’re taking the credit for it like we talked about earlier.

I think you have that some point, step back and ask yourself, what is God doing what am I doing and how much can I step out of that and let God step in? I think it’s at that point you’ll find things are going to go a lot better with your church or your program or your whatever because you’re letting God do it, not you. We always fail.

Carrie: We’re so results-driven in our society. We want to put the effort in and see the results. What I’ve learned over years of ministry, not just in church, but in counseling situations, there are times where you’re going to follow the Lord and you’re going to put in the effort and you may not always get the results out that you’re wanting or that you’re hoping for. The obedience is the important piece, 

Steve: Right.

Carrie: That I would go back to, did you do what God asked you to do?

Steve: Yes.

Carrie: At the end of the day, can you rest and say, regardless of how the results came out, did I do what God asked me to do today? And if the answer is yes, then it’s okay. You can move forward, I talked about this on the podcast before with my friend Sarah Slade.

They brought on and we had an EMDR chat, but we were talking about when we were working in community mental health and we were going into homes and working with children that just had very severe emotional behavior problems. We’re getting kicked out of school, all kinds of things happening and going to juvenile detention. I know there were days that I went home and just felt like, oh my goodness, I did nothing worthwhile today, . I drove around in my car and I talked to some people, but I didn’t really make a difference or I wasn’t able to help these people, but I had to come to a place where it couldn’t all be about me, obviously, because I was only one piece of the puzzle in this child’s life, and so I couldn’t put all that pressure on myself to make those things happen and to make those results happened. But also I had to step back and leave room for God and others to be involved in the situation, to get parents on board, teachers, and whoever else was available to support these kids and adolescents. I think what we’re talking about, there’s going to come like a tough time in your ministry if you’re in it for a long time. There’s going to be a season where it’s not easy or it’s not enjoyable. 

Steve: Absolutely. I think if you’re focused on the amount of people in the seats over what the people in the seats are doing, as in how is God using them, you’ve missed the boat. You may need to go back and they have a heart check.

When you stand before God, I don’t think he’s going to say, all right, pastor or leader, how many butts were in the seats? I really don’t think that’s going to focus. I know that for me, looking at my own life, one big decision that I made for ministry was to go into mission work. And what got me there was a little church.

It wasn’t the church that was huge, it was the church that small. Now that’s not putting down the big churches. I’m not saying that, but that little church was more interested in where my heart was at, and that was the growth they were concerned with was my own personal growth, not what’s coming out my wallet and not what’s. 

How many people can I bring to church? Cuz we need a bigger church and let’s see if we can have this many baptisms and this many salvations. Those are all good things, but the focus shouldn’t be solely driven by numbers like we were talking about earlier. I think it’s important to check a person’s heart. Where’s that person’s heart at? What are they leading by? 

Carrie: Steve, is there anything else you would add to this list? Is there anything else that we didn’t cover that you think you might add of what’s kind of a warning sign or red flag of ministry potentially becoming toxic?

Steve: I think when a pastor or a leader, they can’t relax. They can’t be one of the group. I used to have a pastor that every single week he invited people over to his house. That’s a big deal. And it was a big church too, but he always invited people over and said, you know what? If we don’t have enough food, we’ll all chip in and get McDonald’s, whatever we got to get, but I want to have fellowship in our church. If you’re not coming to my house, take some months somewhere. Spend some time with your own family too. It wasn’t about going out to eat every single Sunday. It was more about time together. That was huge to him. I think that’s missed a lot of time. We work so much on the administrative side or the perfect sermon or the whatever, that we actually forget that there are humans out there that just want to grow as a community with us.

I would say relax, let your guard down. Let them see your flaws. That’s the best way to have growth, is to be transparent and to let them see what you can’t do and haven’t done, and then what can be done down the road as you grow as a person. I think that those following you, those in church would probably grow even more because then they would say, well, the pastor’s transparent. I guess maybe I ought to be as well. Transparency and relax. Those are my things I think, and I would add to that, 

Carrie: It’s hard I think for pastors and other ministry leaders to be transparent if they feel like there are these really high expectations of them. 

Steve: Sure. 

Carrie: I think there has to be a give-and-take supportive congregation environment for them to be in where they feel like it’s safe and it’s okay to say, Hey, let me raise my hand and say, I struggle with this too. Or I’m eradicating sin out of my own life through the help of the Lord, and this is how I’m doing it. These are my weak spots and these are things that God is working with me on. The pastor job or ministry leader job is kind of hard because you need to be able to have those good communication skills while at the same time having the relationship skills.

Sometimes there’s an imbalance between the ability to study, communicate, the intellectual side of things, and the ability to have like a warm touch and greet people be empathetic and compassionate. Sometimes it’s hard to find a balance between those two things because both are essentially important.

Steve: Sure. Absolutely. If they are honest and open about things and they have, people that are around them that will hold them up to that level and let them know, “Hey, we’re praying for you ” or, “Hey, you are a little harsh here.” I don’t just mean the pastor’s wife or the leader, spouse, whatever, but I mean having a group of people that will really, truly hold you accountable in those situations that you see, things you wouldn’t have seen on your own.

Your pride gets in the way or whatever, but to be called out a little bit in a nice loving way, not a, Hey man, you stink. Just quit. Why don’t, no, not like that, but in a loving way, say, I think maybe you handled this a little harshly. I think that helps to have those people there. 

Carrie: Being open to feedback is a very healthy trait to have for sure in ministry and in life.

I have a good friend that I meet with once a week, who always appreciates when I give her feedback, whether it’s on herself, how she’s interacting with her business or on her business. This is what I think of when you say, “Is that what you mean?” Or “I’ve noticed you have this pattern.” “What’s going on with that?” And she’s like, “Thank you because I don’t have other people who are willing to really be honest with me, and I appreciate your feedback. It’s helpful.”

Well, thank you for joining me on this episode. Even when you on a day you don’t feel the greatest , and I was wanting to think of if we had any stories of hope to share. I don’t know if you have any ideas, me or you or us. 

