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70. Mental Health in the African American Community with Dr. Nicholas Grier

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Podcast Episode. No Comments on 70. Mental Health in the African American Community with Dr. Nicholas Grier

Dr. Nicolas Grier is an Associate Professor of Practical Theology, Spiritual Care, & Counseling. Dr. Grier is also a mental health therapist and author.

  • How do churches minister to the mental health of Black men
  • The stigma surrounding mental health and receiving help in Black Community
  • Common struggles that black men are facing today
  •  Early beginnings of Black Psychology
  • Dr. Grier’s view on APA’s formal apology to people of color in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism.
  • Dr. Grier’s Book, Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men


Links and Resources:

https://nicholasgrier.com/

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Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope For Anxiety and OCD episode 70. Today on the show, I have an interview with Dr. Nicholas Grier, an ordained minister and therapist and author of The Care For The Mental and Spiritual Health of black men. He’s gonna talk with us about mental health in the black community. One of the things I really value is hearing from people who have other lived experiences or cultural backgrounds that I don’t possess to try and I guess understand where different people are coming from because I see all different types of clients and it helps me to be able to empathize with others. So let’s go ahead and dive into this interview. 

I know that I had talked with you earlier that this particular episode was kind of prompted by something a close friend of mine said in an earlier episode, episode nine, actually. And I was asking her about her experience with mental health in the African American church. And she said, “well, you know, the pastors in those churches are like ostriches, and they just have their head buried in the sand, they don’t wanna look at their own issues”. And so I really thought, okay, there’s somebody in this community that understands mental health that we could talk to and really combine those two worlds. And I thought it would be awesome to provide an alternate perspective that was her lived experience. And so I was glad that she shared that, but I’m just curious, has it been a challenge for you. Since you work with churches to know how to minister to the mental health of black men?

Dr. Nicholas: That’s an excellent question and observation. The first thing I consider is the fact that there are a number of black churches, right?  so there’s a.

Carrie: Sure.

Dr. Nicholas: Diversity of black congregations. And so from that perspective, I think we have to go into that question, realizing that, like there are different ways that your various clergy, respond to this, very same question.

So for instance, last summer, I was working with a number of clergy on the south side of Chicago with a grant that really focused on this very thing that you’re talking about, you know, so the mental wellbeing of clergy on the south side of Chicago, and most of them were African American. There were, you know, 40, 50 clergy who were part of this program. And so from my experience in that program. In administering that grant. My goodness that the clergy were more than willing to dive into, their own, you know, experiences with, the heavy load that many of them carry the emotions, the psychological burdens that are placed on them. 

So I think when we think about response to this question, we have to think about, okay, who are the specific black congregations and black clergy that we’re talking about? Because my experience, especially recently, there’s a lot of openness from, you know, black clergy really saying that, “Hey, this is something urgent that we need to reflect on”. So not only was that a particular experience that I’ve had with clergy, but most recently there’s another denomination. That’s also, you know, asking me to work with them on developing a program to help their clergy deal with the mental health experiences.

Now, I think part of that is also who do clergy feel like they can trust specifically who do black clergy. Well, they can trust. So, so I realize that perhaps have maybe a little bit of an inside edge, if you will, just to take very seriously the experiences of clergy. So from this perspective, because I am an ordained clergy, cause I also happen to have a PhD and a licensed professional counselor. Well, they tend to trust me, in that sense. But I think part of that too is the ways in which I try to engage them. So I engage them with a lot of respect, deep appreciation for who they are. So I think all those things affect how we think about mental health and black faith communities. 

Carrie: Sure. And obviously, if you’ve already been there and had some of that lived experience of ministering in the church, that’s huge. So in the counseling community, we’re always like working really hard to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health and receiving help. Do you believe that black people face more challenging stigma to receiving mental health services? I don’t know for example, in the past I’ve had someone share with me that it felt very punitive for them almost like you’re gonna to therapy, but it was kind of like a punishment like you’re kid that’s in trouble and you’re going to therapy now. And it just, wasn’t a positive experience for that, for that individual who was in the black community. 

Dr. Nicholas: Well, I’d be curious to know more about that person’s experience. And you know, this to me is, you know, back to my emphasis on focusing on particular situations. And so each situation has its own nuances. And my sense, when I think about a type of situation like this is. That there are a number of, I think, complexities that one must engage. When we think about how do we, address the experiences, that the emotional, mental, and psychological experiences of black folks going to therapy. So in one sense now, which is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about the work of coloring mental health collective, which is organization.

I started that advocates and organizes for the mental well-being of black and brown people. One of the things we’re passionate about with that work is to say that, “Hey you can tell a black person to go to therapy”. But if they’re going to therapy with a therapist, who’s practicing out of theories and Ideologies that actually perpetuate colonization racism and things that sort, without them even being aware of that, then that can actually be very detrimental to the black person going to therapy.

So in actuality, they’re actually worse off for going to therapy. If they have someone who’s not practicing out of theories and ideology, that’s actually helpful for black people. So this is why I’m so passionate about reflecting on how can we help equip clinicians with theories and practices that actually nurture the holistic wellbeing of black and brown folks. So this can be done by taking very seriously, you know, for instance, the literature of black psychology of womanness in Mahata psychologies, right? So there are a number of resources that a clinicians can use. So I think that’s part of what’s at stake in this type of situation, when a person says, okay, feels are punitive when I’m going into therapy.

Well, I mean, my experience at doing therapy with black folks is that they often like wanna meet multiple times a week and even want to go over the sessions. I mean, in my view, it’s because. They feel respected, they feel understood. And it’s not all just having to explain my reality, to someone else.

Carrie: And I think that we’ve come a long way from original psychology in its infancy was a bunch of white European men. And now we have a lot more diversity in the counseling community as a whole. We have a lot more people of color. A lot more people of different ethnic origins and backgrounds. And that helps a lot with people being able to find someone that they can relate to, that they feel like, this person’s really gonna get it. And they’re really gonna have that level of like cultural sensitivity to their work. 

Dr. Nicholas: Absolutely. And you know, I was just inviting womanist, pastor theologians and therapists to a class. So I’m teaching a woman is pastor theology and spiritual care class where I teach at Clare Osteology. And one of the things that was significant. So Dr. pH shepherd was the person who came to visit us and she teaches at Vanderbilt. And she was just naming that when she, teaches her students about, you know, women as pastor or theologies and womanist psychologies, she’s like the things that we’re contributing, like these are not necessarily brand new. In other words, she was naming that even before like certain books and certain academic fields. There were actually black women writing of.

Carrie: Wow.

Dr. Nicolas: About psychology, right? And about, you know, spirituality. So just because psychology came into existence as like this Western Eurocentric male-centric field, that was not the beginning of human psychology.

Carrie: Right. No makes sense. 

Dr. Nicholas: You know, it actually existed before then. And so, when we realized that the fact that, even if we take a very seriously a, you know, African traditions and indigenous African traditions, a lot of these traditions were oral traditions and things that were passed down. And so there’s a lot of diverse types of wisdom that we can pull from whether it’s from the oral traditions or even like the other written works that don’t get highlighted in traditional psychology.

Carrie: So you’re really feeling like there’s more of an openness in the black community towards mental health, more openness, maybe towards clergy to be talking about mental health and how can we apply these things to ourselves to be healthier clergy, but also how can we help the people in our congregations be healthier?

Dr. Nicholas: Absolutely. I think a lot of it’s trust. I mean, I’ve been clergy in the local church setting. I’ve worked with clergy in the local church setting. I know very well, the suspicion, and I would say a healthy suspicion, oftentimes that black folks have of, you know white, if they’re not centered in a deliberative practice. I mean, they can sniff it out just like that. And so when you have clergy, for instance, who are trained in, you know, like liberation theology, being a type of theology that takes very seriously that systemically marginalized and that systemically oppressed and tries to nurture their wellbeing. I mean, I, I can think about the work of Howard Thurman. Who asked the question? What does the religion of Jesus have to say to those who love where their backs against the wall? And so when you’re doing ministry and theology from this vantage point as a black clergy person, well you wanna make sure that a therapist you go to is also reflecting on, how can I conduct therapy in such a way that helps people who are living with their backs against the wall?

Carrie: What are some common struggles that you see black men facing today? 

Dr. Nicholas: The struggles that I see again, I guess I wanna repeat the thing that these are diverse struggles, right? 

Carrie: Sure. 

Dr. Nicholas: There’s a difference. In other words, there’s a lot of variation within black communities. You know, no one black man is alike. And so I, I think it’s important to honor that, but then also when I think about some of the common themes that I’ve seen with black men, even as I wrote my book on the mental and spiritual health of black men. A lot of these things, get back to what I name as like, the social pathology. In other words, what’s wrong with society? What’s the dysfunction in society? I mean, a lot of Western individual psychology looks at the pathology as individualistically based. They point, even when you look at the DSM. It’s always ask Okay. What, what disorder does this one person have? Part of what I wanna ask is what disorder does society have? That causes a black man to struggle mentally and emotionally as they might. 

So from that perspective, I think there’s a lot of ways in which black men experience people, looking at them as if they’re not educated as if they’re criminals, as if they’re dumb as if their ultimate destination is to be locked up or, you know, killed by police. Or if they’re going to be successful by being some type of entertainer, whether it’s, you know, an athlete, visual artist, musician, you know, rapper, things of that sort. So these are all things, themes that came out of the interviews of black men, that I put in my book of The Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of black men. I, I think when we realize that these are common things, you realize these are significant odds. So, so this gets back to the whole concept in psychology of projection and projective identification. 

So one of the questions I asked black men in my book was what does society say about you and what does society think about black men? What is the ultimate life destination that society sees for black men? And that’s when they responded with all of those things that I named in terms of naming that, you know, black men, that society sees black men as criminals bugs as, you know, savages, as people to be feared, devalued, discredited folks who are not known by society, unless we actually take time to have conversations like this. Right? So, so it’s almost like as a black man, even though I’m a person like I’m a professor, I have a, you know, PhD minister, all these things. I often have to like, earn my way, even having these things. 

I have to earn my way to be received by someone as something who actually is this person, as opposed to whatever thing they have in their imagination of who I am. And so when you realize that there’s so much resistance, that that has to go on in a black man’s life, you know, in other words, I’m having to, and black men are having to resist these negative projections that society  has of us. Right? And so, when I look at the various psychological theories I studied, which is one of the reasons why I decided to write my own theory for the mental and spiritual the black men was because I noticed that when I was in graduate school, you know, studying psychology, a lot of these theories when they talked about these are the things you need to be. Well, psychologically, whether some of them talked about it from the perspective of everyone has like, you know, mirroring needs. Everyone has idealization needs. Everyone has these needs to be safe and all these things, I mean, these are all good and well, but they weren’t even talking about the specific things that black men face.

So this is why I think that when we realize all these things that black men face, we have to then take a step back and say, “okay, there are some additional things because of the realities of racism, sex, and classism in black men’s life”. One of the things that black men need to be able to do is to resist on a continual basis. All these negative projections. But then a part of that means that because we’re resisting so much in our lives, we also need to be able to experience mental and emotional healing on a consistent basis as well, because those negative projections keep coming our way. 

Carrie: And I think being able to talk with someone who can really validate that, their lived experience of, okay, I’m feeling like I’m having to work harder or climb this extra mountain, just to be able to do the things that other people may be able to do easily, reputation-wise and things that you were talking about. I think that that’s really important in terms of just the therapeutic context of validating that. That those things are real, that people may look at you and it doesn’t matter that you’re well educated and you’re dressed nicely. They may assume you’re a drug dealer who, you know, because of their own preconceived notions that they have. 

I found this interesting that it, it really just came out very recently prior to us recording this, that the American Psychological Association, it recently published a formal apology for their role in promoting perpetuating and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in the US. And I’m curious about your response to that article, 

Dr. Nicholas: I’ll say, “yes”. I’m curious, what else that we want to reflect on from it?

Carrie: Do you feel like that, that’s been a long, like overdue statement that they made basically. I mean, cause they listed several different things. Just, you know, not taking into account marginalized populations. When we look at studies, sometimes the studies are not diverse. And then we’re trying to apply something that was not studied on people of color to people of color. For example, just some of those types of things. From your perspective as a black man, does it feel validating like, well, it’s about time.

They got around to that. Just what does that feel like for you? 

Dr. Nicholas: That’s a very good point. The reason why I respond to that as I do is because there is a way that I would say people of color and certainly black people see it, you know, see this, apology and say, “okay”, well, you know, the response might be, I’m glad that that happened. And also we know that like our livelihood, our survival, our liberation, our flourishing is not, you know, predicated on whether or not we’re gonna get this apology, right? 

We know that it may or may not happen. History has proven itself a black folks will go to the grave without getting a certain apology or reparations or things of that sort. So we’re not basing our livelihood, our survival and flourishing on whether or not certain groups apologize and give reparations. Now, of course we’ll strive for these things to happen, but we’re not waiting for that to happen in order for us to nurture our own wellbeing, an approach that many of us have. And I can think about groups that I’m a part of. Well, we organize within ourselves to nurture our own well being because we’re like, we know they may or may not get. But we know we have the wisdom, the genius within us to nurture our wellbeing. One of my amazing colleagues, and I will say, you know, she’s someone who I admire deeply because she’s the first black woman to have a full book. And woman is pastor theology and spiritual care. So this is Dr. Carol Watkins Ali. She wrote the book Survival and Liberation, which focuses on pastor or theology and pastoral counseling in the African American context. 

One of the things that she said is if the trauma isn’t the DNA, then the healing is in the DNA. She talks a lot about, you know, black women, especially poor black women and saying that all of society will be better if we care deeply for poor black women, because a lot of our capitalism, the ways and we profit are built on the labor backs and suffering of poor black women. I, I think it’s very important to honor that. And so, when we take seriously the reality that folks who’ve experienced the trauma know very well of the experience of it and have the ability. If we nurture constructive self-reflection and ways to engage and respond to the suffering, then we ourselves can nurture our own wellbeing. And of course, there’s always room for allies in the struggle.

One of the things I’m clear about is that, you know, black folks not waiting on whoever to apologize to us, like we know we’ve got the power, we’ve got the ability, the wherewithal to nurture our own wellbeing. Even as we work with willing allies. 

Carrie: And I think, definitely actions speak louder than words. And so it may take time for some of these things that you’re talking about for change to occur. Obviously, if you’re talking about things that have been going on for a while. Takes time to make changes. 

Dr. Nicholas: Right. 

Carrie: Tell us a little bit more about your book, The Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of black men.

Dr. Nicholas: So, as I alluded to earlier, you know, I just got tired during my PhD program, seeing all these psychological theories, not, you know, fully addressing. Emotional psychological and spiritual experiences of black people in particular. And when you look at, you mentioned the early beginnings of psychology, even when you look at the early beginnings of black psychology, certainly a lot of it was focusing on the strengths of black people and, you know, how do we engage a strengths-based model instead of a deficit-based model, which is significant shift from how a person engage, you know, traditional Western therapy. So that’s been a part of black psychology, but a lot of the beginning of black psychology was about responding to what centric psychological theories were saying. So a lot of these early psychological theories and literature about black people about how black folks are less than, and you know how we’re so different from white people.

So then you have a lot of black psychologists coming along saying, “wait a minute, we need to respond to that”. Because that’s not true. We’re not less than white people inherently. And so when I look at the work that I do, I’m dishonored by those who came before me, because I’m only able to do what I’m able to do because of those who’ve paved a path.

In other words, if I came into existence at a point in time in human history where nobody had defended against this oppressive thought from early psychology about black people. Then, a lot of the tasks of my work primarily respond to these negative perceptions of black people by white psychology. And so, because you have so many folks who’ve come before me, who’ve already done that work. I then can develop an approach to counseling and mental health that, you know, stands on their shoulders and enables me to think about how do we nurture not only the survival of black people, but the flourishing of black people. 

So, this is how I enter into the conversation in human history is to say that, you know, look at these amazing black psychologists, who’ve done this work up until now. And even in more recent years, you’ve had, you know, certain works that highlight, you know, black psychology. I’m thinking about various volumes, on the black psychology, which are available. All we gotta do is look ’em up and, and teach from them and study from them. And we’ll be better equipped to care for black people. And one of the things that I saw was even as I, I did the research, there was not much of anything highlighting the experiences of black men in their own words. And so I felt like it was important to actually, how about we actually talk to black men, see how they experience life, make a space for their stories to be told, and then, to do some reflection about how can we nurture, not only their survival, but also their flourishing.

So this is how and why I develop, what I name as a hope to keep going model. For care and counseling, which is in my book care for the mental and spiritual health of black men. One of the, the folks I build off of is Victor Anderson. Who’s also at Vanderbilt. And one of the things that he talks about is that for too long, black existence has been taught to suffering and resisting that suffering. So in his book beyond ontological, blackness, you know, he makes an argument that, black folks should not be tied solely to an existence of, you know, suffering and then having to resist that suffering. But he’s like everybody wants to flourish including black people. 

Carrie: Right. 

Dr. Nicolas: So what does it look like for us to not. Get rid of the need to resist all these oppressive things that cause us to suffer. We’re always gonna have to resist those things, but what does it look like to also think about how do we intentionally nurture the, the flourishing of people? So I pick up on that in my book and say, “Hey, this book is about certainly nurturing the survival, the healing and the liberation of black men”, and also the ultimate step of this work is to nurture the flourishing of black men. So that’s a significant aim of my book. 

Carrie: Awesome. It’s really great. So at the end of every 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.