Steve: I think one that comes to mind, I felt my situation. Now I don’t drive, I don’t get out nearly as much, but I felt called to do some sort of a small group. Something and we’re involved in a small group already, but something that would allow me to feel useful and be a good tool. It’s not all about me. We decided via Zoom or what have you, to do a small group where individuals like myself could sit from home assuming they feel up to it. You don’t have to drive anywhere. You don’t have to go anywhere and connect online. We could talk to one another and we could do a study, and if you can’t show up, you don’t feel well, you can just text back and forth or email us or whatever. “Hey, this is where I’m at.”

It’s a guy’s group and it’s been good timing for us and it’s, it’s small and I’m okay with that. If it’s just myself and one other guy, that’s fine. There’s actually a few of us that are in it. Thus far, only me and one other person, one other guy, have really shown up, and that’s okay because we talk through text, and we hold each other accountable.

We have a topic. It’s everything you would want in a small group, really just not your traditional small group. It’s an odd fit in a way. It’s an odd situation. We don’t do the traditional thing. We’re not going to one another’s houses or things like that, but we don’t get to go out much or often. So it fits the need, and I feel it’s been a question like, how do I serve? How do I do that? I thought, this does feel hopeless because I can’t be dependent upon as easily as I used to be. I can’t just show up somewhere and say, all right, I got everything together, or have the energy for this long study. It’s kind of have to take it day by day, moment by moment. These guys are in the same situation, so it works out perfectly. A small example, but it’s kind of a big deal for me. 

Carrie: No, I think that’s great that you’re able to keep some healthy social connectedness and male accountability and things like that even within your current situation. Thank you everyone for tuning in and listening today to just kind of talk through some of these warning signs, and maybe you’d have one or two that you might even add to this list.

This was just something that I came up with quickly and I was glad to be able to talk with Steve about it since he’s had a good share of time in ministry situations as well. You can reach us anytime at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

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

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

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

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

Episode Highlights:

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

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Links and Resources:

Amber’s book: Pregnant & Drowning

Explore Related Episodes:

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

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 91. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while, you know that we love to tell personal stories of people who have struggled with anxiety and OCD. These are so important because they are relatable to other people who often feel so alone, and I think some of you are really going to resonate.

If you’ve ever experienced any type of harm OCD thoughts, you’re really going to resonate with our guest today. Here is my interview with the author of Pregnant and Drowning, Amber Van Zuyen.

Amber, welcome to the show. It’s good to have you today.

Amber: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Carrie: You have a really unique personal story about anxiety and OCD and how that’s impacted you and your life, especially in terms of being pregnant and having your son. Take us back a little bit earlier to when you first started experiencing anxiety or OCD symptoms.

Amber: Well, looking back, I can pinpoint when I was 24 when it heightened and got to its worst point, but in early childhood, I would do things like, I’d be in the grocery store with my mom and I didn’t want to step on the lines on the squares because I believe something bad was going to happen or I just had to make sure that I did that so nothing would happen to me, or there was a little girl who had lice in class next to me and I obsessed about constantly having lice and I would go home and have my mom check constantly and it never stopped. It was always just, check again, check again maybe that’s kind of where I noticed my OCD in my earlier days. And then when I was in high school, I got obsessed with makeup and I always felt ugly, I had to cover that up during that time in my life, I would go to the bathroom during lunch periods and take it all off and then re-put it all back on just because I didn’t want anyone to see me. Looking back, those were things where my obsessive compulsive was kind of taking over. But when I was about 24, I had this really scary thing happen with my vision.

I ended up having something called ocular migraines which affected only one eye. I thought I was having a stroke, and my grandmother also suffered from MS terribly early on in my life, I saw her in a bad state, and that was also another concern of mine. So I was kind of always having obsessive thoughts about getting diagnosed with something, constantly reading things, self-diagnosing that triggered health anxiety for me.

I went to the doctor and he told me it was ocular migraines, that there’s nothing to worry about, but I also was concerned about MS too because my grandmother had it, and I was just so terrified and it just played over and over in my head that I was basically already living with a disease that I didn’t even have to the point where I didn’t wanna go out of the house.

I was obsessing with medical books, reading symptoms over and over again, and actually convincing my body that I was having those symptom. This went on for about a month, and I went to the doctor and they prescribed me medication, and I refused to take it for about a month, but I eventually did, and I slowly got better I never completely got over it, but I learned how to deal with it differently.

Carrie: Did they recognize the OCD at that time?

Amber: No, they told me I had anxiety, but looking back, I definitely in the mind it’s repeat, repeat, repeat. It was really destroying my life because I obsessed about it so much as I was living at 24 7 but I eventually got on medication and it got better. And then it was one of those things where I’ve always felt guilty about it because it’s like a lack of faith I feel in a sense, but I do feel like it’s an imbalance that I’ve struggled with and that I truly need medication for it. There have been points in my life where I’ve been off of it and then on it again, and then, Recently I’ve had a trigger because I got off a medication and I was triggered again with medical stuff because of stories Christina Applegate just came out with MS and it triggered that time in my life again but with that said about MS, I see a lot of people doing wonderful with it.

My grandma just got diagnosed at such a weird time she didn’t get diagnosed for with it for 10 years people said she was crazy. She went to doctors and they told my grandpa, you know, your wife’s crazy you need to lock her up in a mental institution but really she was really sick with MS they just didn’t recognize it at that time. She got so debilitated and basically, there was nothing that they could do for her she was too deteriorated at that point to help her. A part of me feel so guilty because I see all these people doing so wonderful with it or just having a good attitude with it and that has been a struggle for me, I feel guilt.

Carrie: Going back to the piece about faith, because I think a lot of people have that wrestling that struggles with anxiety or OCD, well, maybe this is a faith issue, “I don’t have enough faith in God kind of flesh that out a little bit more for you was, I don’t have enough faith, if I do get MS, that God’s going to take care of me and I’m going to be okay.”

Amber: Yes to me, I felt so bad because here I am creating these things in my own head when there are people out there suffering with it and doing good with it because the most courageous people that I know, my brother-in-law’s a paraplegic and he’s just a testimony.

Just such an attitude and I just think God, what is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Is it a lack of faith, but really it’s anxiety and OCD, and it’s truly a disorder? And I had to come to terms with accepting that because I know now going through several years, I’m almost 40 and dealing with it, that it is an actual disorder.

When I’m on medication, I can control it and I can think clearly, it’s almost a bunch of trash jumbled up in your head and then it gets cleared away and you could see clearly without the medication I couldn’t see clearly.

Carrie: I think it’s really hard for anybody to accept that they have an issue, whether it’s physical or emotional. There is a sense of grief and loss of saying, okay yes, I am struggling with OCD because it wasn’t something that you wanted, it wasn’t something that you brought upon yourself it just, it happens, and there’s probably genetic and environmental factors that contribute to all of that most mental health conditions. So that piece of just learning the acceptance is hard.

Amber: It is, and a lot of people are just, oh, get over it they don’t understand so there’s just this stigma that anxiety isn’t real, your OCD is just something that you are making up. You get a lot of that from people that don’t understand it, and I think that’s where a lot of the guilt comes in is people just throw it to the wayside.

This isn’t a real problem, this is just a you problem, but anxiety has a face just like diabetes or anything else does, and it’s an actual disorder some people need medication for it, some don’t, I tend to relapse when I’m not on medication.

Carrie: Tell us about that in terms of maybe responses from people in your faith community when they found out that you were struggling.

Amber: Well, I had a really interesting experience while I was pregnant, I was really struggling with really dark, violent thoughts, and I was thinking these thoughts were my thoughts and I was struggling so much my mom didn’t know what to do. She made an appointment with a Christian counselor at her church, and I went, I sat down with her. She was an older woman, and I began to tell her, I’m struggling with these thoughts I’m getting really depressed, I don’t know what to do. And she looked at me in the face and said, you don’t have real problems, my daughter has real problems, my daughter almost died giving birth, you don’t have real problems. And I just couldn’t even believe that she had gone there and said that, because I’m already so fragile she could have pushed me to, I don’t wanna say suicide, but there were moments during my pregnancy that I questioned those things. Without my family I could have done that, which is her saying that, and it was just so shocking coming from a Christian counselor.

Carrie: That’s really unfortunate that happened it sounds sometimes counselors can have an internal reaction to things that people tell them, and if we’re not in check with those experiences that happen within ourselves, we can do damage. And so it sounds she had some kind of, we call it counter transference reaction towards you as a pregnant woman and dealing with things. And clearly it sounds like she was not up to speed on OCD or what those symptoms are.

Amber: Yes. She definitely was not qualified for at least someone with my condition going on.

Carrie: When did you get that diagnosis of OCD? Was it when you were pregnant? Did someone tell you like, “Hey, this is harm OCD, these are some classic things and these are intrusions it’s not really you?”

Amber: Probably I was 12 weeks pregnant, these obsessive thoughts started five days after I found out I was pregnant. I’ve always had that health anxiety and I’ve always worried, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to have children at the time, and I was still married. My mom’s like, oh, when are you gonna have kids?

Everyone’s like, “When are you going to have kids?” I don’t know. I was 33 and I’m like, okay, I guess we’ll try and I got pregnant really fast. It scared me and I was laying on the couch one day, a few days after I found out I was pregnant and I was petting my dog and I had this thought in my head where she trusts me so much, I could just snap her neck and she wouldn’t even know it and it scared me.

I had no want or desire to do that, but I started to think, am I starting to go crazy? Am I going to get postpartum? And then I let this repeat, repeat and it turned into a big monster, and it got to the point where I called my OBGYN, and I said, these are the things that are going on in my head and I don’t know what to do, I’m scared that they could happen, not that I want them to happen, but they could and she told me, well, thoughts turn into plans, and then things happen.

Carrie: Oh my goodness. Thanks.

Amber: That triggered me so bad that now the thoughts went from my animals to my mother, to my husband to everyone around me is not safe anymore. Any object around the house, I took all the knives out of the house, put them away, I was scared of the knife drawer, I was scared of the cord that goes through your iPod I thought anything could be a weapon. I was talking to my good friend, she’s a nurse, and she was just walking me through all this, and then one night I was lying in bed and I thought I heard a voice say, just do it already but it was really my thoughts but my friend got freaked out and she said, it’s time for you to go get evaluated. I went to the hospital the next day I was so incredibly terrified I thought everyone’s gonna find out, but at least they will shackle me down and I can’t hurt myself, I can’t hurt anyone else, and this baby can have a chance, so I’m gonna go, but I really thought they were going to 50150 me, they didn’t.

Carrie: In terms of involuntarily hospitalize you, that kinda thing?

Amber: Yes they told me that I was suffering from horrible OCD and anxiety, extreme levels of it. I was like O C D interesting, I didn’t really think about that ever being a thing, because you know, when I think of OCD, it’s like locking the door five times or checking. I didn’t do that, but my mom did that I don’t know if it was hereditary. I ended up going to a therapist through my insurance company and I ended up getting on medication while pregnant, and that was a whole other ordeal as well, because I had one doctor tell me he was, I just switched carriers, so I’d gone to a new carrier while I got pregnant.

This is a whole new doctor, and he told me that because I told him I was suffering from anxiety and this was prior to me going to go get evaluated. And I was just kind of seeing what I could do, I tried acupuncture and I was going to try to get a referral cause it was really expensive to go out of pocket every day because I was suffering so bad, because I said antidepressants while pregnant, what do you think about it? And he said it’s equivalent to a mother drinking every day pregnant. And I’m like, what?