Dr. Nicholas: Wow! I was just thinking about this the other day with the person and saying that there was a moment when I was, it might have been 11 or 12 years old, and I started playing piano when I was five years old, started playing saxophone when I was nine years old. And I remember I was at a church, my home church there in Atlanta and the pastor at the time, you know, he references, you know, the words in the Hebrew Bible and you know, the Old Testament during his sermon, he asked a question, what has God placed in your hands? And that was a significant question for me to reflect on, right? Because I then began to recognize, oh my goodness, I’ve been blessed with all these different gifts and ways of being. And, and then part of that work of God and the act of God that I experienced throughout my childhood was a village of people. Whether it was from that church or, you know, from the various schools I attended, you know, and certainly middle and high school. People who saw these gifts, these things that God placed in my hand. And help to nurture those gifts.That that’s been a significant, you know, gift that I experienced and, and act God in my life that has nurtured my own survival and flourishing. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really, like amazing. We take that step back and realize, like what God has gifted us with. 

Dr. Nicholas: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Thank you for having this conversation. I’m always very interested and open to hearing people from other perspectives and other lived experiences that I haven’t experienced. So I, hopefully it will enrich other people, as they listen to conversation as well. 

Dr. Nicholas: Absolutely.

Carrie: Regardless of your cultural or racial background, I hope that you found this interview interesting, and that maybe you learned something from it that you didn’t know before. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about doing the podcast has been the variety of different people that I’ve gotten to interview and talk with people from really all over the world, Canada, London, Africa. 

We haven’t had anybody that I’ve interviewed from Australia. So if you’re in the mental health space in Australia, I know we have listeners out there, certainly hit me up on the website and let me know what you’re doing in your community and in your part of the world. For all of our listeners, if you enjoy the podcast and you really feel like you have benefited from these episodes, I want to encourage you to think and pray about giving back. This is a ministry that reaches people all over the globe. You can support our show financially either through Patreon or buy me a coffee. We will have both of those links in the show notes for you. Thank you so much for listening.

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

68. Approaching Insomnia Differently with Martin Reed

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 68. Approaching Insomnia Differently with Martin Reed

Martin Reed is a certified health education specialist and a clinical sleep health specialist.

  • Martin’s personal insomnia journey and how it led him to learn helpful techniques
  • Regaining his sense of sleepiness
  • Misleading information about sleep
  • Do we really need a certain amount of sleep?
  • Helpful tips to calm a racing mind and sleep better
  • Can we still sleep even when we have difficult thoughts and feelings?
  • Martin Reed’s sleep coaching and online sleep education

Links and Resources:

Marin Reed

More Podcast Episodes

Surrendering Our Insomnia to God

Transcript

Carrie: Hope For Anxiety and OCD. Episode 68. Today on the show. I have an interview with Martin Reed. Who’s going to talk to us about approaching insomnia differently? Martin is an insomnia coach. And has this certification in Clinical Sleep Health. He’s going to provide some really practical advice on the show today. And I have to be honest to say that I really needed this and utilize some of it in pregnancy. I had horrible experiences with restless leg syndrome, and then later it changed. Lots of insomnia and it took me a little while to get into this rhythm, to work through and overcome it. So if you have trouble sleeping, like many people do, you’re really gonna want to tune into this episode. Martin, tell us a little bit about your own struggles with insomnia and how that led you to helping others with their sleep.

Martin: I was always one of these people that never had an issue with sleep. I loved to sleep. If it was advisable, I would have put it on my resume. You know, it was just the IXL that, and so it was something I never really thought about back in, it was, a long time ago, 2000. I think it was, I immigrated from the UK to the US and I was also getting married at the same time. So lots of big life changes. And at that time I experienced some sleep disruption. Never really thought much about it, you know, because everyone has some difficult nights from time to time. And I figured that it was just one of those things and it will get better, but it didn’t, and it was strange.

Because then I started to get a little bit more concerned about it. Not, not like crazy concerned, but this is an emergency, but just more concerned about it. And I started to do things to try and fix the problem, right? Because in life, when we have a problem, we try and fix it. But instead of sleep getting better, it seemed to get even worse. And then this led to more REM. Now, you know, I was starting to get really concerned about what was going on. So like what most of us do when we have issues or problems, we turn stopped to Google and see, see what the solutions are. And to be honest, that wasn’t a lot of very helpful information out there, I think has got a little bit better sense.

But back then, there was a lot of information that wasn’t helpful and it mainly centered ironically on sleep hygiene, which unfortunately is one of these things that people with chronic longer-term insomnia are often told about already know about. And we actually know that it’s not helpful for people with chronic insomnia because it’s more to do with prevention rather than treatment or cure.

You know, it’s a bit like if we get a cavity, we brush our teeth, then it’s not really going to help. But if we brush our teeth before the cavity, it’s helpful, then, you know, and, and I also thought it was a little bit condescending that someone would say, “well, if you have a hot bath or make sure there’s no light in your bedroom, or you set the right temperature in your bedroom, then everything’s going to be okay”. And so I was just really struggling, you know, because there was this problem that I’d never experienced before. 

There was all this information out there that just didn’t seem relevant or helpful. But, tubs, I kept on looking and I came across these techniques, which we now know, which I now know of as, grounded in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia CBTI techniques. And it’s just about changing our behaviors in a way that helps create better conditions for sleep. 

So I found these two specific techniques, that was, don’t spend as much time in bed. Which seemed completely illogical because I wanted to spend more time in bed to try and catch up on sleep and get more sleep. And upon reflection, you realize that more time in bed usually means more time awake and therefore you end up kind of perpetuating this sleep disruption. And another technique was to just get out of bed. If you’re struggling in bed, you’re just spending a lot of time away. So figure figured, you know, all right, thIs sounds different. 

These don’t sound logical at first glance and maybe there’s something to them, you know? So I tried them out and I found them really helpful. I started to regain that sense of sleepiness when I went to bed at night, by going to bed a lot later than I was. And it also just made the nights a little bit more pleasant because I had that option now, instead of just staying in the bedroom, being in bed didn’t feel good. I could just, like, get out of bed and maybe watch some TV or read or just do something to make being awake a bit more pleasant rather than just tossing and turning. So anyway, to cut a long story short, as I found these techniques helpful, I figured these techniques need to be out there more.

There’s not enough support out there for people with chronic insomnia. There’s a lot of misinformation. I ended up just starting off by creating, like a forum, just people, for instance, with insomnia, just to get support. As I found that these techniques were actually really helpful, not just kind of a flash in the pan that helped for a week. And then I was back to square one, but I actually found that they were helpful over the long term.

I figured maybe I can be someone who also shares these techniques. And so there were some people in the forum. I said, “Hey, let’s. I’ve learned about these techniques. If you’re interested, let’s see if they help you too”. And they were helping other people too. So I figured out there must be rid of that. It really is something to this. And so that just kind of led me to where I am today. Over the course of a number of years, I decided that I want to get the word out about these techniques. 

I want to help people coach them through this with evidence-based techniques, not this kind of sleep hygiene stuff. And so that was when I ended up going back to school, I obscured my master’s degree, becoming a health coach, getting certification in Clinical Sleep Health and sending up in Insomnia coach.com, which is my sleep coaching business for people with insomnia. So, it was basically a journey of my own experience. And that’s what led me to where I am today. 

Carrie: What you say, is there some kind of time limit for people? If you, for example, if you’re laying in the bed past. Is it 20 minutes, 30 minutes, then you should probably get up and do something different or try something else?

Martin: It’s a tricky one. Because, if we’re following, kind of the latter of the technique, we usually see people suggesting. If it’s like 20 minutes or 30 minutes of wakefulness then to get out of bed. But sometimes I find that’s not so helpful because it leads us to kind of lying in bed. Has it been 20 minutes? Has it been on my own, 15 minutes? Is it 10 minutes? Maybe I should check the time when we do all these things that ratchet up that brain activity. 

So usually I find it helpful to just be like, what does it feel like to be in bed? If it feels pretty good, you know, you’re calm and relaxed, then maybe we don’t need to get out of bed because that implies that conditions might be right for sleep. So there’s no need to jump out of bed. And that way, when we just use how we feel as a gauge, we might be less inclined to monitor for time or to check the time during the night, which usually isn’t very helpful. 

Carrie: Let’s talk about that. Some more, like, as far as behaviors that you see people with insomnia engaging in. That isn’t helpful. So for getting a good night’s sleep. So one of the things you would say is like clock checking, like what time is it? And then doing that calculation. Okay. Now I’m only going to get six hours of sleep. 

Martin: Exactly. I think, I don’t think we need to be like, really committed to avoidance. Sometimes we’re going to see the time. That’s fine. It’s when we kind of seek out the time. I think that’s when it can be a little bit problematic. I’m still waiting to hear from someone who told me who has chronic insomnia, who told me that checking the time during the night, like actively checking the time through the night, made them feel good and was helpful.

Usually the best outcome is neutral, but most of the time, like you just said, it leads us to think, okay, how much sleep if I go, how long have I been awake? How much time do I have left? Just get all those cogs tony again. And it seems like such a small thing. Just not to check the time during the night.

I have so many clients that tell me that was one of the most helpful things they did just making that change because it’s one less thing for the mind to be concerned with during the night, in terms of other behaviors, we commonly see people with chronic insomnia, completely understandably engaging in, but that kind of backfired on us is like a touched upon just spending too much time in bed or allotting too much time for sleep. And so we might be giving ourself a sleep schedule where we’re going to be in bed. 8 hours, for example, because we want to get eight hours of sleep or I, you know, I’ve had clients that have moved on to spending nine hours in bed, 10 hours in bed, 11 hours in bed, because they’re just so desperate to kind of get more sleep, to create conditions for sleep.

But unfortunately, this backfires on us because. What happens is we usually then go to bed before we’re sleeping enough a sleep. We can go to bed. It’s really easy to confuse fatigue with sleepiness. Fatigue is kind of feeling run down, worn out, exhausted difficulty, concentrating that brain fog, which I’m going to throw it out there. I’m going to guess that 99 to a hundred percent of people with chronic insomnia experience all of the time. And it’s really easy to confuse that with sleepiness and to think, that means it’s time for bed. That sleepiness is just finding it hard to stay awake. And that only occurs when we’ve been awake for long enough.

And when we have a lot of concern about sleep, sometimes we need to be awake for a little bit longer than we used to be in the past to build up enough sleepiness, to kind of overpower all that stuff that’s going on in our mind. So, spending too much time, allowing too much time for sleep, getting out of bed all different times.

You know, according to how we sleep from night to night time, the ironic thing that we see with people with chronic insomnia is often let’s say, you’ve set your alarm for six AM, you fall asleep? Finally at like 5:30 AM. So you get half an hour asleep, human nature. You’re going to want to turn that alarm off and get that sleep because it’s now happening. And it feels great at the time to do that, but unfortunately, it’s a little bit like kicking the can on the road. You know, we might get that bit of extra sleep when we do that, but we kind of setting ourself up for sleep disruption the very next night, because we’ve been sleeping for later in the day. We’re back to, then we’re not going to have as much time awake during the day to build up that sleepiness for the next night. 

Carrie: So naps good or bad, or is it hard to know? Just kind of depends on the person. 

Martin: Think for safety. Naps are always appropriate. You know, if we actually feel like we’re going to fall asleep without warning and we need to drive or operate machinery or something like that, you know, safety trumps everything. But ideally we want to avoid those daytime naps just because they’re going to reduce what we call sleep drive. One way we can imagine sleep drive is like, if we take a balloon and we’re blowing air into a balloon, every puff of air into that balloon is like an hour that we’re awake and we sleep when that balloon bursts.

So when we first wake up in the morning, you know, an hour, every hour of waiting, a furnace blowing air into that balloon blowing air into that balloon. And, and the idea is by the time we go to bed, that balloon is really close to bursting. We get into bed, pop the balloon burst and we sleep. So if we imagine that kind of analogy for naps, our balloon is about half full during the day. Then we nap. We’re kind of letting air out of that balloon. And then we got the rest of the day. We ended up going to bed but the balloon is still a little bit floppy, you know, not really close to bursting. So it’s one of these things that, and that might feel good at the time during the day, but then we’re kind of setting ourselves up for some potential for sleep disruption the following night.

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense, actually. It really does.

Martin: Another reason why it can be helpful to just avoid those daytime naps is it can also be just another area of concern because people with chronic insomnia. Often try to nap during the day because they’re chasing sleep. We’re so desperate for sleep to happen, whereas people without chronic insomnia they’ll nap during the day, because they’re sleepy, they’re finding it hard to stay awake.

So a lot of the time, especially my experience, I see clients. They try to nap during the day, but then they can’t nap. So that generates even more concern because then they’re like, oh my goodness, I’m really struggling to sleep at night. And I can’t even sleep during the day when I try to nap. So just by removing naps from the equation, we’re eliminating that potential source of more concern. And we’re also banking all that daytime sleep drive to help with sleep at night. 

Carrie: There’s so much of this, that’s connected to stress. So it’s like I’m stressed and then I can’t sleep. But now, because I can’t sleep, I’m stressed about not sleeping. And that really leads into the thought process that people get into with insomnia. So talk with us about that. Some of the common thinking errors that people have.

Martin: Absolutely. My thinking on thinking, my thinking on thoughts has definitely evolved over the last few years when I first learned more about these CBT I techniques. The traditional way of thinking that is the, we have, like dysfunctional thoughts, thoughts that are inaccurate or incorrect, and that we should perhaps evaluate them, criticize them, or try and change them into more accurate, or more positive thoughts.

My thinking now is that. We don’t need to really do any of that because thoughts are thoughts. Sometimes thoughts are true and they’re accurate, sometimes they’re not. So, but we don’t necessarily need to get into an argument with our mind because these are thoughts. Thoughts can make us feel good. Thoughts can feel unpleasant, but they’re still thoughts. And we can still control our actions and our behaviors, regardless of what the mind tells us. Even though sometimes that, that prompting from the mind. Can lead to us responding. Behaviourally almost instantaneously and make us believe that thoughts control our actions with some practice.

We can help to kind of decouple our actions from our thoughts. So I don’t know if they asked you a question, but generally now I take the approach that there’s no real dysfunctional thoughts, per say. There are just thoughts and that we can always work with our thoughts in a way that separates our actions from our thoughts so that we can still do things that create good conditions for sleep. And we can still do things that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live, even with all those thoughts going on in our minds. 

Carrie: I think really learning to become an observer of your thoughts and not having to get sucked into every single one that you’re having or believe that it’s somehow. Character reflection on you or that you have to act on it kind of what you were saying. It’s like, you can have a thought. And certainly, we have thoughts all the time that we don’t act on.

Sometimes we have thoughts that we should act on like, I should exercise. And we don’t. And then other times, you know, we have thoughts and we’re like, that was out of left field. That’s not really who I am or what I lined with. So do we have a misperception though, sometimes about sleep just from what we’re told with doctors and you know, I have to get my eight hours and you know, I’ve just heard conflicting things on that. I’ve heard some people say, you know, well, no, you don’t necessarily have to get eight hours. It just depends on your age and your own kind of individual makeup. Some people need more sleep than others. Any thoughts on that?

Martin: Definitely. You know there’s a lot of misleading information out there about sleep. A lot of it does focus on sleep duration. So many of us can have the belief that we need to get eight hours of sleep, or we need to get a certain amount of sleep. The thing about that is anytime we read information about, we should be getting a certain amount of sleep, it’s always just based on averages. It’s a bit like saying everyone should be five foot, 10 inches tall, just because that’s the average height. I don’t know if that is, but I’m just guessing here, but you know, all I’m just getting at is it’s just one of these things that’s based on averages.

So there are always going to be happy, healthy people that exist outside of these averages. Just like with our height, we can’t control sleep duration. We can help, we can use our behaviors in a way that creates good conditions for sleep, but in terms of how much sleep we’re going to get, we have no control over that. And often we get most caught up in the struggle when we do try and control that a lot of the clients I work with, they find the best, just such a relief to know that they don’t need to aim for eight hours or seven hours of sleep. 

You know, they just need to allot an appropriate amount of time for sleep. You know, give themselves the opportunity to get sleep. And the body is always going to generate at the very least the band and minimum amount of sleep we need. No matter what, as long as we’re giving it the opportunity to generate sleep, we never lose the ability to sleep. So it’s really about just trying to not control things that we cannot control and sleep duration is one of the things that we can’t control.

Unfortunately.

Carrie: That’s an interesting concept that I’ve never really thought about or pondered. It’s like, I don’t have control over what my body does, how long it stays asleep and whether or not, you know, I’m able to wake up rested. It’s like I have to provide the opportunity, but then my body has to kick in and, and sleep with it. Interesting. 

Martin: Exactly. One thing about, well, just to add onto that one thing that we often see when we read these articles about sleep duration. They’re really aimed primarily at people who aren’t getting enough sleep because they’re kind of burning the candle at both ends. They’ve got a busy home life. They’ve got a busy work life, so they’re just not giving themselves the opportunity to sleep. We’ve got, I think a lot of this advice or information about try and get seven to nine hours of sleep or whatever it is people are saying these days is, comes from a good place where it’s aimed at people who are only giving themselves four hours to sleep because they’re not prioritizing sleep. 

Because they’re too busy, doing everything else, people with chronic insomnia at the opposite, they are prioritizing sleep. They are giving themselves plenty of time for sleep. So I think the messaging comes from a good place, but it’s just aimed at a different audience. Unfortunately, the only people that are really paying attention to all this information are the people with chronic insomnia who it doesn’t apply to quite so much.

Carrie: So I would imagine there’s a lot of people listening to this podcast who deal with Anxiety and OCD, and they’re saying, okay, the problem I have, I feel maybe physically tired, like I’m ready to go to bed, but then it’s like, my mind is on overdrive and it wants to think about all the things I have to do tomorrow, or what happened today or things that are bothering me that I can’t control. Are there any helpful tips for people who just have a hard time shutting their mind off, who want to go to sleep? 

Martin: Definitely. Well, I think first and foremost is making sure we only go to bed when we’re truly sleepy enough for sleep. I’m talking about finding it hard to stay awake. Because, our sleep drive system will always overpower like that arousal system or the mental chatter once it’s strong enough, no matter what, without fail, it might take a night or two, but sleep will always happen, that sleep trifle always be strong enough at some point.