I was just shocked well, okay, this isn’t an avenue I can go down this isn’t going to work. I guess I ended up getting put on medication and I had another doctor, a different one after going through the evaluation process, she put me on something, a roll of doses and it turns out that it’s not the stigma that’s attached with taking antidepressants while pregnant. There’s some that are more harmful and then there are others that don’t travel through the placenta quite the others do. And I’ve asked several doctors and they say that it’s a very low-grade risk as far as the baby’s health goes certain ones and the one that I was on in particular, Prozac, was a friendly one for pregnancy.

Carrie: That’s interesting that your first doctor said that because there are all kinds of studies that have also been done on depressed mothers who are pregnant and that can actually cause harm, low birth weights and those types of things.

Depression in itself is not good for pregnancy, but taking an antidepressant sometimes can help, mitigate some of those risks from the depression.

Amber: Yes.

Carrie: Did your baby come out just fine?

Amber: He came out wonderful. I missed one little part of that story when I told my OBGYN my thoughts, she put me on a medication instantly and not a lot of high risk to it. I was terrified I was on that for six weeks, and then they switched me to Prozac, which is a lot better but he came out beautiful, perfect, good birth weight, he was seven pounds, eight ounces.

Carrie: That’s great. Do you feel like that changed the course of the rest of your pregnancy? How far along were you when you got on the medication?

Amber: 11 weeks.

Carrie: You had these symptoms really early and I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know a ton about this, I just know from anecdotal experience that individuals I’ve talked to have struggled with OCD. Some of them, I guess with all the hormones and different things that are going on in your body and pregnancy is somewhat stressful to your body in general, that can increase people’s OCD symptoms.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to other people who’ve had similar experiences or heard or read articles or things like that.

Amber: Actually, I had two girls reach out to me that kind of heard about my story. Their OCD was a little different. One girl was just terrified of throwing up she has this horrible fear of throwing up, and she was obsessively thinking about it during her pregnancy, and it was derailing her from her everyday life.

She couldn’t focus, she couldn’t go to work. I kind of tried to talk to her as much as I could through it, just knowing that she’s not alone, that we’re all in this together, and that we all have different little things, but they’re all kind of in common when it comes down to the core of it. And then there was another girl who suffered horribly with depression and my boss at my job kind of hooked us up and I kind of just texted with her and she ended up getting on medication while pregnant, and that was a big game changer for her too. She didn’t completely get through her OCD depression during pregnancy, but it helped tremendously.

Carrie: That’s great. I think it’s mental health it’s so important to talk about these things while pregnant too and this is kind of close to my heart because I had some mild depression when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I think I struggled so much with like the shoulds. Well, I should be happy because I got pregnant and I was older and had lots of friends and family that had dealt with infertility, and so I put all these kinds of like shoulds on myself. You should be happy and I had this expectation that I was going to still be able to be fit during pregnancy and dealt with some back pain and different things. It was hard I really had to read just things. I guess I say all that to say I want people to know pregnancy is a happy time, but people can still struggle with some pretty significant mental health issues through that experience.

Amber: Yes, I mean when I had my baby, I held him and I didn’t feel anything right after I had him and I’m just thinking, aren’t I supposed to feel all these things? I just felt numb. Before they make you go home they have you watch this video, don’t shake your baby, don’t do this, don’t do that and I just felt, or if you’re feeling these things, come back in it’s one of those postpartum videos. And they’re playing this because they know who I am you know, just like all of these fears and for the longest time after he was born, I would get these bouts of fear changing him. I’d feel I’d lose control over my hands and they would do something to hurt him not that I wanted to, just the fear of it. And I would have to take him to my mom’s and go, just take a breather for a minute, go for a walk, and kind of work through that.

Carrie: I think the things that you’re talking about, one of the reasons OCD goes undiagnosed is because people don’t know what a lot of the symptoms are and that the obsessions can take a variety of different forms.

It sounds like you’ve struggled with your share of harm, OCD obsessions, but also somatic obsessions in terms of your body, and maybe there’s something wrong with me and maybe I’m really ill. Tell us a little bit more about how you got through that dark part in your life spiritually, this is the lowest point I feel like I’m going crazy, I feel there’s something really wrong with me, I don’t know what it is God help me.

Amber: I meditated on the Bible so much, just verse after verse, great glory from harvest I would put him on every night about fear and worry and anxiety, and I just would fall asleep to his messages and it would give me peace and calmness.

That was the only place I found a place where I could take a deep breath and just be like, I’m going to be okay. Another book, which really helped me was Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer. That just really helped me put into perspective. I can have a thought come into my head, but I don’t have to let it make a home there.

Just that God got me through it I never felt so close to him, but yet so close to the enemy as well I just felt it was a battle for my life. I definitely feel, Yes, I have anxiety and OCD, but there was some massive spiritual warfare I’ve never felt anything like that ever and it’s only by the grace of God that I got through it.

Just prayer, prayer, prayer, talking, I talk to a lot of Christian friends and that’s one thing that I think is a strong suit in me. I don’t have money, but I’m an open book and I tell people I just spill my guts. I think a part of that was a big part of my healing process, just letting it out, letting people know I’m not ok.

Letting them pray for me and I got baptized when I was pregnant was a huge thing for me it was like a rededication. My faith is stronger now than it has ever been, and I’ve never felt closer to God during that time it was wild.

Carrie: Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. The harder circumstances and his sufferings lead us closer to God and we discover more about who he is through those really hard times in our life. Then you felt led to write this book titled Pregnant and Drowning. Can you tell us about that?

Amber: While I was pregnant and going through all these things, I so desperately wanted something to relate to. I could find little tidbits here and there about women that had suffered from postpartum. Some are a little bit similar to mine, but not a whole lot.

I didn’t find a whole lot on harm OCD when I was going through this, and I don’t know if I wasn’t navigating correctly or how I was searching, but it just seemed so taboo to talk about and I just wanted people to know that you are not your thoughts. One thing that I really struggle with, and this is just strictly my opinion.

When I see a horrible headline where a mother bills her children, I think that is not postpartum in my opinion, that is evil and from the enemy. The devil does all these things to make you think that you’re going crazy and that you’ve got to do these things I’ve never had that desire. When I see that and I see postpartum, I go, I don’t know if can postpartum go that far to where you could harm a child like that.