So we can always get ourselves one step ahead by making sure we only go to bed when there’s that strong sense of sleepiness. And then in terms of. All that mental chatter, all the mental gymnastics, really all that is, it’s our brain looking out for us. You know, it’s not a brain trying to cause us problems. It’s like our brain is being a really overly enthusiastic friend. Who’s trying so hard to help us out. It’s just kind of getting in the way. So I think just recognizing that, you know, this isn’t an adversarial relationship. It’s just our brain trying too hard to help us out. That can be helpful. And just recognizing that that’s what our brain does.

Our brain’s number one priority is to look out for us. Often we get most caught up in all this mental stuff. When we quiet, understandably, try to fight them or avoid these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions, because they’re unpleasant. So naturally we don’t want to experience them. But unfortunately that’s when we usually get most caught up in the struggle, trying to fight them, trying to suppress them.

It’s not usually helpful over the long-term short-term. Sometimes we can, like push feelings and thoughts away. They always come back and then when they come back, they tend to be stronger. It’s a bit like pushing a beach ball down under the water, you know, it’s just going to push back harder and harder. The more we put, try and push it away. Sometimes I think it’s just helpful to recognize, like, this is my mind looking out for me, I’m feeling, identifying and acknowledging everything it is feeling. I’m feeling this is my anxiety coming back. This is my frustration and my anger, whatever it is, you’re feeling. Just identifying it, labeling it, recognizing it, not trying to fight it or push it away can be really helpful. 

Just the fact that we’re thinking certain things or our mind is racing. Doesn’t mean we’re not going to be able to sleep. We can still sleep when we have difficult thoughts and difficult feelings and difficult emotions, but it becomes a lot more difficult for that to happen when we try and get engaged in controlling them and pushing them away or trying to avoid them, trying to fight them. And I think, you know, as a last resort, kind of what I touched upon. Aaliyah was if you’re just spending a lot of time in bed and it really just does not feel good to be in bed. It might be helpful to just get out of bed and just do something a bit more pleasant until conditions feel a bit better for sleep.

Carrie: Talk with us about what the CBT I program that you have looks like, is it over a course of a certain number of weeks or a certain number of lessons that are involved in it? What does that look like? 

Martin: My course is kind of grounded in many of these techniques that are taken from CBTI. It’s not CB type itself because technically that is a therapy. And I’m not a therapist. So I just coach people on these techniques. There’s kind of, I take what I personally found helpful from this collection of techniques and what other clients have found helpful along with just some other things that are more grounded, maybe more towards the act model, acceptance and commitment therapy. 

So, it kind of combines them, a little bit of cherry picking. And my online course runs for eight weeks and it’s conducted online. Clients can fill out sleep journal. And check in with me as they progress. And the way it’s currently structured is the first week is just about education, you know, sleep education, because like we touched upon, there’s a lot of confusing and maybe misleading information out there about sleep, how much sleep we need, what a normal night of sleep is like. And then as the weeks progress, we start to introduce these behavioral changes that aren’t intended to make sleep happen or to control sleep, but rather to help address any behaviors we might have implemented to try and improve our sleep that are kind of backfiring on us and to just change our behaviors in a way that creates good conditions for sleep.

So we kind of come up with a sleep schedule and earliest possible bedtime. Consistent with our bedtime in the morning, we talk about what to do during the night. If we’re awake, like you just touched upon all the mind games going on. What if we wake up in the middle of the night, we can’t fall back to sleep. What do we do? And we also just go through ways that we can explore our thinking, you know, not to control our thoughts, but just to maybe change our relationship with our thoughts where maybe we’re less influenced. By our thoughts and feelings, we’re less inclined to try and control them. And we kind of get independence back over our behaviors, but it’s the, our thoughts. Aren’t kind of dictatorial and control all of our actions. They’re the kind of core educational components, but really it’s kind of, it’s quite different for every client I work with because it’s very customized in terms of the specific challenges that each client is facing. We work together to focus on where the client feels the priority should be in terms of where they’re struggling and what their challenges.

But, so it’s, so it’s educational based and the changes, the components are introduced gradually over a course of eight weeks, which I also find is helpful. So it’s not. We should do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this go, you know, there’s completely overwhelming. We just say, okay, first week, let’s just do focus on some more education the second week.

Let’s see if we can change the sleep schedule a little bit, the third and fourth week. Maybe let’s practice getting out of bed if being in bed doesn’t feel good. You know, so it’s all gradual so we can learn a new technique, become a little bit more comfortable, confident with it before we then add most stuff.

Carrie: So as we’re winding down at the end of every 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.

Martin: You know, I think it would really go back to my own experience when I was first struggling with insomnia. And I learned about techniques that, once the hygienic pastes that were a little bit different and that in itself. Just gave me hope because when I was just finding the sleep hygiene stuff out there, that wasn’t helpful to finding these new techniques gave me hope and it gave me the motivation to give them a try. And I think that kind of inspired me to use those techniques, to offer hope to other people as well. You know, it’s this kind of knock on effect, first of all, through the forum and then through how that’s expanded. You know, through my own podcast as well. And just working with clients, seeing that transformation, sharing their transformation, just spreading that hope out there to others as well.

Carrie: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us about using these techniques that are very practical for overcoming insomnia. 

Martin: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure to me? 

Carrie: We would love for you to help us get the word out about the podcast. I know, you know, at least one person in your life right now, who is having difficulty sleeping, feel free to forward the link to this episode to them and let them check it out.

You can always rate and review us on iTunes, and that helps our show as well. Thank you so much for listening.

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

67. The Personal Story Behind the Mental Health Alliance with Joe Padilla

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 67. The Personal Story Behind the Mental Health Alliance with Joe Padilla

Joe Padilla, a licensed and ordained minister, and co-founder of Mental Health Grace Alliance.  Joe shares with us how his family was personally impacted by mental health and how he was able to work through it.

  • Stepping down the ministry to navigate his wife’s mental health issues
  • Barriers to seeking professional and pastoral help
  • Doing research and equipping himself to help his wife overcome her mental health condition
  • Learning how to integrate neuroscience, psychology, and biblical scriptures for mental health recovery
  • Reinventing support group models and curriculum that integrate faith and science. 
  • Joe’s work at Mental Health Grace Alliance

Links and Resources:

Mental Health Grace Alliance

More Podcast Episodes

Trancript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 67. Another really great personal story interviews for you guys today. Before we hop into that, though, there’s a couple of things that I wanna say on a more personal note. On the podcast here, it’s very hard to talk about current events due to the nature of having a counseling practice and trying to keep my own sanity as I’m recording this introduction. I know that this show won’t come out for another six weeks. Also, my interview actually was recorded several months ago. However, I feel like because we have such a worldwide audience that it’s really important for me to say. A couple of things about what’s happening in our world. At this point in time, Russia has invaded Ukraine and it’s a very heartbreaking situation.

We know from what Jesus told us that in the last days. There are going to be wars and rumors of wars. So this should not come as a surprise to us. I hope though, that these recent events have reminded you to pray for your brothers and sisters all over the world who are in war-torn countries, or who are experiencing persecution for their faith. If you have freedoms and the country that you are in to worship and praise God as you, please, if you are able to go to bed tonight and not have to worry about being bombed, we need to be very thankful because we may not always have those freedoms. We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we know that God loves us and that God is with us. And if by some chance you are in Ukraine and you’re listening to this, just know that we love you. And we are praying for you.

Today on the show. I am interviewing Joe Padilla, who is the CEO and co-founder of the Mental Health Grace Alliance. I didn’t know anything at all, really about the Mental Health Grace Alliance, until I was told by one of our previous guests that I needed to look into this organization. They’re doing some amazing things, just combining this passion of helping people who have mental health issues in the church. And Joe is gonna share his own personal experience of how they got started. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Joe: I am a licensed and ordained minister. I’ve been in ministry for 20, some odd years now. And my background really kind of started with missions and then local ministry, and then really running the Grace Alliance as a mental health type of ministry, helping churches and individuals and families now based out of Texas. So, that’s where we are.

Carrie: Awesome. I know that your family was personally impacted by mental health, and that’s kind of how you got on this journey. Tell us a little bit about that.

Joe: When we started a ministry, basically in missions that we were on the field for probably a total of 10 years in regard to that. And during that time, we noticed a lot of challenges with my wife’s mental health, as far as depression, anxiety, and different things like that, which led us to come back, worked locally within the church and stuff.

But while we were here trying to get the mental health care system, you know, all of those pastoral care as well and all that kind of stuff, but really nothing ever really kind of progressed for her from both the professional and the pastoral, which got to the point where we actually had to step down from ministry because of those. 

We’re extremely challenging for her, for us and for our kids. And then really started to try to figure out, and how do we navigate this journey? And it was a time when we stepped down, that where we started to focus on how, do we really navigate this? And so I started to dive into really learning. What is neuroscience? What is, the psychology, all these types of things. Cause I wasn’t getting all of that information. And as you know. With the church leaders and things. That’s one of the areas where they just don’t get a lot of equipping and training and being a leader myself, I just didn’t have that. 

So it really took the time to kind of research and look at all those. And it was finding this way that you really could navigate this for kind of what’s called mental health recovery. And no one was talking about that. They were just talking about management and things like that. Long story short, I started to apply all these principles and then over about a year and a half period, I saw my web significantly improved. Through her journey where we’ve never seen any of that kind of progress in the last kind of eight to 10 years of suffering. And that led us to having to leave, ministry altogether. And then here we are now, building, rebuilding life, our marriage or family and everything. And just looking at all these concepts are using a real whole health approach or a holistic approach and doing all that we got better medical care, the mental health professionals.

I started to figure out what works, what doesn’t work and an even from ministry, figuring out what works. And what doesn’t work and why things were getting so bad. So, from both of those end, we just kind of learn how to navigate it and figure some things out and then rebuilding life towards a new promise for us. And in front of that journey, that’s where we start to figure out there really is a way to navigate this. Even within the church, and it’s way simpler than we think, but it’s a very useful, and then that’s kind of where the organization came from that experience.

Carrie: I like that. We talked about the holistic approach a lot on this podcast, you know, it’s not just your spiritual health, it’s your mental, emotional, physical, it’s all just interconnected. And that’s how God created us to be. So I like that. I wanna mention something too, that you talked about just in terms of one navigating the system of mental health care is hard. It’s hard to find a therapist. Sometimes, you call, you make phone calls. You may not get a phone call back. People say, “oh, no, I don’t take your insurance or no, I can’t work with your availability on the days you’re available. I’m not taking new clients”. 

So I’ve found a counselor recently for myself or some things that I’m processing through being pregnant, getting ready to have a child. And just different stressors in my life. And I know how hard it was for me. And I understand the system and I understand how the system works, but it took me probably a couple of weeks to find somebody that could meet with me. And that in itself, I think can be discouraging. Did you guys have a lot of roadblocks as you were trying to just kind of navigate the system and get the help? 

Joe: Well, I think from our position, we had excellent professionals. If it just was all scattered, do you have a family doctor who’s helping you, but then you have a psychiatrist who’s coming in, but then they don’t talk. And then you have a therapist. But then the therapist doesn’t talk to the psychiatrist. So it’s just all so scattered and you’re getting all kinds of, you know, it’s like they say, you talk to 10 people and you get a hundred opinions, but I think we’re really trying to figure out what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. And then because you have a psychiatrist, who’s prescribing medication, but then sometimes they’re not paying attention to what the side effects are, how they’re playing with other medication and what really the condition you’re dealing with as well as then you’re going to the therapy. They’re really, was kind of a way of, what kind of therapy do you need on the front end of this on to once you have a lot of stability, what’s helpful? 

But if you don’t understand that therapeutic process for an individual in high crisis, in high stress, it can actually make it worse. And I see that all the time and that’s what we were going through was, this has been a health care system, is so scattered.

No one’s communicating. No one’s really understanding. And then it took time for me to learn. Wow! These medications that they’re prescribing and they keep updating them. It’s actually making it worse. Why isn’t anybody paying attention to this or the therapy? And I remember meeting with therapists and they’re trying to sole approach. I’m like, “what are you talking about? You have no idea what you’re doing”.

You have to understand what condition is, where the brain condition is from a neuroscience standpoint of what can actually be processed rather than tools based to get to the point where you can process things. So kind of an understanding, because that’s a hard journey and I coach a lot of people through this. And we look at their kind of the therapeutic process and they’re making no progress whatsoever, because I was meeting with somebody recently and talking them through that. And it’s just, like they said, “well, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere”. I was like, “well, how long have you been in that therapy”?. It was like, “well, I’ve been in for quite a long time”.

It was like, “you know, you’re paying for that. You should go back to your professional and say”. “Here’s this, this and this, this, how can I move forward with this and this and this”,  but they belong for a journey. And then you ended up in this conversation.

Carrie: Absolutely. 

Joe: So, again, I think that’s part of when we say the mental health care system, there is one, the availability, when you do get in, it’s looking at the process of what type of care are we actually getting into?

Is it appropriate? And is it being followed up with very well? And then you look at the community. Where’s the community support? And there’s always a gap there, especially when you get into the price centered or Christian or body of Christ or church community, that’s very lacking. And we can talk about that a little bit more later too, because that’s kind of the essence of what we do as an organization. But I think when we talk about the confusion of the mental health care system, we’re talking about all these things that just from availability to who do you see, and then is it appropriate? Is this the right process? Are you in the right place? 

Carrie: If there are a lot of moving pieces really to navigate. And I think for you being so involved in your wife’s care, you were probably able to provide a certain level of feedback, maybe things that you were seeing, that she wasn’t able to see. Cause I know that sometimes people will go into see a psychiatrist for example, and they’re just reporting on their last week instead of really looking at the whole picture and reporting maybe on their last month or their last few months, because they’re in distress. And sometimes when you’re in distress, it’s just really hard to get it out and even communicate about what’s going on with you internally with  your experiences.

Joe: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s when we developed our coaching and then even within our groups, we try to give information that helps when they are working on professional helps them to be a little bit more strategic with understanding their care and their follow-up. Even when you get into medication, we do have a topic where we cover that. But giving them strategic ways of how to communicate better with their psychiatrists so that you can take the guesswork out and you really get into some information that’s helpful so that you can move forward rather than just kind of guess your way through a lot of these medications. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of trial and error. More so in the psychiatric realm, then in other areas of medical treatment and different people respond differently to medications and it’s hard. I wanna ask you a little bit too about there’s this medical model of mental illness and the medical model of mental illness says, “Well, you know, you just have some chemicals, are often in your brain. You’re probably going to struggle with depression your whole life, or you’re gonna be struggling with anxiety. That’s just the way it is or some genetic components, this and that”. And for me as a believer, it’s always been very challenging. And there’s a part of me that greatly rejects that model, because like you said, at a lot of it is focused on management and just focus on. 

Well, you know, you’re just gonna have these symptoms and we just got to figure out how to manage them, instead of saying, how can I live an abundant life in Christ, even though I have these mental health struggles. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, that I have this podcast and wanting to give people hope that you don’t just have to suffer. You know, there are so many different treatment options. There’s different types of therapy that you can engage in. There is alternative medicines. There’s so much hope and so much help out there. And the more that we talk about it and the more people know about it, like we have Christ, we have the ultimate hope to get better.

Was that something that you found or you process like on your journey?

Joe: You know, and I think that that comment of, is she gonna be like this roast her life and then something inside you, is going. “I don’t know about that”. You know, I think that’s most everybody, even if you’re not a believer, I think there’s just, that’s just hard. But especially in the church where we have this aspect of, well, then where’s Christ in that, you know, whereas that?, and I think if we take it from the position of, when we look at mental health recovery, or we look at that concept from a medical process or even, and that whole journey, we don’t look at it as we’re gonna try to get rid of your diagnosis. We’re gonna try to get rid of all your symptoms. 

We look at it more of, you can still flourish in life. So it’s a really about understanding. How do you build a life that is more meaningful? And that you can flourish in your life and you have much more resilience to the condition that you’re walking through. And overtime as you build your own flourishing life and you become more resilient than you actually see a lot of symptom reduction, you may not see the whole thing go away, which is fine, but you can live very meaningful and purposeful. And I think that’s a lot of times in the medical model or sometimes in the community. And no offense, because I know that there are some conditions that are challenging. And, but I think that sometimes we just get this message of you’re gonnq be like this, the rest of your life, take your medications, manage and survive as best you came in. 

I think God’s designed us for more than that, even though we have a condition because I’ve coached people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia and things like that. And I’m telling you, Carrie, I have seen them flourish from, and I have some incredible stories, even miraculous stories where they were living on their parents’ house. And this is on disability. This is what gonna  be the rest of their life, to having a full life, getting married, having business, you know, all these types of things. You see this dramatic turnaround they’re conditioned didn’t go away. But what happened was there symptoms declined as they flourished in life, they’ll need their medication, but they’re able to flourish with a meaningful, purposeful life. I think that’s the opportunity to show people cause when I’m coaching somebody and I’m working with them, I just share with them and tell them, “look, I know that I know, that I know, that I know. It can be different than this”. You get rid of this. We’re not gonna try to eliminate this.

But let me show you what you can’t have. And that’s when we get into psychology and you’d know this more than I do as a professional, where we were it’s called avoidant goals versus approach goals. And so that management of you just live this way, avoid all these things. And because you’re, you know, avoid life and all this stuff, because you have this condition and the research shows the more you live that way. Especially, God is in that narrative, we just don’t have very, we don’t have good wellbeing and mental health as opposed to approach goals of, here’s what you can have.

This is what your life is about. Here’s the opportunity that you can have a build and you start to see better wellbeing, mental health and stuff like that. I think that’s what we do with our curriculum since the week. As Jesus did, he came and he flipped the script. And I think in mental health, we need to flip the script so that you see much better hope in a tangible way, rather than just, let’s just keep praying about this and go to your closet and keep asking God, I think there’s more to it than that.

Carrie: I love that. That there’s always hope. And what you were talking about with goals. Is that a lot of times people do, they come into counseling, they come to see me and they say, I want these obsessive thoughts to go away. I’m dealing with OCD, or I want this anxiety to go away. I want God to heal me and just take all this away. And it’s like, okay. So that’s like, step one, maybe. But what would your life be like if you had less anxiety and sometimes that really just stops people in their tracks, almost like they’re not really sure. Oh no. I just feel better. What does feel better? Look like, you know, cause feel better to, you might look differently than feel better to me. And we start to unravel this. And then a lot of times they’ll get to, well, if I wasn’t so anxious, then I would be able to have more social relationships or I would be able to start dating somebody, or I would be able to have more confidence to do the things that they believe God’s calling them to do.

So that’s a whole different thing to work for because who wants to work for just less of something. I mean, I guess in the physical realm, it’s kind of similar to losing weight. Well, I just want to lose weight. But why? Oh, cause I want to run with my grandkids. Well, that’s totally, you know, wow! You just opened up the world for yourself there, by looking at that approach goal. I like that concept. Let’s talk about community because you brought up the community so crucial. I think now more than ever. At least, what I’m seeing in the North American context, is because we do have some worldwide listeners, but in our American context, we are more isolated. And we have ever been, and COVID of course made things worse and caused people to isolate even more. 

It’s so hard sometimes for people to find, a good, authentic Christian community.

And there’s so much shame around the stigma of having a mental illness. Sometimes I’ll talk with people and I’ll say, “okay, well, who in your church knows about this? Have you talked to your pastor about this? Is your small group praying for you”? And they’re just like, “oh, you know”, it’s just like, I can’t tell anybody that I’m dealing with these obsessive thoughts. And I’m like, “but you need these people, you know, you need this help in this community”. Do you find that as well? Just in working with people. That it’s, that is hard. 

Joe: I think it’s, well, this gets into the conversation about stigma and community. Obviously, community is the biggest agent for healing and for people, anybody, even if you’re just isolated and you’re healthy.

Carrie: Right.

Joe: It’s like, not that to have a flourishing life, you have to have community. And especially when you get into mental health challenges, because it is a little bit more of a private challenge or an issue or things like that it’s often associated with fate or you’re doing something wrong, your sin, or, you know, and then it gets associated with, well, maybe that’s demonic or something like that. I think that’s been an unfortunate default narrative, which really just unfair to begin there. So it’s still with the stigma. I think it’s research nerd. So I read all this stuff and I actually went and looked at the stigma and found that there’s about 50, 60, 70 years of research on stigma, mental illness stigma.

Carrie: Wow!

Joe: And what they basically have said over all these years is the more that you try to break stigma. The more stigma you create, because we’re not built for narratives that are psychoanalytical. Or just not an institutional project, we are people. And so when you use narratives that are biomedical and things like that, we create an otherness type of people and otherness type of people fall into a brokenness and default narrative. That’s why we just create more stigma by using that type of thing. And so when we use language that we already know that we understand, as far as mental health. I often like to just, say, “you know, this, these are about mental health difficulties and disorders, or just mental health challenge”. 

This is just me personally, but I don’t like using the mental illness language because, and I know that there’s others that will advocate for that. We can all have different positions. I think that, especially from the pandemic, we’re starting to realize I’m working with more church leaders. That realized this, now that is really more of a spectrum rather than a disease division. You know, it really is a place where we all are experiencing crisis and any crisis, especially within mental health, creates a longing for meaning and community. So I think we have to understand where we are on that spectrum and things like that. Yes, there are disorders and stuff and we can work. Then there’s also people on depression, anxiety scale that would never identify themselves. As mental illness or mental health. 

Perfect example is, I worked with a professional. We were just in a conversation and I was just trying to help a family member of this professional. And they explained to me, when I say professional, they’re a business professional, the very fluent they’re very influential. And they were just saying to me that like, you know, they’re on medication, they had the classic symptoms of depression and anxiety and how that was causing a lot of relational challenges. And then they said, “well, I would never come to your website because that’s where mental illness”. You know, I’m just going to go to church and I’m going to go, do some more inner healing work, you know? And so it’s like, okay, well, that’s fine. And I think that’s because of the narrative that we often tell around mental illness is so limiting because we make it such a sickness issue that we forget. It’s a person and it’s a story. And so when we talk about mental health and things like that, even like when we talk about suicide awareness and stuff like that, I’m kind of like, Hey, suicide awareness. It needs to be called, story awareness.

You have to understand people’s story because you will become more compassionate and understanding to a story than you will to a statistic. So we use statistics secondary, not first. We use stories first because at the end of the day, there’s more commonality. If we just sit down and talk to each other, then we realize. And then the diagnosis will become a secondary concern, but it will have so much compassion because the story’s there. So in order to break the stigma within the church, we have to tell the story, humanness and humanity and where God is in that journey because mental health is all over the Bible. I mean, it is everywhere. It is so described and described a very, very well. But we don’t tell that narrative because we only use scientific terminology and then nobody pays attention. And everybody’s thinking, I don’t know anybody with schizophrenia, and this is a longer, obviously a conversation and stuff, and we help churches and leaders. And I have this document that I could, I have, you know, some leaders and stuff to help them understand. How to use the right language so that you can appeal to the right people and get them the right support. 

Because the statistics, that show that it takes about seven to eight years before someone will actually reach out and get help. But that whole seven year journey, we talk about it as a team of how do we reach the seven-year journey person, because in that place. They’re not seeing mental health, they’re just saying I’m broken, God’s working on me and this is more sanctification in my life. And so then, and that just recreates or reinforces more of that avoidance or avoided detachment type theories and stuff like that. And so, but if we can really learn the language of the seven-year journey, I think we would see much more help and much more resources that would get to people much quicker.

Carrie: So, tell us about Mental Health Grace Alliance and what you guys do?

Joe: So, Mental Health Grace Alliance, we are integrating science and faith, scripture Christ into a material that is practical. It’s easy to use. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. So we’re really trying to get you that the insight and the tools to make life better. Okay. So from a family to an individual and even for churches. And so what we do is we provide a small group curriculums and that small group curriculum can be used even personally, because we know that, that’s hard to get groups going and stuff like that. And we just encourage people, if with the curriculum, even if you just found one person, that’s a group, this size doesn’t matter. Having one or two other people. So with that curriculum, and there are 16 week, so we have one curriculum for, again, for family members. That’s the parent or the spouse who is living with somebody that has a mental health condition of some sort.

Then we have it for the individual and that’s called our living grace. So we have family grace and then living grace. And then we have a version for students, high school and college that’s written in their world and that’s a 10-week version. So that can happen easily within a semester. We have another material called to thrive, which goes through much more of the intensive process. And that’s what we actually developed our coaching program from, but we just got overwhelmed and we turned it into a self, got to workbook. From the process of revising that. So hopefully in 2022, we’ll have a new version to be released because people have turned it into groups and we can’t keep up with them.

Carrie: So awesome.

Joe: So that’s the primary thing that we do is really provide them that a topical guidance through these, this material and everything is faith-based from a sense of, here’s a scripture. Here’s a way that you guys can discover how God is inside this journey. Not you trying to get to God, but where God is relating to you. And then some science facts and subscriptions facts. That they could discuss. And a lot of times they come with a tool that they can practice and professionals love it because it’s a place where they’re just getting reinforced because we do, like I said earlier, we have a topic on medication, you know, but then the rest of the workbooks really do reinforce a lot of principles. That are very tools based within a lot of therapy programs.

We’re not doing therapy, we’re just doing the support of it. And they’re getting the resources and the help and the groups that we have they’re easy. You do not have to be a professional. They are not, they don’t replace medicine or therapy or anything like that. It is just a way to get this conversation going. You learn and get encouraged and you grow through this. And we’ve done research on these groups. So we do have published results on these groups and we see that people reduce their symptoms and they are aided mental health recovery, and they renew their faith. And then the stories that just are amazing coming out of these groups too. 

Carrie: That’s a really interesting connection, I think between discipleship and mental health recovery because they are related in the sense that we’re always on that process of striving to become more like Christ. And that’s not always just a spiritual process. It’s a communal process. It’s a self-examination process. There’s so much that goes into that. So I love that. And just the aspect of people being able to be in a group with other people who they feel like, this person gets it. They have struggles too. And we’re able to be open about that. I haven’t led a group in a while since I’ve been doing online practice, but when I did groups in person, they were so incredibly powerful. And what I would see was my clients that were in group therapy. It almost like, It’s like it lit this spark under their individual therapy work. 

It’s very hard to explain other than it was just like, that was so powerful and good for them to be able to kind of see some of their symptoms in other people and be able to respond compassionately to others. When sometimes it’s hard to respond compassionately to yourself. There’s just so much. I think that people can get out of that. And I remember walking out of one of the groups and I just thought, this is what church is supposed to be like, I was like, this is what authentic community looks like. And it wasn’t a Christian based group because I had people in there that weren’t Christians.

It was just, you know, anxiety management group. But I walked out and I went, we learn a lot in the church from group therapy, you know what.

Joe: You know, from our focus is talking to some church leaders about this recently, but what we do is we have a solution for the frustration gap in the church. And what I mean by that is someone goes to the pastor and the pastor can tell this person needs way more professional help.

And I am equipped to offer, and we have nothing here at the church for them. So they get referred out to a professional. Then they go to the professional and the professional is I ready to help you? I wanna help you, but I have no spot for you for another three to four weeks. Okay. And, I wanna send you back to the church.

There’s no support for you there. Well, here’s this community support group, but they don’t do faith. And again, some of those models that those cathartic models that I’ve seen, the research on those groups, they are not effective. It’s just venting and venting and venting.

So, but its like, and so from our standpoint, I’ve been through that. Cause I went to a support group and I was like first and last meeting I’ll ever go to in the community support group because it was so horrible and it was so discouraging. And I thought there’s gotta be a better way of this cause I have seen life in the church. And so really that frustration gap, the pastor doesn’t know where to send them other than the professional, that he doesn’t know where to send them back because there’s no Christian support other than this community support. But then there’s not here from all the time. There’s no Christian stuff in these community groups. 

So that frustration gap basically means the support group model needs to be reinvented. And so what we did is we have reinvented the support model into a discipleship growth, the journey for those who are experiencing mental health challenges. From the family to the individual. And so really giving away that they can grow in their relationship with Christ. This isn’t about, Hey, we have this group for you in the back. It meets on Thursday nights. You come to the back door, there’s coffee over there, and then you just really be quiet and was like, no, let’s give you a full dignity of a discipleship experience tailored for your experience of where you are on this journey. Cause you’re not losing out. There’s actually an opportunity for you to see this as a growing experience. So here’s this group and these groups lead themselves; they’re just facilitated. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I’m enjoying this conversation so much and I hate to wrap it up, but I’m curious for you, just kind of looking at your journey that you’ve been on. What would you tell your younger self who had a wife who is struggling with mental health issues? If you could go back somehow and give yourself advice.

Joe: If I were to go back and I would say, look at the science, don’t be afraid of the science. I think sometimes there’s this tension between science and scripture.

And the more that I see science, the more alive scripture gets and the more research I see that the bigger God gets and I fall in love with God more. There is a beauty between science and faith. I think we’re in a new age of the church that much more open to that now where we were 20 years ago. It was a little bit more tender, things like that, but I would say, yeah, I’d say, Hey, look at the science because there really is a way, and there’s a lot more hope 9when you integrate the science.

Carrie: Is there a way for people to go on the website and look and see what groups might be running near them? 

Joe: There is. So our website is a Mental Health Grace Alliance Dot.or. And then they can just click on the, for you page and they can see our material. And then also there’s a button there on the, for you page or for the family page, just to the shows them what groups are available. There are some groups that are online and then there are some in different areas, but it’s really easy for them to start a group. We make it really easy. This free training, free support, all that stuff. All they had to do is buy a workbook. So it’s very easy for anybody to find a group. 

We have hundreds of groups all over the world and things like that, so they can evaluate and see what’s there. And then if this is a shirts that’s interested and they’re listening to your podcasts, or maybe a leader, we provide free virtual meetings for church leaders because they’re curious and they want more help. And so we provide those meetings for free and I’ll meet with them and just talk them through. And most of the time when I meet these pastors and these leaders, they don’t go longer than 30, 40 minutes because they’re ready. They just need someone to help them kind of guide them. And then they run with it. 

Carrie: Awesome. We’ll put the links in there and I’d love to get a hold of your workbooks and see if it would be helpful for some of my clients, you know, as an addition to what they’re already doing.

So, man, keep doing what you’re doing and just encouraging churches and people who are struggling.

Joe: Thank you appreciated.

Carrie: I know that some of you may really benefit from the resources that the Mental Health Grace Alliance has to offer. We will be sure to put their website in our show notes for you to click on for easy access.

And we are always looking for great guest suggestions for the show. I probably won’t be recording until sometime in the summer, but if you have a guest suggestion, you’re always welcome to fill out our contact form on our website: www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening. 

65. ACT Therapy for Anxiety and OCD with Ingrid Ord, psychotherapist and author

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 65. ACT Therapy for Anxiety and OCD with Ingrid Ord, psychotherapist and author

My guest today is an experienced Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) practitioner and author, Ingrid Ord. Ingrid talks about the connection between ACT and Christianity.

How did Ingrid develop an interest in ACT?

What is ACT, and how does it work?

How does ACT help with anxiety and OCD?

Bible characters who went through hard times and learned to accept their situations.

Ingrid’s book, ACT with Faith

Related Links and Resources:

Ingrid Ord

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 65. If you’re new to the show, I’m your host, Carrie Bock. And we are all about using shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. If you’ve been a fan of the show for a long time, you know that we love to discuss different types of therapy here. I could be helpful for people who are struggling with anxiety or OCD. I like to do that because you always hear people say, “Eh, I tried therapy. It didn’t work for me”. Did therapy not work because it wasn’t the right modality for you? Did therapy not work because you didn’t have a great relationship with your therapist? There are so many variables there that we could die suck. 

Today on this show, we are talking with Ingrid Ord, who is a therapist and author of ACT With Faith. ACT is a type of therapy that we’re going to be talking about today. And that stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you want the long name, this wasn’t a therapy I knew much about. So, it was interesting to learn from Ingrid. And I know it’s a therapy that’s being incorporated more and more in OCD treatment. I hope you enjoy this interview.

Ingrid, I believe that therapists choose modalities like therapy that align with them personally and professionally. So I’m curious: how did you become so interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, also called ACT?

Ingrid: I’ve been working for a number of years, right? The modality I was in before I went to CBT and REBT was client-centered therapy, which fit me very well. REBT, Rational, Emotive, Behavior, Therapy. And it can be quite very proactive, and I found that quite hard. Then I found ACT, and suddenly, there was a therapy that did everything I’d been training up until that point. But allowed a much softer, gentler approach to actually being in the client’s space and not pulling them into your space. 

Carrie: REBT is pretty confrontational.

Ingrid: It’s very confrontational, and you have your disputations. It works really well. They were male lawyers.

Carrie: Certain populations might be necessary for us.

Ingrid: Certain populations. The thing with ACT is that it seems to work at the cold front. It’s one of the few therapies I’ve found that when the patient or the client actually needs it, it works for them. 

Carrie: Okay. So, tell us a little bit about what ACT therapy entails. 

Ingrid: Well, very much as the name says, within the acceptance part, it’s about willingly accepting that we have experiences that we don’t want and going into the experience. And being with it because these experiences invariably tell us something very important about our values. If I’m anxious about something, it’s probably because it’s something that there’s something in there that’s very important to me. So, if I’m anxious about meeting someone, it could be that it’s very important to me to make a good impression on this person. And why is it important to me? Maybe I’m envisaging a future relationship, a job, or something like that. It’s important to be within the experience itself. It’s tempting not to want to be there, to distract ourselves, and to all the denial stuff. And so the link between accepting what we’ve got in the moment and committing ourselves to taking action will take us in the direction of our values. Never mind what’s going on. What’s very attractive to me? 

Carrie: So there’s a sense of I’m accepting that I have anxiety about maybe going to a job interview because I want to look good or I really want a new job, but even though I’m anxious, I’m still going to work through that to the point where I’m committed to saying, I’m still going to put myself out there for this opportunity. I’m still going to the interview, show up, and do my best. 

Ingrid: Yes. So you take public speaking is a common problem with many people often, you know, seen this done in, in workshops and I do it myself is to acknowledge to the people there, how anxious I am, but I’m here because this is very important to me putting this across is a very important thing. And so I brought my anxiety was me, and I’m doing it anyway. 

Carrie: That’s good. I imagine that you’ve seen that it can help people with anxiety work through avoidance because avoidance feeds that cycle of anxiety and worsens everything. 

Ingrid: No, yes. I have a very dear friend in the app community, Robin Molson. She showed me in one of the first workshops. It’s a series of concentric circles. We’re right in the beginning of the circle, is what you are not wondering. And then the next circle will be what you do to avoid it. And then the next circle will be the results of what you’re doing to avoid it. And then there’s another biggest circle, the results of the results. So you end up with a little problem in the middle and the huge amount of consequences from actually avoiding taking action and sitting, you know, doing what you needed to do, whatever it is that you need to do that you’re anxious about.

Carrie: I’m curious about this in terms of OCD. Where people are taking action, but they’re doing things that they don’t want to be doing. They’re engaging in compulsions, trying to get out of repetitive thought patterns. What would ACT say about that? 