I don’t know I just wanted to tell my story because I would never do something like that, and I felt like a monster and I was ashamed of it, but I know now that wasn’t me those were just thoughts that I invited in and I just could not get them off of the OCD wheel in my head.

Carrie: I appreciate you being so vulnerable about some of those specific thoughts that you had, because I think a lot of people, even people who come to therapy that I see, it takes a little while before they can even open up and talk about some of the things that are going on in their head because they feel they’re so horrific.

And then if I start talking about it, I’m going to possibly start obsessing about it, it can be really tough for them and I think that other people will be listening to this and find it very relatable of some of the things that they’ve had. I appreciate what you said earlier too, about how you can have a thought come in and it doesn’t have to make its home there, like you don’t have to continue to dwell on it you can notice there’s a separation that we can create. I’m having this thought, but one that’s not a reflection of my character which is so important and then two, it’s a thought. I can separate myself from that and say it’s not the same thing as a desire that doesn’t mean that I want to engage in that.

That’s why we call them intrusive thoughts because they intrude when you think about something that kind of pushes its way in, that doesn’t need to be there. That’s something that a lot of people, especially when they’re first kind of getting to know themselves in OCD that they really struggle with.

They think, Oh because I had this thought about hurting myself, my animal, my kids, whatever that means, somehow there’s some deep-seated secret desire that I want to do that, and that’s not the case so it’s important for people listening to this to know that.

Amber: There’s such a difference and it took me forever to realize that because I thought I don’t want to do these things, but why are they in my head because I won’t let them go I’m giving them value. I’m creating this monster that’s under my bed, and I can’t get rid of it until I can figure out that there’s a difference between a thought and who I am as a person, and that doesn’t reflect me.

Carrie: Your book is about your personal story and some things that were helpful and beneficial to you during that process.

Amber: It starts off in my earlier anxiety and then it moves on to my pregnancy, and there was so much darkness in that time and just the struggle I went through to try to get me in this baby through that journey also, I ended up having another baby and I was on medication the whole time. It was a great pregnancy as far as mental health goes totally opposite.

Carrie: That’s so hopeful too for people to know that they can have a different experience than they did the first time, even if they had difficulty with their mental health.

So you just kind of knew going into the second pregnancy, okay, I know what I’m dealing with I know what thoughts could come up, I have some more tools, skills, or resources to be able to separate myself from those and distract myself and move on. Did you ever get any good therapy in this process to specifically deal with the OCD?

Amber: I went to a couple of meetings. It was kind of far away from where I lived and I should have done the group thing I think it’s helpful. I am interested in joining one now cause I think it’s so important to support each other and to realize you’re not alone and that we can all get through this together, just hearing each other’s testimony, each other’s stories, helping each other through struggles.

I know that for me, I don’t have a lot of friends that struggle with the same things I do. I have one friend that has pretty bad anxiety, so to be able to relate to her is medication and therapy. Just to be like, “Hey, oh gosh, you do that too oh, okay I understand how that feels.” Just knowing that you’re not alone is such a game-changer I think.

Carrie: Amber, you have such a powerful testimony and I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us, I hope that people will get your book if this is something that they’ve struggled with and so that they can kind of relate and relieve a sense of shame that they may be having over dealing with some of these thoughts.

Amber: Well, thank you so much for having me.

88. Relationship OCD and Anxiety with Samara Lane

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 88. Relationship OCD and Anxiety with Samara Lane

On today’s episode, Samara Lane, a relationship and ROCD coach, joins me.

Samara shares her healing journey through relationship OCD. We also talk about how to overcome anxiety and OCD in relationships.

How does OCD manifest in relationships?

How to distinguish OCD from real feelings?

What can cause OCD to develop in relationships?

Some helpful ways to help you cope with anxiety and OCD in your relationship. 

www.samaralane.com

More Episodes on OCD:

87. OCD FAQ

26. A Personal OCD Story of Experiencing God’s Presence and Grace with Peyton Garland

13. Panic Attacks, OCD, and God: A Personal Story with Mitzi VanCleve

8. One Therapist’s Story of Discovering Her Scrupulosity OCD with Rachel Hammons

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 88. I didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happens that this episode is coming out around Valentine’s Day, and it’s on anxiety and relationship OCD, so that seemed to gel together well. I have on the show with me today Samara Lane, who is a relationship anxiety and ROCD coach.

Been wanting to, for a little while, have this episode about relationship OCD because it’s a very hot topic. First of all, a lot of people don’t even know that it exists. Am I correct?

Samara: That is very correct, including the people who start experiencing all the symptoms and wondering what’s wrong with them.

Carrie: Right. There’s this very stereotypical view of OCD that it’s somebody like Monk that you see on TV concerned about germs and concerned with order and cleanliness of things, but that’s really only one subtype of OCD. There are several different subtypes, so it’s often that people will believe, “Hey, I have anxiety,” and certainly, anxiety in OCD is very related.

But often, I have people come to me and say, “Hey, I have this anxiety.” They start telling their story, and then I realize, do you know that you’re actually having obsessions? These types of thoughts and, do you know that what you’re doing, intense Googling on the internet that’s actually a compulsion or seeking reassurance from your partner all the time is a compulsion, and they don’t realize that until somebody kind of puts a name and a label to things and it helps so much being able to know kind of how to move forward with that.

Samara’s Personal Relationship Story

You have your own personal relationship story about what led you to become an anxiety and relationship OCD coach. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Samara: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was my own journey through Helen back, really, because I’ve never experienced suffering as much as I have with really intense spikes of OCD.

I’m sure all of your listeners can relate to that. For me, it comes on differently for everyone. It came on the worst; the biggest initial spike that made me realize something was going on here was right before and during my partner’s proposal. I could tell, I just knew that he was about to propose, and I had this wave of anxiety.