Ingrid: Well, one of the first things within there is the good old exposure exercises that you do and help the person to expose themselves to the situation so that they actually feel the anxiety. OCD is a specialized sort of area in that not that you have to be specialized, but you need to realize that the obsessions and the compulsions are there in order not to feel the anxiety. So you help the person go backward in the process to hopefully not do the compulsion or let the obsession go. And then, they will feel the anxiety and expose themselves to the feeling of the anxiety as being something totally normal. It’s going to happen. 

You have anxiety and are doing all these things to stop yourself from feeling anxiety. That is totally normal, but now it’s all become a big problem on its own.

So we need to unpick that take you backward so that you see that you actually can feel the anxiety. And live and get on with things, and it goes away. It always amazes me how people are so amazed that it goes away that you will stop thinking about this. You will, and it will go away if you stop listening to it and arguing with them.

Carrie: Right. And I think sometimes, in OCD treatment, that first step is really developing an awareness of how this plays out in a person’s life. And then being able to separate, like, I am not my OCD. I’m dealing with OCD.

Ingrid: Oh, yes.

Carrie: But it’s not my character. I may have these obsessions about hurting someone, but that’s not my value system. My value system is in loving people and caring for people. And that’s been shown through their behavior. 

Ingrid: Yes, absolutely. And it’s strange that you should mention that about, you know, not me and my values system. Very often that is a factor within OCD is that things are occurring, obsessions, compulsions that are totally in opposition to what their value systems are, which, of course, creates an immense amount of guilt and shame and so on, and actually help the person to understand that because it’s in your value system. That’s why you have these. The very fact that you’re so afraid of that means you’re going to have the obsession of the compulsion. 

Carrie: And we’ve talked about this before on the show, I think in your relationship to scrupulosity that people.

Ingrid: Yes.

Carrie: Those who are more spiritual and who have a connection to God are more likely to struggle with scrupulosity if they have OCD. I think that I can really see how this would be helpful for people with that sense of, there’s say, acceptance over the issue. And then you even said something earlier about taking it along with you. Can you talk with us a little bit more about that? Cause I know that that’s also a principle.

Ingrid: I often use the metaphor of a backpacker over the shoulder bag and say, look, you’ve got this thing, and it’s stuck to you, and it’s not going to go away. It’s like one of those magnetic games: as you move, it’s going to move with you. So instead of spinning off, trying to push it away, put it in your backpack, put it in your sling bag, and go and do what you want anyway because it won’t leave you.

So go ahead and do it. And it really helps to visualize it as well. So sometimes, I’ve had somebody visualize a little purple man who was giving her absolutely. I guess you should put them in the bag about herself, esteem, and all arresters and take him with you. And, of course, she must always be careful not to disrespect the mind. You’re not showing disrespect for the mind because the person needs to know your mind is doing its job. It’s just doing it in a bit of a weird way right now. 

Carrie: It’s trying to protect you.

Ingrid: We always need to be careful not to undermine the mind’s job and get the person to feel that their mind is somehow defective. That’s actually a very important part of actors. There is nothing wrong with you. You’ve got problems because there’s everything right with you. 

Carrie: Oh, wow. This is a very interesting reframe for people. 

Ingrid: Isn’t it wonderful?

Carrie: It takes off that shame layer, really.

Ingrid: Yes. And the fear of, you know, am I losing it? I always joke that the least funny joke ever is of all the things I’ve lost in life. I miss my mind the most. 

Carrie: I’m curious for you: how does ACT therapy align with faith in God and biblical teaching?

Ingrid: Actually, that’s a very close fit because the stitching with the thing I’m trying to avoid and actually sitting with it and willingly accepting it is much easier as a Christian because I have got the added strength of grace without being a Christian. I willingly accept that struggling against this thing will make me worse, but that’s just pure straight logic, and I learn it through experience, and that’s how it works. But now that I’m a Christian, I know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. And so whatever I’m experiencing is somehow going to work towards my good. And if I am in it and with it and thinking about God’s promises, you know what He has promised me here, it increases my faith. 

Carrie: Everything is purposeful. I think one thing as Christians that we fight against sometimes. Is, you know, okay, God, why am I going through this? Can you please take it away so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore because it’s uncomfortable and it’s painful. And I know that you have the power to do that. And instead of, like you were saying, really leaning in and saying, okay, there must be some purpose that this experience is here.

Ingrid: Yes.

Carrie: And God has allowed it in my life for some reason or another, you know, maybe it’s to help somebody down the road. That’s going to be going through a similar experience; maybe it’s to grow my character internally, and I could see how this therapy could help you lean into that. 

Ingrid: Sometimes it’s to help me to learn something that I really need to learn. You’re like recently after I tell you at the end, but we’ve been living on a boat, and I tend to live in my head, but you can’t when you’re on a boat, and I’ve seen some many beautiful things and outside that I wouldn’t have been part of. Cause that would have been busy in my hand. 

Carrie: I know for me right now, I’m dealing with some chronic back pain related to my pregnancy. It’s taught me so much about many different things, but really relying on God, understanding my limitations, and having compassion for my clients with chronic pain. I think that it’s not over yet. So, I think there are probably still more things that I will learn or somehow will grow from this experience of going through it. 

But it is hard to accept when you’re in the middle of it. You know, it’s like, I can take my back pain with me to exercise and recognize that I don’t feel like exercising because I’m in pain. But when I start to do the stretching and the yoga and the things that I know will be good for me and the core exercises, I start to feel better. And I know that what I’m doing is not exacerbating anything. It’s trying to help the other muscles support my back and support. So I can see that in what we’re talking about today.

Ingrid: And would you say that it would then help you with empathy was chronic pain patients who sometimes seem to be quite childish, or it helps to have empathy with that to say, I know it feels really, really, really hard. 

Carrie: Sure. Have you seen in terms of biblical characters that you’ve studied how they may have accepted a situation and then acted based on it?

Ingrid: One of the things that mean a lot to me is the three Hebrew children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, being thrown in the fire. And they said,” I think it was never that our God could save us from the fire, but even if he doesn’t, we still weren’t worshipping here.” That’s been a lot to me. There’ve been a few occasions in my life where, you know, you’re up against it, and it’s like, do this or else. And even if God doesn’t save me. So that’s one and the other one, really his job, even though he slays me when I trust him.

Carrie: Yes.

Ingrid: I struggle to get through this without getting emotional. But there’ve been very, very hard times in my life where that’s resonated in my head that God, I don’t know what you’re doing. And it feels like this is killing me, but I trust you. 

Carrie: Tell us a little about the book you wrote, “ACT With Faith.”

Ingrid: Well, I wrote it initially. The audience I chose was non-Christian therapists because I believe that there are many out there who are highly competent and would be very willing to work with Christians. With their own belief because, you know, ACT has a pragmatic Trist criteria which states that whatever the client believes is the truth in that room at that time. So even with a non-Christian therapist, Christian clients’ truths are what’s important. 

So, I thought I’d put out there what Christian truth is in terms of the six ACT processes or the six major processes lined in ACT. So, the therapists could relate process by process to various aspects of Christians’ beliefs. And I also wanted to give them eight for their Christian clients. So I put in a whole lot of appendices, which a client hands out, but if there’s something they don’t understand, like grace, they can hand it to their clients, and their clients can see how it relates to the whole ACT process.

Carrie: I like that a lot. Who has been resonating with the book, or have there been other people as well that have picked up on it, maybe clients that have read it and resonated with it or a Christian therapist?

Ingrid: I found it actually at a wide range of people because many clients have resonated with it. And people who are not Christians. People have come to me to say, “How can we adapt this for Muslim clients?” or I am trying to help and explain to them that the way I work is to say if I have a Muslim or Hindu or another religion, we have a religious book, and this is what it says. And I’m sure there are some things similar to this in your book. Can we see if we can find it? And there is something like if we’re dealing with marriage or relationship issues or whatever. People who are Christians who are not Christians

Carrie: That’s awesome.

Ingrid: In a very wide range of people. 

Carrie: Towards the end of every 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.

Ingrid: Kind of alluded to this, but in 2018, my husband and I both felt that God was indicating to us to leave South Africa and return to the UK. The unfortunate part about it was that we would have nothing because of, you know, exchange rates, etcetera. Various factors meant that we would arrive here was nothing. We have about, so we’ve lived on the boat. It wasn’t supposed to be for three or four years, but that has been that, and it’s been very hard. The summers are beautiful, of course. And that’s what I was alluding to earlier with, you know, at being outside, seeing the nature it’s beautiful. But winters are tough, and we applied for housing, and it’s taken a very long time; we were approved in June, and it’s been hanging on hanging on. And today we got the large vacation, the house we love is ready, we can move it next week. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really beautiful. It’s hard to wait on those types of things, but praise God.

Ingrid: It’s very hard, it’s very hard to wait, and that’s been what I was, you know, about Joe, and I’ve been very ill on the boat at times, just saying to the Lord, “Okay, I know you have this in hand, I know you have it in half.” It takes you a bit longer than order a life.

Carrie: Yes.

Ingrid: I know we are both very excited about that. 

Carrie: It’s really being able to trust that he’s going to take care of things.

Ingrid: And, of course, deal. But you know, we’ve had to do quite a lot of, you know, applying and sorting and working and, so we do our bit.

Carrie: Sure.

Ingrid: But God is there, and he’s in control. And he knows exactly, and we couldn’t have chosen if I’d had to draw a little cottage that I would love to be in. I couldn’t have done anything more beautiful than what we’ve actually got.

Carrie: I’m so excited for you to be able to move into your place. And thank you so much for having this conversation about ACT with us. We’ll put links to your website and the book in case people want to learn more.

Ingrid: Great. Thanks, Carrie. Nice talking to you. And I hope the rest of your pregnancy goes well or you don’t have a bad backache. 

Carrie: Thank you. Thank you. 

Have you had any personal experience with acceptance and commitment therapy?

I think it would be interesting to have someone on the show from the client’s perspective. I wanted to share with you something that I’m very excited about, and that is what we now have: a Hope for Anxiety and OCD Facebook group. I know not all of you are on Facebook. It has its good things and bad things about it for sure. However, we wanted to create an opportunity for listeners to really interact with each other. And interact with myself. I’m hoping this will really help expand our audience reach because there are many people who still don’t know about the show. While at the same time, getting to know those of you who are listening on a regular basis. We will put a link for you to that group in the show notes and hope you will join us over there. Thank you so much for listening. 

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

62. Connecting with God Through The Psalms with Courtney Reissig

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 62. Connecting with God Through The Psalms with Courtney Reissig

Courtney Reissig, a mom, author and speaker is joining me on the show today to share how God used the Psalms to prepare her for a traumatic and life-threatening pregnancy experience.

  • How Courtney started diving into the Psalms
  • Psalms as the language of the realities of life 
  • How Courtney processed her emotions 
  • How she worked through her trauma and what she learned from it
  • How to use the Psalms in prayer 
  • Courtney’s Book, Teach Me How to Feel 

Related links and resources

http://courtneyreissig.com/

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Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 62. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today, I am joined on the show by Courtney Reissig, author of Teach Me How to Feel. She’s written other books as well.

We were talking about using the Psalms in our spiritual journey without using the Psalms to connect with God and in prayer and meditation. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation. 

Courtney, I know that you had a difficult experience that was traumatic for you and prompted you really to dive in, and study the Psalms, in more detail. Can you tell us about that?

Courtney: I had a traumatic delivery with my last son,  and it was actually like a medical crisis, but I actually started diving into the Psalms about six months before that, and was truly interested in them and how they fit together and how,  as I learned more about them, I realized the Psalms was giving us language for the realities of life.

It was so interesting at the time. But I didn’t know, that the Lord was using to preparing for what was to come. And so, I had spent that six months diving into the Psalms. And then when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I had a placenta abruption, which is the  Medical crisis full abruption is sudden death for the mom and the baby, but mine was partial.

And so I was admitted to the hospital for three weeks as we waited for either to stop or for him to be needed to be delivered. Really, what happened to me. And that time was kind  of hospital  bed rest  is really , really traumatic.  I felt like everyday with a life or death situation   with whether or not I was going to have to deliver him, whether we be okay. On those days, I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t read the magazine people brought me, I couldn’t really watch TV, but I could read the Psalms.

And I spent so much time in the Psalms in those days, reading and processing and journaling about them. It’s not for I really start that I’m using the Psalmus. You’re not the first person who had walked through something that was life or death. And the Lord really met me there and showed me that He understood my frame and understood my struggle and was giving me language for what was going on.

Carrie: Yeah, So did you feel like, even though you could really describe like what you were feeling exactly. It was almost like when you opened up the Psalms, it, it really was like, oh yeah.

That’s, how I’m feeling right now. 

Courtney: Yes. Oh yes. I mean, there are so many songs where I opened them up and was like, yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though God has forgotten me. I struggled a lot and actually after he was born kind of that. And I struggled with guilt over that because, I lived and I had the best-case scenario, but I still had all of that trauma that I had to work through. 

And even then I had a lot of darkness and postpartum depression. And even in that, the Psalms really helped me see that I was not the first person who had felt darkness or felt like God’s hand was against me or felt like I had sorrows in my heart all day or anxiety in my heart all day. So it really did give me words when I didn’t have other words for what we know.

Carrie: Um,  that’s good. How did you process those emotions as they came up? Just, you know, feeling like God had forgotten you or maybe other concerns that you had, you know, sadness, anger, fear?

Courtney: Yeah. It’s really understand talking to your friend about how kind I processed it at night. And I, it took me a long time to realize that I’m an internal processor. And so a lot of people didn’t know that I was struggling for a really long time until like six months after he was born. I had shared that I was really struggling. I think for me, I just had to really work through my own thoughts in my own head.

And through writing, primarily for me is just a big way for me to internally process what’s going on, that was a big thing for me. I find that when I’m deeply, deeply struggling, that I’ve got to write to get it all out before I can never talk about somebody else, which I’m a natural born talker, which so people don’t think that that’s how I process.

They usually think that I brought those through talking about it. Cause everything, but when I’m really, really struggling, I work it through with writing and then reading. I didn’t have a lot of quiet moments. It was my fourth son by the time this happened. I had four children, four and under,  there were no quiet moments.

My husband was really gracious and gives me time to process. And I will say too, I eventually did go to therapy and that was really helpful. I needed someone else  outside of myself and outside of my circumstances to really kind of help me work through what we had walked through. And I still remember I canceled number of times that I had a really good friend who finally was like, I’m going to come watch your kids and you’re going to make that appointment.

Carrie: You thought, I don’t have time for this, or you were avoiding it because you knew it’d be uncomfortable to talk about?

Courtney:  I think I knew I needed it. Like, I think I knew like deep down that I really needed just to like an hour, a week to sit and process. And I was gonna have that unless someone had given me that time.

Yeah. I think I was just like, I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time or the energy. It seemed impossible to me. Yeah. 

Carrie: Yeah. That was just really loving what your friend did to just kind of step in and say, They all l take care of your kids so that you can go take care of you.

Courtney: Right, and I think sometimes we’re afraid, I  think as moms, maybe it’s women in general to kind of say I’m willing to do that, it feels too self-focused and we are kind of conditioned to be like, we’re always dying to self and I think we’re supposed to die to self. Because  Christ, I just like drive to himself.

Carrie: Right.

Courtney: But we are also not God, you need help sometimes. And so, sometimes the most self-sacrificing that you can do is to help and you can help  others. And I think, that’s what my friend saw in me is that I needed that so that I could serve and the way I was called to serve.

Carrie:  I know some people, when they go through trauma and then they get to the end of experience, they’re like, okay, it’s over. I lived, I should be fine. Like, I shouldn’t be having those residual effects. Like, did you understand that it was. The trauma that was impacting maybe emotional experiences that you were having, or was it kind of like you learned some of that later? Like after the fact? 

Courtney: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Cause I don’t think I understood that fully in the moment. And it’s been helpful since I’ve come to realize that I have that  It’s helped me love my kids well through it, I had a few people in my life who understood enough of what we had walked through and had lived long enough to say,

Carrie: You’re going to have to be working through this for a while.

Courtney: It took me a while, like a few years to realize that there were these things that would happen. And I wouldn’t understand why I would all be dealing with it again, even it was in my mind seemed to be kind of unrelated. It’s only been as I’ve learned that I’ve learned part of the process of working through trauma is that eventually, I think hindsight now allows me to say, oh, I was not in a good place then, because that  I’m in a better place now. 

Carrie: Sure.

Courtney: Yeah, I don’t think I fully understood in that moment, but I’ve walked through the trauma scene. Then, so I was diagnosed with cervical cancer during  COVID.

Carrie: Wow!

Courtney: Yeah,  and I was really, really unexpected. All the markers to catch it, just kind of fell through the cracks for me. And, um, so I had radical hysterectomy really quickly because I had walked through the trauma with Ben. It didn’t make it easier and didn’t make it less traumatic, but it did make me more aware of what I was going to need to process what had happened. And the healing emotionally from that was better the second time around versus I just felt like I was blindsided by what happened with him.

Carrie: Right, right. Yeah. It’s interesting. Because so many times when we’re in survival mode, we are not aware that we’re in survival mode. We’re just kind of making the next day happen. Like, I’ve, you know, in your situation, it’s like, I got four kids and somebody is going to feed them. 

Courtney: Right. And you don’t realize that you’re like deeply not okay. Like, you’re like a hair trigger away from like blowing up. And I’m thankful that the Lord brought me through it and then allowed me to give me some clarity to see so that I’m aware. I mean, trauma happens all throughout our lives. 

Carrie: Sure

Courtney: And so I’m not naive enough to think it won’t happen again, but.

Carrie: What guidance, like you can give us on using the Psalms in our day-to-day prayer and devotional life? 

Courtney: I’ve used them all different ways. Right now, my life, I’ve been really convicted over the last year that my prayer life is really lacking, it’s always been, like more of a struggle in my own life to just find, to be purposeful in prayer. But so many of the Psalms are prayers and written as prayers

Carrie: Yeah.

Courtney: And so one of the things I’ve done over the last year has been to pray the Psalms and just pray them based on whatever’s going on in the lives of the people. I’m praying for at the time or my own life.

I think that’s one way to use them is to use them as prayers. Many of them are prayers.  I think another way to use them, is to read them when life is hard and read them to find familiar friends who also understand that life is hard. You know, I read them a lot when I was writing the book, I write them a lot.

When I was walking through this trauma, I read them a lot when COVID first started, because everything felt so uncertain and crazy. And I have found in every one of those seasons that the Psalms get the human experience. I think I’ve heard a Tim Keller, wouldn’t say. That part of his devotional reading is he reads, a Psalms everyday  because we’re always walking through something that the Psalms understand because God is the author of the Psalms and he understands us. And so I think for anyone, it’s a really helpful tool. And seeing that we have a God who sees no matter what we’re walking through.

Carrie:  Yeah, Just sense of relate-ability that we have to. I mean, it’s the human experience. It’s anger, it’s sadness. It’s uncertainty. It’s fear. And for me, I think it opens up and gives us permission to have a messy prayer life.

Courtney:  Yes,  absolutely. 

Carrie:  So just say, this is how I feel and it’s messy right now and I don’t care what’s going on in my life. Like it’s crazy. 

Courtney: .Right,  and I think sometimes we’re afraid just to be like that because we, depending on, like our theological tradition, we are so prone to wanting to have it all put together and to sound like we’re trusting the Lord and that everything’s going okay. And I think that’s the reality of the Psalms is that they’re not afraid of the struggles. And they kind of reorient us to acknowledge that.

Carrie: Hmm.

Courtney: Stop pretending that everything’s perfect and that we’re able to respond rightly to everything at all. Any given time.

Carrie: Yeah, the, we don’t have to have polished prayers all the time.

Carrie: Right? Yeah. I love that. Tell us about your book. Uh, “Teach me how to feel?”

Courtney: Yes, that book was born out of our experience with Ben and it kind of takes us through 24 different Psalms and walks through how the Psalmus experiences, the feeling, and then how this almost experiences God. There’s also a study guide that goes along with it to kind of help you add more depth to it.

If you’re trying to really kind of work through the Psalms, but the heart behind it was that a person who is walking through something could take any, could open up and look at any emotion that they’re feeling at any given time and find language for their struggle. There are short chapters. They’re designed for, like, if you’re walking through struggle, you need something 

short and accessible.

There are a variety of feelings. There are happy ones like joy and forgiving and different ones like that. And so it’s not all sad songs, but it’s really intended to show you the breadth of the songs and the breadth of how God gives us language and the different struggles and joys and sorrows of life.

Carrie: Hmm. Good. How can people get in touch with you if they want to kind of find out more information?

Courtney:  About the book? 

Carrie: Yeah. Or just if they want to get in touch with you, um, do you do speaking engagements sometimes or? 

Courtney: Yeah, I do. Um, I don’t do them as much as I used to, so COVID really slowed down what ended up speaking that I did. And then, um, it kind of gave us, like a little bit of a reset. Is this what we want for our season of life right now? 

And so, I don’t accept a lot of speaking engagements throughout the year. I accept maybe like one or two outside of Arkansas where I live, and I’m also on staff at my church recently. So that takes up a fair amount of my time.

And I have a website that I. Should I update more than I do Courtneyreissig.com, but I feel an urge to write something. I primarily put it on Instagram, so it’s just my name. Courtney Reissig.

Carrie: Okay. Awesome. So when you were struggling, if you could go back in time, like what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Courtney: Hmm. That’s a really good question. So I would provide, to my younger self, I would say trust the long game. That’s kind of the thing that I would tell younger Courtney, is that what seems like an impossible thing right now, it seems like God’s not going to work that out for you right now. God plays the long game in life.

And so it’s kind of the message of someone, where the one who meditates on God’s word day and night is like a tree planted by streams of water. And what we know about trees is that they don’t grow overnight and transformation doesn’t happen overnight. 

And so the life spent in the world. And what life spent trusting in the word made flesh Christ is one that grows over lifetime. And so that means that there are seasons like summer where everything is going really well and the trees in full bloom, and then their seasons, like winter, where it seems like nothing’s happening. 

And I think I spent a lot of time in my younger, in my twenties and towards the end of my thirties now. So most of my thirties, not trusting the long game, not trusting that God was working, that God had a long-term purpose in view when He was working in my life or not doing anyone else.

I think it’s probably the greatest struggle of these younger people, in general, is we’re so instantaneous and that’s not how God works. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s so good. Just to have a little bit more for ourselves of an eternal perspective. What God’s doing right now, you know, we may not see the fruits of it for many years. Something that we’re investing in, you know, you could be investing in kids or teenagers and you may not see the fruit of the day to day what’s you’re doing until many years down the road, you know, or the difficulty that God’s bringing you through right now is the difficulty that you’re going to be helping somebody else walk through and 10 years. Right?

Courtney: Right, right. I mean, there’s in our own life. We’ve seen in just the last few months, an answer to prayer that we’ve prayed for 10 years. 

Carrie: Wow!

Courtney: And I mean, that’s just a long time. And to be honest, like there’s, there was like whole years where I stopped praying for it, you know, because I just don’t think it was going to happen.

So I think that it’s the benefit of getting older is you get to see God work over the long haul that you don’t see when you’re younger. 

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. That’s good. Hopefully that encourages some, some younger people out there that are wondering why something isn’t happening right now.

Courtney: Right. Yeah.

Carrie:  Well, Courtney, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk with us about these things. And I hope it expands and encourages people’s prayer and devotional life, or if they’re going through a hard time to really just dig into the Psalms and see what God is going to show them and teach them through that.

Courtney: Well. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I really hope you enjoy this episode on the Psalms. In a couple of weeks we have a really powerful interview about forgiveness that I wanted to share with you. So, if you’re struggling with forgiving someone in your life. You may wanna  tune in, in a couple of weeks to that episode. 

Just a friendly reminder that we have a couple different products on our website for sale. We do have some t-shirts. If you want to share the news and share your excitement about Hope for Anxiety and OCD. We also have an e-book on finding the counselor who is right for you. If either of those things are an interest to you upon over to Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com.

My assistant and I are also working on putting together a  facebook group which will be an encouraging, supportive, positive place for hopefully to be able to connect with us and other listeners. But definitely be on the lookout for that.

43. Overcoming Anxiety about Career and Calling with Kelsey Kemp

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 43. Overcoming Anxiety about Career and Calling with Kelsey Kemp


I had the privilege of interviewing Kelsey Kemp, a Christian career coach, speaker and podcaster. We had an interesting conversation about career and calling that will help you gain a new perspective on making career decisions that honor God. 

  • What to do when you get anxious about making career decisions?
  • How to make a wise career decision?
  • How to know God’s will for your career?
  • Scripture verses about choosing a career and using your God-given talent. 
  • Steps to take if your work isn’t aligned with your purpose and calling.
  • How to evaluate whether it’s time to stay or leave your job?

Links and Resources:

Verses and Scriptures discussed: Mark 12:30, Matthew 7:7, Proverbs 16:9,
Matthew 25:14–30, Romans 8:28, Matthew 6:33, Matthew 25
Kelsey Kemp
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Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope For Anxiety and OCD, episode 43. If you’re new to the show, I am your host Carrie Bock. And on this podcast, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthy connections with God and others. Today, I’m gonna be talking with Kelsey Kemp, a certified career coach. 

One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about overcoming anxiety, related to career and calling is because oftentimes this is an area as Christians where we can really get hung up on what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives occasionally. I know for myself, even though I’ve only had one career per say, I’ve got a master’s degree and became a therapist right away. 

However, along that journey, I’ve had many different jobs. And I feel like I’ve learned different things from each of those jobs. And at some point before I got into my private practice and had my own business. Became self-employed. I came to this crossroads really of, I read this book called “The real adventures of working girl”. About a woman who had had a bunch of different jobs. And I sat down, had this prayer time with the Lord and was like, okay, what is the role for me? Where do I thrive? What do I do the best? And it allowed me to, instead of just going and looking for a job that was out there really mapping out what my ideal job, where my strengths really go and what fits with me.

And so, I’m so excited, Kelsey, to have you on the show to talk about some of these things, because I think it’s gonna be really valuable to people maybe who are anxious about, am I, am I in the right job or my in the right career? And you know, am I too old? Is it too late for me to change? There’s so many questions that, and anxiety can really keep people stuck in a place where they don’t need to be. So thanks for coming on and talking about this with us?

Kelsey: Oh my goodness. Well, now I actually just went to dominate this interview and ask you questions. You said about your exploration of different jobs. And at first I was like, she’s a unicorn that stayed in the same career the whole time. But even you acknowledging that you had multiple different facets to enrolls how you play that out. I thought that is actually, so how callings go a lot of the time, even if you only figure that out in hindsight. But there was something drawing it all together, but there’s a lot of ways that you could go about it. But man, do I also relate in what you’re saying about “how this is like a cesspool for anxiety”.

Carrie: Right.

Kelsey: With career decisions and wearing off, am I gonna  miss it wrong? Am I just going to totally derail God’s plan for me, side note? He’s way more powerful than. But anyway, yes thank you I can’t wait to dive in. Obviously I’m already, like jumping out of the bed, getting ready to go. 

Carrie: How did you get into this business of helping Christians finding their calling? 

Kelsey: Goodness. So I listen to business podcasts all the time, and I recently heard somebody say “business is actually just radical empathy”. And it’s also reminding me of, I’m reading through all the gospels again right now of work as a way that we carry out the second greatest commandment, you know. The first being loved the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think I got the order, right. And you always mess it up. And then the second being, love your neighbor as yourself. So my story very much started with being the person that needed this help.

Right out of college I went into tech consulting. So I was working for a really huge multinational firm. I was in their digital and emerging tech group as a business analyst. Helping it really large firms develop new, basically overhaul their integrated Tech systems. And a lot of people, when I would say that, would say, that sounds so cool. And I, my ego, what’s a, yes, that’s why I chose this one. That’s why I wanted you to say, or that’s what I wanted you to think about me, but it was so incredibly dissatisfying. And after two years, I really realized. I had spent so much of my academic journey and my young professional journey, doing things that others deemed as most valuable or sought after. And it led me to just white knuckle my way into saying “I can do it look, look at what I could do”. And over time that just wears on you. I mean, two years, I guess it didn’t even take that much time. It wore on me so much to realize that what you’re called to do is so much different than just doing what you can.

So, I was very much suffering in my health, my mental health, and in the bottom of that pit, just so desperate. God, would you please show me what is your will for my life? Isn’t that kind of the common prayer?

Carrie: Right.

Kelsey: Please show your will for my life. Please show me, please show me, please show me. And after her whole life, I just realized when I would dwell on Matthew seven, seven of the famous, like asking it will be given to you. Seeking, you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you. That sounds like a pretty active process actually. 

Carrie: Yes.

Kelsey: And I realized I was waiting for God to actually, just write the direct 10 step instruction list on the wall for me. And I felt convicted of my spiritual brattiness actually. God, I need you to essentially, I realize, assure me from all discomfort and the guilty. I want you to confirm that I’m going to have, It’s such a significant life of my dreams, and I want you to get me on the direct path to being there without any searching. And so when I realized, okay, I really gotta start making this an active process, doing my research, learning about fields that I don’t even know exist because I realized I had a pretty childlike view of what career options were available to me. All the while God just revealed to me this moment of remembering what my mom always said of necessity is the mother of invention.

Again, that’s a theme of love your neighbor as yourself. What did I most want? I wanted somebody to help me discern what I was truly called to do occupationally. And so I thought I’m 24 and I have no idea how to solve that problem. But man, that would be so amazing. If one day I figured out the solution and then gave it to other people.

So I thought, why don’t I just start now? So I signed up to become a certified career coach. And it started my practice actually earlier in life than I thought I could. Did I get some laughs along the way? Absolutely like it was not lost on me though. I was 24 and it’s been three years since then. Still I get some laughs, but I’ve worked with people even in their sixties executives. God has been very, very gracious with me. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. It’s just a great testimony of how God uses our struggles and turns it into something beautiful for. Then you to be able to pass the torch on and, like, help the next person who was going through what you were going through just a few years ago.

Kelsey: Exactly. He wastes nothing. 

Carrie: Right. So you talked about this a little bit, like where people really are like, okay, God, you know, show me. You know, show me your calling. And I think there can be this anxious component among some Christians of like, okay, what if I miss it? What if, like God’s calling us some kind of bullseye and I shoot the arrow and I just, I totally end up on the wrong target. And I ended up in this job that God just doesn’t have for me. Or maybe you feel like you’re in that job right now. Oh gosh. I just feel like I’m totally wasting my time or missing out on, what it is God has and we look at calling is some kind of, like big, you know mysterious thing that we’re gonna miss it. And we’re gonna mess it up. What would you say to somebody that’s dealing with some of that right now? 

Kelsey: I think one, I will quote Tim Keller most likely in abundance during this interview, because he just informs so much of the theology of work that has really helped me come to this point. But one thing he said was no, that God’s will, is more of something that he does then he gives. And so we want all the clear instructions, but what he actually models for us in the Bible is it says in Proverbs 16, Verse 1 and 9 are quite similar, but 9, it says “A man’s plans belong to his heart, but God is the one that establishes the guards, his steps”. And what does that take? It actually takes lifting your foot and, and then God will direct it in the right place. 

But what we see in the parable of the talents that has been, so that is probably one of the most foundational scriptures to my career coaching practice of seeing the, you know, the parable of the three servants, the master who’s going well on a long journey gives each of them a he, He divides his wealth among them. It says according to their abilities and he did not give them any instructions at all. But you see that when the master comes back at an unpredictable time, you see that the rules were actually clear all along. He always knew he was going to judge each of them. Based on what they did in absence of instructions.

Carrie: Wow!

Kelsey: So he, and it was so clear and to the servant who out of fear saying “Master, I didn’t, you’re a shrewd man. I didn’t want to make you angry if I lost any of it”. So he buried his talent in the ground and I like how talent it’s meaning the piece of gold, but actually just in English. It’s interesting to think, Okay, what about my innate resources? Of my abilities too. 

Carrie: Sure.

Kelsey: I will bury it in the ground for fear of losing anything. And he said “you wicked and lazy servant” and it reminds me of the Matthew effect too. Those who have little understanding, even what little they have is taken away. But those who have understanding even more will be given to them. So what did the faithful servants get? They doubled their masters’ wealth. We don’t know if it was by taking it to a certain brand of bank. We don’t know if they invested in a certain new crop that was all up to them, but their result was that they doubled their master’s wealth in absence of instructions. And the master said, “well done, good and faithful servant. Now come and share in your master’s happiness”. And that is what work is like to me, that faithfulness, of course, we’re here to serve and not be served, but our father in heaven is so gracious that he does give us joy, fulfillment, purpose, happiness. We’re not chasing happiness, but he says, “here that comes from me. I’ll give you all more than you can imagine, when you’re faithful”. And so to answer your question, just kind of more tangibly, as I think about, kind of that bag of gold in the parable of the talents. 

I imagine us coming into this life and we have all these clues and these breadcrumbs, our internal resources of who God made us to be with our innate talents when we’re reborn in him and the spirit, our spiritual gifts. Our core values that are unique to each of us, our personality, all these things. Those are all context clues that you’re meant to multiply those natural, also the opportunities physically that are given to you and the spheres of influence and the abilities and all these things multiply those for the glory of God.

I pay attention to the breadcrumbs and the context clues and make a wise decision based on what career path given my research and exploration and talking to many people. Do I think, would best glorify God and serve others? And I can trust that God’s going to also bring me joy through that. They don’t have to worry. And that is when I think you can know you’re following a calling because God teaches you so much through action. Clarity comes through action, not just from thinking and not especially for whom honestly, having a kind of sparse. I will be very honest prayer life of only saying, God, show me your well, God, show me your well with your arms crossed in a dark room, refusing to do any research or trusting or taking action.

Carrie: Sometimes we have to take that risk and we have to try things and see how it works out. And that can be scary at times, just thinking of, you know, different things that I’ve done, even going to get a master’s in counseling. I hadn’t ever sat down and talked to a counselor about what their job was like. Looking back on that, that probably would have been a good idea to do, for seeing what kind of careers are available to me afterwards. 

But I knew like when I got into that room and I had my first session with someone, it was like, there was this wave that came over me like, this is it. This is what I’m supposed to do. You just, I just innately knew that. And I didn’t know exactly how that was going to manifest out. It’s manifested in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, but if I hadn’t have, taken that step to move across the country to go to graduate school, to try out counseling, then I wouldn’t have known. And I know some people that got into that practicum and they had a completely different experience and they were like, you know, I think I wanna do more church type ministry, but maybe counseling. Isn’t the professional nature of it. It’s not really for me. 

I have a friend that uses her counseling degree working in a museum. She’s not doing any formal counseling, but she loves what she does. And she works with people and got hired because she could do people because she has a counseling degree. So it was just incredible how God been steer and guide us. I can’t remember the quote, but it’s basically something to the effect of God can steer you if you’re moving, but it’s kind of hard for God to steer you. If you’re just not moving. If you’re standing still.

Kelsey: And that’s called a Whirlpool, actually, if you’re just spinning around in circles, actually, that’s why a lot of my most anxious thoughts felt like it felt like I was spinning when I wasn’t just making a decision about my career. I, again, Tim Keller. He has this whole sermon. I really recommend anyone looks it up on YouTube. It’s called, “Your plans versus God’s plans”. And he excellently breaks down the mystery of God’s sovereignty and our free will. And he says, anytime that somebody comes to him and says “much would I do in my career”? Whatever. He says, “make a decision” and they say, “how spiritual have you? You’re supposed to be a pastor”. And making decisions. Practicing wisdom is how you become more and more the kind of person who discerns God’s will. And I will definitely be sending this episode to people because of what you said of how you were already in the room, when you had that feeling of confirmation of calling.