We were at this beautiful, lovely dinner he’d planned for us. Many years ago, I remember being flooded with thoughts like, oh no, I have to decide the rest of my life right now, and what if this is the wrong choice? Or what if I’m settling? There are some things that aren’t perfect in the relationship—so much pressure.

I felt I was hyperventilating, going to have a panic attack, while he pulled out the ring and popped the question, and I said yes at the moment. And I think also because the anxiety was so intense now in hindsight, the OCD thoughts were so intense, I felt really guilty and like I was faking it when I said yes because so many doubts were coming up.

So I felt like I was lying and just saying what he wanted to hear, but I was like, yes, and then I was like, I need to go home and sit down. It really our engagement; our proposal ended with both of us sitting on the kitchen floor, and I was crying and doing all the compulsions without realizing it, seeking reassurance, confessing everything, telling him all of my nitpicking, intrusive thoughts, all of my doubt.

That, of course, didn’t feel good to him. I don’t recommend doing that. And it wasn’t really the romantic engagement experience that either of us had planned on, and up until this point, we’d been together for over two years and lived together. And the relationship was great, right? We wanted to be together, but it felt such; it just whew flooded me with most people.

Yes, it was an unconscious compulsion. I just started Googling. I was like, what the heck is wrong with? Fortunately, at least the one good thing that can come from our initial Googling is finding help and education and realizing that we’re not crazy; we’re not alone. This is a thing. Relationship anxiety and relationship OCD are a thing.

I’m so grateful that relationship OCD is now even a term and is even recognized by so many more people as a subtype because for me, this was 12 or more years ago, I don’t even remember, 13 years ago, maybe now, I didn’t see anything on relationship OCD back then. It was one person was talking about relationship anxiety and had a blog, and that was it.

But yeah, that really started my journey, and I cut a long story short, I felt like I tried everything under the sun to feel better. I read books, and I saw therapy and counseling. I took courses and really was through trial and error because I didn’t have a set system that was proven that I knew would work. And frankly, I didn’t know what resources were available to me, even if there were any back then.

So, just doing my best, I pieced together a system that really freed me. It takes time, of course, and it takes a lot of practice cause we’ve been having these OCD tendencies for so long. But that’s the practice I now teach my clients. I certainly wish that I had known then what I know now, right? It would’ve saved me years of suffering because it was years; it was many years that I suffered without really knowing how to handle it. And now it’s night and day different, of course, but it was really hard.

How Does OCD Show Up in Relationships?

Carrie: I’m curious: before this manifested in terms of your relationship with your fiance, did you have other concerns about other relationships? Like close friends, teachers, or family members?

Samara: Yeah, like anxiety with other types of relationships? Great question, and one that I’ve done a lot of reflection on, and in hindsight, absolutely. I never thought of it this way because I think it stayed mild or moderate enough that I just kind of coped and worked, tried to cope, if that makes sense. But yeah, I look back and see now there have always been tendencies to, like, oh, my best friend gets me really angry.

Well, maybe I don’t want to be her friend anymore. Running away and avoiding the things that are triggering, upsetting, or make me feel bad. And I also did this in many romantic relationships with past partners.

Carrie: Avoidance is definitely a big piece of anxiety and OCD that people have to work through. And it’s hard because the natural tendency when we feel discomfort is to say, “Hey, let me pull away from that.” But it only feeds and heightens anxiety and OCD more to avoid things. I call it the avoidance cycle. It’s like the avoidance confirms that you really do have something to be afraid of versus facing that fear and walking into it, even though you feel uncomfortable, helps you know, I really can do this.

I can handle this situation that I don’t feel I can handle. I’m curious as far as when you’re talking with somebody because it’s normal. Everyone who’s been in a romantic relationship knows that maybe if you’re looking at getting married, it’s normal to have what people cold feet before the wedding and have some trepidation.

It is a big commitment, and we should take that seriously. Now, how does somebody know? Is it at a level where it’s problematic versus this is just kind of normal relationship concerns that everybody goes through?

Samara: Such a good question and one that we really struggle with when we’re trying to discern what’s the anxiety and what are legitimate issues or challenges that we’re having.

I think you’re absolutely correct when making a big life choice, especially for those of us who are prone to OCD tendencies or anxiety. of course we tend to overthink, but even anyone without OCD or anxiety is going to possibly, potentially have a cold feet, like you said there. And all relationships have challenges.

My partner and I have had to work a lot on communication and how to navigate a relationship and a partnership. How do we navigate conflict? So those are really common challenges that aren’t red flags. They’re just part of being in a relationship, and it tends to happen when there’s anxiety triggers us.

It spikes something within us. It could be thoughts without sensations. It could be sensations without thoughts. It could be both together—sensations, meaning facing heart, panic, fear, and things like that. Our body is different in the sense of how we respond to it. It’s not just like, oh yeah, we had an argument earlier.

I think we’ll revisit that soon and maybe continue talking about it and working through it together. The average non-OCD mind might think it’s more common if we’re in the ROCD to go immediately into, oh, it’s a bad sign. Maybe I don’t love them anymore, or maybe we’ll never make it work.

Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake. Maybe I’ve already wasted the best years of my life trying to be with the wrong person. Maybe we need to break up, even though I don’t want to. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to, even though there’s also a part of me that feels that the only answer is to break up.

And so it’s this back and forth, this inner war within ourselves. I hate to use the word red flag because I think that alone can be overused, misconstrued, and highly triggering. The things we would want to take really seriously are untreated addiction, any kind of true abuse, ongoing, repeated dishonesty or cheating or something like that, of course, and anyone would want to take those seriously. But those aren’t the things that relationship anxiety glows onto the minutiae. Another thing I can share about this real quick is that there are two sides to the relationship anxiety to the ROCD coin. One side is the I’m not enough, and that’s how it’s expressed. It’s a little more obvious, in a way, easier to tell. This is a “me” thing. This is about my relationship with myself.

For those who have ever experienced it, my partner hasn’t texted me back. Do they like me? Do they love me? Something changed. For example, on the other side of the relationship, the anxiety coin expresses itself as What if my partner’s not enough? Or what if my relationship isn’t enough? What if this life choice isn’t enough?