Wash over you. And it was a feeling of confirmation, not of go, do this. 

When you were in high school. I don’t know. Or like, in you’re on the volleyball court and this just like, Hey, Carrie you can be a counselor. That’s not how it, how it went. We would love it. But honestly, in the end, I don’t think we would want that to happen because God is sovereign. And He knows that we have to through experience, train our hearts to be faithful to Him. And especially in ambiguity. 

Carrie: Yes. Yes, that’s true. And you can pray about things and sometimes you don’t have the clearest sense. It’s not something that’s for or against in the Bible. You know, if it’s very clear, aligned with scripture, okay, this is very clear. You know, I need to do that. And or if it’s very not aligned with the values of scripture, then we know, okay, that’s not what I should be doing. 

But many, many, many I’d say most decisions in our life we make, we can’t go directly to the Bible to find the answer to that. We have to base it on biblical principles and values of loving God, loving people. What we sense in our spirit, because I do believe that. The holy spirit speaks to us. And sometimes we just sense that internally of like, this is a no, and I don’t even have to know why it’s a no, it’s just a no for me. So we can, we can trust those things that, that God gives us. But sometimes we just have to say, okay God, I, I’m not sure, but this is the decision or the direction that I believe that you’re sending me in. And I’m gonna, I’m going to go in that direction. And do it. I think that you’re, you know, you’re spot on with what you’re saying.

Kelsey: If it’s okay. I would like to speak a little bit more to the question of, can we miss our callings? Cause I think that there’s one more aspect to this conversation of yes, you and I just supported a lot of points to say, generally speaking, God will faithfully lead you in that direction. And also we should just know that our free will is not a joke. We’re not all the way like puppets on strings. There actually are plenty of options. Just like I think our culture is finally releasing our grip on the view of their being the one that you will marry.

There’s a lot of personal choice involved with that as well. Though we know that we can trust God, he’s guiding us. It’s complicated. But what I wanted to say as an additional point of perspective is, and this is hard to admit. It’s quite honest and honest look at life, but we can miss our calling in general. Yes, because one, if we look at our primary calling that we see in the Bible to follow Jesus. To believe in him to have a salvific relationship, to go and make disciples of all the nations. That’s the great commission. 

Carrie: Right.

Kelsey: You see those callings are very direct instructions that are blatantly listed out. Do people opt out of those constantly?

Yes. Is it unequivocally God’s will that we would all follow them? Yes. So why would we believe that we cannot also opt out of faithfulness? In all other decisions in life and not re consequences. Is that harrowing? Yes. I mean, have we all seen that person who has squandered their talents for a lifetime bearing under them under many, many excuses that I’m sure are valid, but you know, you could, as an option, trust God.

Precede regardless, but yes, I think that we’ve all seen that example play out. And so this is something that is harrowing, but important to acknowledge that you can opt out of faithfulness at any point. And why, if you are not communing with your creator and seeing work as an and your calling as an opportunity to commune with him, And so if you’re not even obeying your first command to be in a relationship with him, why would you believe that he would just release you to go have all your idols in the world?

Which of course you can, but then he will always be knocking at your door saying, “come back to me, come back to me”. So I’m not sure if that was a little long and winding of an answer, but I have spoken at a few places and especially students come up to me and they’re like, “you know what? I was just so encouraged for your talk”, to know, like I can’t miss my calling and I thought, wait, did I say that? No.

I think that, like, if you’re opting into faithfulness, you could trust absolutely that you are a part of God’s promises. He’s guiding your steps. He’s even guiding your words, as it says in Proverbs 16:1. “And he is working all things together for your good, for those.” What does it say when people just say he’s working all those things to your good in Romans 8:28, but they don’t mention the last part of that first “for those that are called according to his purpose who love him and are called according to his purpose”.

Carrie: Right. 

Kelsey: So I think that there is like, a pulling up to the bar. And then I think that you could be super secure.

Carrie: Right. I think about Matthew 6:33, that “seek first his kingdom and all these things shall be added to you”. It’s like if you have your priorities and your perspectives in order, and you are seeking God, who’s going to lead and guide you and whatever that next piece is, the next step, you don’t get the whole roadmap. Sorry. That’s not how spirituality Christianity works. I’ve never gotten the whole roadmap and I’m not expecting you to either, but you will get the next piece of the puzzle. The next step along the way, 

Kelsey: But who would we become if we actually had the full roadmap, actually in all of the, those end of times, Parables, especially in Matthew chapter 25, the bridegroom didn’t announce when he would be coming back and the virgins with the lambs. It was to test who was faithful and the master didn’t announce when he was coming back from the journey. It was, so her true character could be revealed. And if we just got all the assurance in the world, here’s your life story one. I don’t think we would actually want that. That’d be kind of like, I don’t know. I want a little mystery of my life, but then also this is an opportunity to grow with him in the midst of uncertainty. 

Carrie: What would you say, just shifting gears a little bit to someone who is in a work environment and they don’t believe that that aligns with their faith or calling, like for example, maybe the company is expecting them to work too many hours and that doesn’t align with their God-given need for rest or God given need to spend time with their family and put them as the priority that they want to. Maybe the company is just. All about profits and they don’t really care about the people that they’re serving or the people that are working for them. What would you say to someone who’s, who’s in that environment and just not feeling good about it? 

Kelsey: I would say the same thing to them that I would say to others who are even, maybe they would say their content at work, but they’re starting to get this inkling that maybe there’s some greater  thing that I could live into for God in my career, some greater measure of service and use of my vision, my aspirations, my talents. So whether it’s a really bad situation or a, maybe there’s something more, my advice is pretty much the same. Be proactive. Do not wait. I’m such a firm believer of, you don’t have to marry the first option that comes in your line of vision, you post you find, I think this could be my next step. Doesn’t mean that it’s time to jump ship tomorrow, but good grief. We all hear that saying like start with the end in mind. 

So essentially you could reverse engineer what you need to do in the meantime. Let’s understand what that end is in terms of starting. The discernment journey of what are you called to on an overarching level, given who God created you to be very specifically what he put on your heart to go do or serve, like to help who doing what, why? And then the last step after that more bigger vision discernment is the very practical of great what jobs, what role title.

Companies would allow me to best carry that out or what business idea would allow me to carry that out. That’s great too. And so then you can only then really kind of reverse engineer. All right. Wait. So now that I have that, well, at least I know I could start acting on it at any time. I think it’s appropriate. And so then it’s kind of a more detailed conversation of when do I jump into that next thing, but at least you have started the discernment journey when here’s the key. When like, before you are seeing red and deeply stressed out, there’s just a, you know, you’re a mental health professional. When somebody is in a fight or flight, you actually are not able to perceive.

The reality of the array of options available to you when you act, physically get tunnel vision. And so how therefore would you be able to perceive some cool thing that maybe otherwise you wouldn’t think is possible or go out and do more research and have more tenacity in that, or make a decision out of faith and not fearfulness. All those things start early. I really recommend it. At least being very thoughtful about exploring, especially through informational interviews. You know, even if you’re slightly interested or you heard about somebody’s job title and you’re like, I wonder what that is. Or you have a family friend and you think they’re just doing the coolest thing, even if you don’t.

Aren’t a hundred percent sure. That’s the key, don’t make a decision before you actually do research. I find people really forced themselves to make career decisions before they know what the day-to-day reality is like in that job, what tasks they would spend the majority of their time doing, what the career outlook, what the growth trajectory is. And if they’re okay with all of those things, I find that people do not want to have a coffee chat with someone, unless they’ve already decided, I for sure want to be an HR professional because I’m a people person. And little did they know there’s a ton of paperwork involved in that. And also there are so many different specialties in HR it’s mind-boggling. So, if you do those informational interviews, you would know that, but I find that people try to decide beforehand so they could treat their networking conversations as a. I’m just going to say a few things to sound impressive until I could get to the punchline where I asked you to pass on my resume when actually it should have just purely been a research conversation. 

Carrie: That’s good to note, I think. Are there any specific guidelines that you use when helping people evaluate whether it’s time to stay or time to go and their job?

Kelsey: There’s a couple, and I actually have a frequency about this on my website that goes through in depth, some more on each of these criteria and it’s interactive and it’s not meant to make you make a rush decision. That’s the point just to, help you predict, okay. What are the number of months that I should really be expecting and why? If it is a yes, I should leave. Why and what else did I do instead? So that’s some of the things that can help, but to run through a few of them right now, one, do you actually want your boss’s job or your boss’s boss’s job? Do you actually, not only, maybe on one end, if there are growth opportunities within your current field or your current company, do you want them, or it may be, I’ve talked to a lot of people that do like their job, but they get frustrated because, they are current company does not offer advancement opportunities and that’s essential to career satisfaction.

So that’s one thing advancement. Do you have the opportunity and do you want it, and what about your team and your boss? Is it, I think there’s not too much to be sat on that it talks about. Can you trust your management? I think that’s something I take quite seriously because I’ve seen people booted out. I’ve seen bad reports given that are not merited. If you actually cannot trust your management, then, that I have a dear friend right now. Who’s going through that? Not merited whatsoever that is truly something to get out of quickly.

What about, are you interested in the subject matter of your work whatsoever? Maybe you’ve been sticking around because you enjoy your coworkers and there’s a few perks and you have a really cool summer party and a Christmas party, and you liked those things or your interviewer’s servicemen is just the best.

And you want to stick around for that or the health insurance. It’s just, premium, but what about the actual tasks that you’re doing? Do they agree and utilize your innate abilities? If not, or if not all the way. I think that’s something that we could always maximize when you truly find your point of creative genius, which I believe exists in everybody. And you find what task reveals that cause maybe you haven’t stumbled upon the thing that reveals it again test experiments. 

Then, oh, man, you don’t even know what sense of flow like buzzing focus and satisfaction that kind of like, and God got to the end of the six days kicked back and said, “that was very good”. That kind of feeling you were missing out. So maybe it’s not like, I hate this or it’s so terrible, but maybe you could just maximize again, like multiplication divine multiplication is a huge theme, especially in the gospel. 

Carrie: I think something, you have to take this step back and say, is it my actual job duties that I’m not liking? Or is it the job duties? Is it the structure of how this company has structured the job duties? Maybe I really enjoy my job, but the boss is super micromanage or their coworkers are always whining and griping and complaining, and it’s just like a negative environment to be in. And so sometimes it’s hard to tease those things out cause you just look at it as one whole picture.

But I think like, what you’re saying is it’s like, do I need a different company where I could do the same thing, but maybe have more freedom, autonomy, better benefits, whatever it is, or do I need to be doing something, a different type of tasks, because I’m just not passionate about this, the way that I was in the past and those kind of things can shift and change for sure. And you have to kind of tune in and pay attention to that.

Kelsey: Absolutely. And the last thing I’ll say on this, as you are allowed to see a measure, when we say responsibility, our culture often means hunkering down and like counting the 10 beans that you were given and making sure nothing happens to them. That really sounds like the unfaithful servant. I actually, I think responsibilities should be more defined by.

I assessed everything that God gave me in everything that He, I really believe is a, such a God-given desire that He put on my heart. And I did my darndest with it. I just went for it. A lot of wisdom is not deciding between good or bad it’s deciding between best or better. And I think that I just want to say you are allowed to change jobs. That doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian. That was a big deal for me because my main idea of the theology around work that I grew up around was, and I’m not blaming any pastor because you know, they’re not a career coach. They’re not obsessed with studying the Bible through the lens of career ethics as I am. That’s okay. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. 

But what I did pick up was to be a good Christian at work is to just take whatever God gave you, which by the way, releases all agency from yourself in whatever job is right in front of you, you just have to take it. That’s kind of the read between the lines that I got and you just have to be excellent at it, which again, the read between the lines is just stick in it and make sure that you perform better than everybody else. So one day somebody like Jim at the water cooler. Really? Why are you so much better of a CPA than everybody else? Will you share the gospel with me? And that’s just not how it works. Honestly, due to convict grace, like, oh my gosh. non-Christians and Christians and non-Christians can be so much better at a job than Christians can. That’s fine. So, anyway, I think faithfulness, it’s just a choosing for better or choosing the better, not just managing only what you have, expanding your impact for the kingdom. You don’t have to stay where you’re at. 

Carrie: That’s so good. That’s so good. Because I, I’ve talked with clients who have felt guilt over leaving their job. I don’t want to leave my manager in a bad place or just very conscientious of what other people are experiencing or thinking, or they’re not wanting to disappoint someone.

Maybe I, this coworker helped me get this job. I feel like I shouldn’t leave or there’s so many emotions that can get tied up in those things. Even when we know clearly, like in our mind and in our spirit know, it’s time, like it’s time to move on.

Kelsey: And if the spirit is telling you that, and you know that you will be able to glorify God more and serve others better in another place, then pull you. Trust the Lord to fill that seat with somebody better, which is very humbling. Okay. 

Carrie: Wow!

Kelsey: He has the whole puzzle mapped out, please. your only concern is to follow him and play your piece. He will figure out the rest. I also speak with clients that are really, they see so many problems in the world. I think that I, you know, I, this was a big part of my quarter life crisis. There are so many things I care about. So many things I’m grieved by. The most loving thing you could do is to pick the one you. I don’t want to say just pick one, because that freaks always freaked me out. But what about in a more playful way, pick the one that you’re drawn towards most. And trust God to be God in you to be a human who could probably just do one thing super duper well. He will fill out the rest. 

Carrie: That’s good. This has just been a really great, great conversation. I’ve enjoyed it so much. 

Kelsey: Likewise. 

Carrie: At the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person. 

Kelsey: I cannot wait for the story though.

I’m about to share it. So I actually wish I received this from someone in person, but admittedly, I heard it on a podcast, but it was just too good not to tell all my friends about, even still to this day. I, gosh, this instilled so much awe in me like God is so big. And I’m so small, of when this pastor in country and the Middle East undisclosed. He is ruthlessly going out and risking his life, sharing the gospel all the time. And even though he really is, I think doing, I wanted to say like taking everything in his hands as much as he can. I would rather say he’s stewarding his job as much as possible. 

He’s initiating conversations about God everywhere he goes, but still in humility, he said, “don’t, don’t get it wrong. God is the only one that could save someone”. I, and it reminds me of the loaves and the fishes of, your job is only, I love how Dallas Jenkins, the creator of the chosen. He says this, he says, “Your job is only to bring the five loaves and the two fishes for Jesus to bless”. Even if you’re like Jesus, like there’s 5,000 people here.

There’s no way this is, this feels really dumb. Bring it to him and it is not your job to feed the 5,000, it is only your job to bring the loaves and the fish. Jesus it’s the one that will multiply it for 5,000. So similarly, this guy he’s saying, “God is the one who saves”. Let me give you an example. I went out into an incredibly rural village, has almost no contact with the outside world.

I went into this one man’s tent and I was telling him about the gospel and this man said, “I’ve heard of these things”. And the pastor’s like how the business is so remote. And it’s a predominantly Muslim country. And he, he said a man dressed in white has been coming to my tent every single night for months. And he’s been telling me to write things down and the pastor said, “Show me what he’s told you to write down”. Wow! Word for word it was the entire book of John from the gospels. 

Carrie: Wow! In his language?

Kelsey: In his language. 

Carrie: That’s incredible.

Kelsey: So that’s what God means when he says I am the one who calls you. But like he said to Moses, I made you have a mouth. Okay. All I need you to do, but I don’t even need you. It was an Acts 17 as if He is served by human hands, he’s not, he could do this all himself, but he knows for our hearts that we need to participate with him because as a gift, it’s a gift to him or to us actually. But anyway, he says to Moses, I gave you your mouth. I’ll also give you the words to say to Pharaoh. I’m really just asking you to walk into his court. And He is the one who calls us, but all of our callings are for him and for his glory and they will be done through his strength, achieving the results that he always wanted for himself. He just wants our faithful hearts to say, even though this seems ridiculous, I guess I’ll build the art.

Even those, this seems ridiculous. I’ll lift up the loaves and the fishes, even though I feel so scared, I’ll go into Pharaoh’s temple. I think that’s how our careers are supposed to feel. Not fearful because He commands us to fear not. And He commands us to not worry. And that’s not him. The disciples said at one point in the gospel, they were like, how is that possible? You’re asking us to be perfect. And Jesus said, “yes with man, this is impossible. But with God, all things are possible”. So he’s not asking you something that you can’t do in him. You need not worry literally, but we can live quite gloriously on the edge for him. And that is what I really hope to help people do through my practice.

Carrie: And so, that’s awesome. I love it. Well, Kelsey, we’re gonna put your, the links to your website in the show notes so that people can find you. And my assistant is gonna go through and pull all the scripture references, the scriptures that you mentioned today. And so we’ll put those in there. If people wanna do some study on those passages. I think that that would be awesome. 

Kelsey: All the best thing you can do. Let God preach to your heart. Not me.

Carrie: Thanks for being on the show today. 

Kelsey: Thank you so much. This was just the most jubilant conversation.

Carrie: One addendum that we forgot to talk about is that Kelsey has a podcast as well, called “Answer the Call”. So if you like what you heard today, and you want to hear more, go check out Kelsey’s podcast as well. She has a link through her website that we’re going to put in the show notes.

If you have been a regular listener to our show, I would love it. If you could rate and review us on iTunes or other platforms that you listen on that allow reviews that really helps people find our show and validate that we’re talking about good things. So I appreciate you so much for listening and taking the time to do that.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Different Types of Therapy

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on Different Types of Therapy

Using Brainspotting for Anxiety and OCD with Brooke Randolph, LMHC

  • What is Brainspotting? How does it work? 
  • How was Brainspotting developed? Who discovered it?
  • How can Brainspotting help with anxiety and OCD?
  • What happens during and after a Brainspotting session
  • Can Brainspotting be used with all ages? 
  • Brainspotting training
  • Comparison between Branspotting and other forms of therapy.