And at the root of it, it still actually is an us thing, and it’s very clever how the ROCD is expressing itself, but that’s when we have intrusive thoughts like, am I settling? Is there someone I’d be a better match with? Am I really attracted to them? Do I really love them? I don’t feel the way I thought I should feel courageous enough to keep going within and practicing our mindfulness and our awareness; we’ll see underneath this is really, again, the same, oftentimes the same core issue. Am I enough? Is my choice enough? Am I safe? Is there danger? I must protect myself.

How People with OCD View Conflict in Relationships

Carrie: The need for safety, getting down to the root of the issue, and feeling unsafe. Not necessarily because your relationship is unsafe like you talked about; we’re not talking about abusive and unsafe relationships. We’re talking about safe relationships, but our perception due to intrusive thoughts can get that shaken up and make it feel unsafe when it’s okay. For example, conflict, all relationships have conflict, but if you have this high level of anxiety and intrusive thoughts, conflict can feel 10 times more threatening than it does to the average person. So you have to learn how to deal with those things and how to navigate them.

How long have you been together with your husband now?

Samara: It’s starting to be easy to lose count. We became a couple 13 years ago, almost 12 and a half years ago. We’ve been married for over eight of those years now.

Carrie: Was it a big learning curve for him to learn kind of how to navigate some of these issues?

Samara: Oh yes, absolutely. And bless him. Not everyone has his experience, but he was so confident in us and remained so confident and committed to us that even if I was in the early days of it, seeking reassurance or doubts.

“I don’t know about this. Are you sure he’d? Oh, I’m positive. We’re great. We’re going to do wonderful.” And of course, then my OCD just, instead of feeling grateful, it was just, well, he’s too confident. I don’t really trust his judgment. But he has been such really forgiving.

There have been times when what I expressed was really hurtful and really hurt him deeply and emotionally, and he has just stayed committed. I’ve done a beautiful job of just trying not to take it personally, acknowledging this is a thing, and being honest with me about his feelings and how it affects him, right?

I definitely learned early on not to divulge all the things anymore.

Carrie: I’m curious about your process, and I also have some thoughts about this. How do you feel this develops, or where does it come from, the bent towards relationship OCD specifically and anxiety?

Samara: Totally. Yes. I would say I have a predisposition to OCD. Not all of my clients, but I know for me, as an example, when I was little, in hindsight, I didn’t know what was going on, but I was ruminating and , really worried about moral scrupulosity if I’m saying that term correctly, something wrong, oh, I have to confess to my mom right away, and then I’d get immediate relief from it.

So, I see those tendencies in me from a young age. So, just in general, it can be a predisposition to OCD. In general, oftentimes people have had other OCD themes, and then it switches to ROCD or vice versa, or maybe they just always had social anxiety, and now suddenly it’s expressing as a more severe form of OCD or more noticeable form, other things that it can come from.

So again, just like biology, how are we wired right? Do we have anxiety in our history? Do we have any predisposition to this? I also often see that there is some wounding, some emotional wounding, that could be trauma, big or small, even things that we don’t necessarily think of as trauma. Sometimes, they’re very clear-cut and dry, but it could be when you got teased on the school bus, and that is still this unhealed part of our shadow self, right?

Our inner child really needs that love, compassion, and healing. It can also be wounds in our adulthood if our last relationship or one of our prior relationships ended badly or painfully. That can certainly affect things: attachment styles, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized, and any kind of insecure attachment.

We sometimes see it as a factor. Also, just general life stressors, right? If we have a predisposition to OCD, then if we’re in college and it’s really stressful, or we’re moving or switching careers. Life stressors can bring up this feeling of being unsafe, unsettled, or in limbo. And then, often, it just wants to glom onto something outside of ourselves.

Oh, it’s the relationship. I know it is. It must be the relationship. I’ve had a moment of clarity. So there’s a lot of different things. And then, even when we are struggling with our self-esteem, self-trust, or self-worth, I have seen that play a role in it. It could be one, it could be a variety of those things.

Carrie: I’m glad that you brought up a few different things there in terms of working with many people with OCD and a trauma overlap connection. Yes, there is that propensity towards OCD, but then there are also these wounding childhood experiences. Sometimes it’s not as dramatic as abuse, or sometimes it is.

Sometimes, it’s not as big as being physically or emotionally abused or something like that. Sometimes, it’s more what you didn’t get. It’s more the lack of somewhat of emotional neglect or the lack of engagement by caregivers or others when you need it the most. And we’re looking at not just what people received but what they did not receive in relationships.

And there can be a fear of vulnerability of getting too close to somebody. And then, if I have to find a way, my brain’s trying to protect me and find a way that I won’t get hurt again. So I’ve gotta kind of push back against that and, oh, there must be something wrong or must be something nitpicky about this relationship that needs to be fixed or worked on. It also can be a perfectionistic tendency because we think, oh, well, this happened, or they did this small thing to hurt us, and they may hurt us in a really big way. Or maybe it means they’re not faithful in the future because of this one little thing they did to hurt my feelings. That type of thing kind of blows up. So, I think we have to conceptualize that anxiety in any form is trying to keep us safe from hurt. And that’s especially true in the relationship OCD aspect and past romantic relationships, whether it was a divorce. Whether it was a bad breakup or a toxic, narcissistic relationship you got out of. Those deep wounds can last for much longer than we would like them to.

That needs some healing and needs some attention. We can’t just gloss over that and say, well, now I’m with Joe over here, and he’s nothing like Bob. He’s not hurting me, or he’s not abusing me. You can tell your brain that, but your body may still be going haywire. This is unsafe. I know from our conversations before you said I’m not a Christian, but I have a lot of coaching clients who are Christian.

What have you seen in Christian clients, specifically those struggling with this relationship? Anxiety, OCD?

Samara: It can feel; the number one that comes to mind is this fear and this feeling or belief that this is God saying that they’re not the right person. And how do you know? Sometimes, there can also be a lot of guilt.

I seem to have lots of clients that find me, not all, but some of them may be exploring. They’re doing their religion, they’re practicing their faith maybe a little differently than how they were raised. They can also feel this guilt and shame, and is this relationship bad? Or if they have premarital sex.

Then, they can really feel a lot of guilt and shame around that. It can really fuel a lot of the OCD if that’s not something that they believe is right. But the number one that I see is, how do I discern between is this God telling me this isn’t my person, versus this is just anxiety.

Carrie: That’s a really huge one that I run into and hear a lot is people say, is this God, or is this OCD, or is it the devil?

What is this that’s going on in my mind? How do you help people discern some of that?

Samara: I think each of us, it’s really coming to our own discernment and understanding and what resonates with us, what my clients have found most helpful, and what I personally believe is God doesn’t communicate through OCD.

Carrie: That’s not God.

Samara: It is different. And the more we learn about the OCD mind, as I’m sure so many amazing listeners here learn from you all the time and how it works and the signs that we’re having intrusive thoughts, signs that we’re doing compulsions and feeding the cycle, the more easily it’s we’re able to identify this is the pattern, this is the thing, and that’s not God.

I believe that God communicates. God can communicate in a firm way sometimes, but not through riddling us with crippling fear. And I believe that God is a really loving being and forces there to meet us with compassion as we go through these things, not to beat ourselves up. That’s really the mind.

Carrie: Absolutely. I like how you put that. I know you mentioned mindfulness a little bit earlier. Is that something that you practiced as part of your process?

Samara: Absolutely. Yes. It’s such a critical part of it. The way that I love to think about it and describe it is when we’re in active OCD thoughts and panic, it’s we have forgotten that there’s just a story playing in our mind.

It might as well be a movie that we’re watching, but we’ve gotten so sucked in and hooked by it that we feel like we’re a character. We think the movie is real, right? It’s like a bad dream. Like, oh no, all these bad things are true or might be happening or might happen in the future, and we forget that we’ve just fallen into this story that’s totally made up.

It’s just a story, and we have the choice and the ability to step back and really look at the thoughts, watch what the mind is doing, observe the judgments that it’s making, observe the sensations and emotions in our bodies and just let the movie play without hooking into it.

Carrie: Almost like you fall down into this Alice Wonderland world, but everything feels super real when you’re in the midst of the OCD thought storm. That’s definitely relatable, I think, to a lot of our listeners who have experienced that. I think this has been very informative for us because a lot of people may be listening to this and realizing I didn’t realize that those were OCD obsessions that I was actually having about my relationship, and now this will be able to help them kind of find a pathway towards healing as I think is really important.

Samara: Absolutely. I mean, I suppose the good news, if there is any, is ROCD is a subtype of OCD like you said, and so we heal it in a lot of ways, just like we would other types of OCD. It can, and I think one of the trickier parts about it is all the societal conditioning that is so perpetuated and prevalent in movies and media, Hollywood and fairytale stories that we grew up with, and social media memes all over the place.

So weeding through the relationship myths and unlearning and debunking those along with, like you said, any trauma or wounding, whether around relationships or anything that’s coming up around this. Usually, it is related to other people. In my opinion, these are what make ROCD one of the most, if not the most, complex OCD subtypes to weed through because we’re also sent all these messages that no doubt mean don’t you really do have to leave. You should leave. I would leave, right?

And that’s a lot to weed through, but it’s a beautiful invitation and doorway to breaking free, recognizing and breaking free from the OCD cycle, and practicing deeper and greater levels of self-trust because no one knows what’s best for you, better than you do.

Carrie: At the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person since we’re called Hope for Anxiety and OCD.

Samara: I’d be happy to share. I’m sure there are so many that I could, but the one that’s coming to my mind really has to do with my relationship, but not necessarily the ROCD because it happened after I had really come to a level of mastery around the ROCD.

But a while back, my husband was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD. We’re a fun bunch over here sometimes, and he had a really rough mental health year after just a trying time in his life, and his mental health was really struggling. I noticed the toll it was taking on me and our family, and there was a point at which I just felt some hopelessness as a part of me knew.

Of course, we’re going to get through this. Of course, as a resilient human, everything will work out and be okay. But it’s almost it was more of a surrender. I don’t know how to solve this. I’ve tried everything I can. It’s really many ways out of my control. And I wrote a letter to God, and I just journaled and wrote out in present tense words like how I was deciding my life was now, and the ease around it and the joy around it.

Not that it was perfect at all, but there was a lot of connection, and it felt healthy and grounded for me, him, and a kid for everyone. I believe that this wasn’t a coincidence. Literally, two or three weeks later, his prescription had changed. This was a prescription that was really common.

It’s always been known about his psychiatrist already knew about it. And he just got on this prescription that managed it to the extent that it was night and day different. He was then able to, and the tools he used to manage and regulate himself finally worked. I’m not saying medication is for everyone, but I felt my letter had been received and then just kind of forgot I even wrote the letter.

The energy of practicing that surrender and being it’s, I can’t do this alone. I need help. Our family needs help. My husband is in pain and struggling, and just seeing the difference night and day and feeling so much better. It’s been a gift and a blessing.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing that.

Glad that your husband is doing better, too. Well, it was great having you on the show today, sharing your wisdom, and having a dialogue about this. I think it’s an important conversation. And what better time to put it out than around Valentine’s Day?

Samara: Exactly. A triggering time here for many.

Carrie: Yes.

I’m glad we were able to have this episode because relationship OCD doesn’t get talked about enough, and probably more people struggle with it than they actually realize.

Regardless of your relationship status this Valentine’s Day, I want you to know that you are fully and completely loved by God regardless of what you’re struggling with or how you feel about yourself. He’s absolutely crazy in love with you.

As always, thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t received our free download yet, Five Things Every Christian Struggling with OCD Needs to Know, please check it out at hopeforanxietyandocd/free.

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

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