Brooke Randolph, LMHC
Counseling At The Green House

Play Therapy for School Aged Children with Anxiety with Brittany Dyer, LPC-MHSP

  • How does anxiety present in school-aged children? 
  • How does childhood anxiety present differently from adult anxiety?
  • Behaviors that may indicate a child has anxiety
  • Anxious parents with anxious children.
  • Things parents can do to help their child with anxiety.
  • What is play therapy? How does it work?
  • How to introduce therapy to your kids
  • How does play therapy reduce anxiety in children and even in adults?
  • Signs that your child may need a therapist 


Brittany Dyer, LPC-MHSP

Reducing Anxiety with Secret Keeping Horses (Equine Assisted Therapy), Bailee Teter, LPC-MHSP (temp)

  • Bailee’s story about how she became an Equine Assisted Therapist without being a “horse person.” 
  • What is Equine Assisted Therapy?
  • Different models of Equine Assisted Therapy.
  • How does equine therapy help with anxiety and other mental issues?
  • Human-animal emotional connection. God says take care of the animals.
  • Horses read and respond to human emotions like anxiety.
  • Stories about how equine therapy helps people with anxiety

Unbridled Changes Website
Bailee Teter

Welcoming the Parts We Don’t Like (Internal Family System -IFS) with Lindsey Castleman, LMFT

  • What is IFS (Internal Family System) Therapy
  • How did Lindsey get into Christian counseling
  • How did she incorporate Christian faith principles into her practice
  • Looking at the core of self through attachment and faith-based lens
  • Some parts of self want attention come in different forms like anxiety and OCD
  • Bringing all parts of yourself connected as God is three in one

Lindsey Castleman, LMFT

The Power of EMDR Therapy for Anxiety with Sarah Slade, LPC-MHSP

  • Our path to receiving EMDR training
  • What is EMDR?
  • Different types of trauma (little t and big T)
  • Getting to the root of troubling body sensations and 
  • How EMDR can be helpful for people with anxiety 

Sarah’s Counseling Practice: Willow Tree Counseling, licensed in TN and KY
Sarah’s book: Healing Negative Wounds: The Impact of Trauma

How PCIT Can Help Your Anxious Child with Anika Mullen, LPC-MHSP

  • What is Parent Child Interaction Therapy?
  • How PCIT is helpful for children with behavioral problems
  • How receiving PCIT virtually through online counseling benefits families
  • Are the tantrums my young child is having a normal part of development?
  • PCIT Calm adaptation for anxious children
  • Reinforcing brave behaviors over accommodating anxiety

Anika Mullen, LPC-MHSP: https://ecounselingconnection.com/clinician-credentials

The Science Behind Engaging with Music for Anxiety Relief (Music Therapy) with Tim Ringgold

  • Spiritual pain
  • Neuroscience behind how music calms the nervous system
  • Practical ways to utilize music when stressed
  • Difference between listening to music passively and engaging with it

Tim Ringold: https://www.timringgold.com/

Music therapy: https://www.musictherapy.org/about/musictherapy/

34. Sudden Onset of OCD in Children: Is it PANS/PANDAS? with Dr. Roseann Capanna Hodge

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 34. Sudden Onset of OCD in Children: Is it PANS/PANDAS? with Dr. Roseann Capanna Hodge

I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Certified Integrative Medicine Mental Health Provider (CMHIMP), and a Board Certified Neurofeedback Provider (BCN).  She is also the founder and director of The Global Institute of Children’s Mental Health and Dr. Roseann and Associates. 

Dr. Rosean shares with us her knowledge and clinical experience in treating PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome) and PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus).

  • What should parents know about PANS/PANDAS? What are its signs and symptoms?
  • How are PANS/PANDAS diagnosed? Is there a test for PANS/PANDAS?
  • What is the treatment for PANS/PANDAS?
  • PANS/PANDAS in the school setting
  • Dr. Roseann’s book: It’s Gonna Be Ok

Links and resources:
Dr. Roseann Capanna Hodge
Book: It’s Gonna Be Ok

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 34

Dr. Roseann: Wow, I’m so excited to be here, Carrie, and have this conversation. 

Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? 

Dr. Roseann: My name is Dr. Roseanne Alanna Hodge, and this is my 30th year in mental health in supporting kids, their families and adults using only proven holistic therapies like neurofeedback, biofeedback, and of course, psychotherapy.

Carrie: Awesome. What type of training does it take to become a certified integrative medicine, mental health provider? That’s a long title. 

Dr. Roseann: Well, you know, here’s the deal. Since I literally have only been an integrative mental health provider my entire career, there was no certification. There was nothing years ago.

I started out with going to the basement in a library and looking at microfiche and doing my research that way. And then I bought literally hundreds of books about integrative care, everything from nutrition to exercise, supplements, genetics, and did a lot of that training. So when these certifications became available because if you’re a licensed mental health provider, depending on what state you’re in and in my state, Connecticut, my license allows me to do work as long as I’ve had training. And so I always try to do highest and best and get certification. So I have certification to be an integrative mental health provider. I also have the Amon certification. I’m also a certified neurofeedback provider. It really just means you’ve done extensive training in a certain area in order to guide your clients, your patients, whatever you call them to that area.

Carrie: Okay. And your specialty is working with children and adolescentsts

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. And families.

Carrie: Okay, awesome. So why did you want to come on the show today and talk with us about PANS or PANDAS? 

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. So I am somebody who specializes in PANS and PANDAS, and it is something that is dramatically on the rise.

And what is it? Is that they’re separate disorders that have the same infectious or toxic trigger. And there’s also another one in there, autoimmune encephalopathy, but PANS and PANDAS is a sudden onset of a mental health issue because the body has a misdirected immune response starts attacking itself and has an inflammatory effect, which then can produce a wide variety of psychiatric, neurocognitive and physical issues. And autoimmune encephalopathy is the same, except it’s not a sudden onset and why I want to talk about it. Like I said, it’s on the rise and infectious disease triggers are a very common source of mental health problems in the time of COVID. You know, we’re all seeing people with long holler symptoms affecting their cognition, right? Whether they’re calling a brain fog or they’re having psychiatric problems, I’ve had more than one person with psychosis as a result of COVID but there’s more than that. Right? So we have depression. Yeah, right. And, and there’s, it’s a very, very common source of anxiety, depression, EDD like- symptoms.

And I want therapists and people out there in the world to know about it. And, you know, we specialize in OCD in our center because we specialize in PANS and PANDAS. And other than one or two people who have OCD that come to us, all have a primary diagnosis of pans and pandas. So people are just not making this connection in my mission.

I’m on a mission to change the way we view and treat children’s mental health. I mean, that really is my mission, but I want people to know about this because not only am I somebody who treats and started working with people with Lyme disease almost 24, Is it 25 years ago? Somewhere, a long time ago, Carrie

And then I of course get my own child who gets Lyme disease at 22 months and develops PANS, but It is a horrible journey for any person, a child or an adult that has, you know, PANS and PANDAS, Lyme disease, because what happens is the first people that they see medical people, miss it. Then they get slopped into mental health providers who then say, “Oh, this is a mental health problem”.

They don’t understand the physical components. And you asked about like I do integrative work. I mean, What does that mean? It means that I really am studying about mind and body. And I don’t want to get the spirit out of there, but I’m really working on mind and body connections. And we are not educated enough as therapists, but parents are not educated.

They’re not getting educated that their kid could have a mental health problem. That results from something that could be medically treated, not with an anti-anxiety or antipsychotic, but with anti-inflammatory antimicrobial drugs to address what’s causing that root cause of that mental health problem.

So it’s something that’s incredibly common. One in 200 kids, the research says have it. And even though it’s called pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, it can actually now be an adult-onset. So we’re no longer just making, you know, saying it has to occur. 

Carrie: So kids who have PANS or PANDAS when they go to get mental health treatment and the parent brings them in, oftentimes I imagine they’ll be misdiagnosed as either having anxiety, OCD, ADHD. Is that right? 

Dr. Roseann: Tic disorder, separation anxiety. Yeah, absolutely OCD. I know there’s a separate category in the DSM for oppositional defiant disorder. It’s not real. it’s a symptom of another issue, So, you know, whether things are your depression and OCD on that spectrum, you have internalizers and externalizers and odd kids, or externalizers. It’s really the behavioral manifestation.

People haven’t done their due diligence to figure out what it actually is that sourcing this anger and non-compliance. Sorry people that are listening. Parents, they’re refusals. 

Carrie: Right. So how do people get diagnosed? How do they come to a place of a proper diagnosis? What does that testing process like?

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. So first I have to say whether it’s Lyme disease or PANS and PANDA, there is no single test of the diagnosis. And this is so critical because people will go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, after rabbit hole, looking for an official diagnosis. And particularly if the source is a tick-borne illness and there are hundreds of types of tick-borne illness.

We really often only hear about Lyme. Sometimes we hear about Bartonella or BBCA. They have very, very much impact to your mental health and some of your more severe psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar and there’s research to substantiate some of the things that I’m talking about.

They have a high rate of tick-borne infection. So. No single test. Okay. Are there tests civil? Of course. But as I mentioned with Lyme disease, Some people say it’s the most genetically evolved bacteria on the planet. And because it’s been around since prehistoric times they’re finding it.

They definitely found it coming over with Columbus in 1492, but people are saying prehistoric times, And so this bacteria can hide inside of a cell. So that means standard testing may not pick it up. And then there’s a whole controversy about what tests people are using and not, but in pans and pandas, there is a panel called the Cunningham panel.

It does not mean if your child is negative on that, that they don’t have PANS and PANDAS. So you have to look at clinical symptoms. And do they meet criteria, PANS and PANDAS? You know, there’s going to be a sudden onset of a problem or a deep acceleration of a preexisting condition. I like to talk about this because people really don’t understand this.

So you could have ADD. And then it’s literally off the charts, right. Or a low level of anxiety and then sudden onset of OCD. And that can be a confounding variable because people like, well, my kid always like saying chest, you know, but then literally overnight. So, and sometimes it’s really easy to see Carrie because.

People will come to me and say, oh, my kid got, the case of somebody who came to me recently, he got COVID and within 10 days he is psychosis. 

Carrie: Wow. 

Dr. Roseann: So pretty easy to make that connection. 

Carrie: Sure. That was really fast. 

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, with physicians still wanted to send them to the psych hospital and I was like, what is going on? We got to treat it. So we got him to where he needed to go. I think it’s really important that people find a provider- PANS and PANDAS trained provider. And you can do that by going, there’s a great national organization called Aspire Care where you can go to epidemic answers and they have providers listed there.

Carrie: Okay. That’s awesome. I think that that’s really great. This is a sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms, but it’s based on a physical medical problem and part of the problem that we have sometimes is we don’t always know, is something mental health-related or is something medically related. And we talked about in one of our very early episodes on the show, kind of ruling out medical conditions for mental health disorders.

What are some things that parents might see if they think that their kid might be struggling with this? what are some signs or symptoms to look out for? 

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. I want to say that if you’ve had chronic anxiety or chronic stress or long-term any type of physical or mental health problem, you’re going to have physical effects on your body.

Your body is not designed to run on empty. And when your nervous system is hyper stress-activated, you’re going to start getting nutrient depletion. You’re going to get physical problems. You may have hair loss, your thyroid might go down. So whether that’s the actual source or something that’s worsening it. Really taking a functional approach through lab work is really important. So what are signs of PANS and PANDAS? We can only connect the dots looking forward. I mean, looking back not looking forward. And so these are things that people see. So when it’s really sudden, and sometimes people will come to me.

I know when they write down a date that it started. I’ve got to consider PANS. And it wasn’t like, oh, the grandmother died, or you know, they got bullied. Whatever it was, it isn’t something traumatic that happened often when it’s really sudden overnight, and you will hear stories of this, then all of a sudden they woke up.

And this is very common OCD, very, very severe to the point where they’re doing obsessions in compulsive thinking and behaviors. So they cannot function at all. Right? So these behaviors and intrusive thoughts may be going on for hours on it. And it wasn’t present there before, or was present at a very mild level.

So the level of how it destroys your functionality is a big red flag. You also can have regressive behaviors, so you can have a loss of bladder functioning. Right? Frequent urination is one of the hallmark signs. And this can occur in adults too. It’s not just kids, a loss of handwriting or coordination is another one or a loss of academic skills, math and reading, being the two most common.

And then, you know, you’re going to, you’re going to look for things like. Vocal or motor tics, a real extreme level of anxiety. And, and, you know, I mean, as somebody, a professional who spent so much time with OCD and anxiety, these are conditions that are misunderstood. You know, most people think about OCD as only compulsive behaviors, hand-washing and whatnot.

It always starts off as intrusive thoughts, right? And often the nexuses worry it’s anxiety. And then it’s, what we call a maladaptive way of coping with anxiety. So some people are like I’m going to go and work out. I’m going to go pray. I’m going to go to my spin class with my bestie, and we’re going to socialize when I’m feeling anxious and you find these healthy ways to cope. But OCD gets in there and there’s this habituation and it can really ignite like a wildfire due to the negative reinforcement cycle in the brain. And what happens with neuro-transmitters reinforcing us, but what it looks like. And these kinds of things. If there’s sort of a wax and weaning, all of a sudden your kid might need reassurance a lot and they weren’t a kid that needed reassurance, separation anxiety can all of a sudden show up.

One of my dearest friends, her daughter was totally typical and got bitten by a tick and within 30 minutes became a different human being. She developed severe separation anxiety within 30 minutes, her mom is a psychologist. She had to quit her job, and unfortunately, she didn’t really respond to a lot of treatments.

So she wound up getting tick-borne illness and then strep on top of it. So PANDAS, it’s strep only, but PANS is any infection or toxic trigger. And most of these individuals have layers of infection. So they could have scars. Like, my max had nine co-infections from ticks, Scarlet fever, a bunch of other things, you know, it was a lot of work to clean him up.

So a variety of symptoms can result that are mental health-related and they can be quite extreme behavior can be frightening. Not to speak in a way that’s saucy or inappropriate. Because I’m a PANS’ mom, parents will come to me and say, I literally thought my kid had a demonic possession. They just flipped out, you know, just can be very, very extreme, whether it’s an internalizing where they’re scared or extreme rage externalizers and then, you know, psychosis can happen in this as well. And it can be really, really frightening. And the most recent research, early, 2021, which is in my book, it’s going to be okay. Is saying what I knew. That these kids have paradoxical reactions to psych meds.

No surprise, because the issue is inflammatory response, infection and toxins, and every psych med has a toxin load. There isn’t a psych med that doesn’t have a toxic component. And so you add that into a system that’s already flooded and overwhelmed by infections and toxins. It actually worsens things.

Carrie: They can’t tolerate the medication cause their system’s already on overload.

Dr. Roseann: Overload. And, yes, they’re anxious. But the source is not neuro-transmitter genetics. That’s what everybody wants us to believe. So this is surprising to people. When I talk about this, most people, I hope people are listening, and this is why I do this.

You know, why am I doing this? I want you to think about it, right? So if you’re a therapist, you’ve got somebody on your caseload. This is who they are, who they are. And if you’re a parent or a friend to somebody, you might be like, holy moly. That’s what happened to Becky’s kid. And you want to say, this is an episode that I want you to listen to because I learned a lot.

And that information can just really change the trajectory of not only that individual, but their entire family. I mean, this is a devastating thing we knew within like six months that my 22 month-old had Lyme disease. I already was integrative. I already am in the Northeast with the top experts in the world.

He’s 16 and I’m telling you it took 14 years. And I won’t even tell you how much money, because it is not attainable for most people, because a lot of my friends have lost their homes and marriages. It is extraordinary what we did to get him better. And that is the norm and it’s rabbit hole after rabbit hole, after rabbit hole.

And I didn’t have the same issues as other people, because most people are forced to go in network where they’re challenged you belittled. I mean, when you hear some of these stories of what happens to people, it’s frightening. I mean, I, when I talk about cases, I. Give information that hides and protects there’s identity.

I mashed them up. I like to say I’ve had people who were tied down in psych hospitals, even though their titers were showing that they had off the charts. I had one client who had the highest strep titer that the hospital has ever seen and they refused to treat her for strep.

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about what the treatment is usually like for PANS and PANDAS.

Dr. Roseann: So there’s a treatment triangle and it involves antimicrobials really getting at that infection and then anti-inflammatory treatment and then mental health. Because even though this isn’t a biochemical problem, this is very traumatic. There are mental health components, parents need a lot of support.

They may have had a totally typical kid who now is hijacking the family, you know, financially behaviourally everything, and they’re not equipped to deal with this. And so they need a lot of support for themselves on how to really kind of get through this and, you know, really set these loving limits with their child and support them through this.

It’s very, very challenging. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Parents that have children with mental health issues or physical issues need a lot of support and a lot of help. And unfortunately, a lot of times are judged is just, well, you’re a bad parent because your kid’s acting out and that’s not the case.

Dr. Roseann: And sometimes kids are called bad. I did a summit and my friend, JJ Virgin was on and Bob Hope’s granddaughter, Miranda hope is on and myself and we all have the same story. All three of our kids were kicked out of preschool. 


Carrie: Wow. 

Dr. Roseann: Yeah. And my kid was called a feral animal, by the teacher. Now what human being would tell a mother, your kids, a feral animal.

And each of us had horror stories. Right? JJ Virgin’s son was left outside in Palm Springs in September, outside the room locked out because they said he was a bad boy. 

Carrie: Wow.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, so we have to change that, that’s not okay. And one in two children in America has a physical or mental health problem. That’s ten-year-old data. That study is being updated. I can’t even imagine what it’s like right now. So we have to be way more tolerant and accepting and loving.

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about your book, Dr. Roseanne, It’s Going to be Okay, which I love that title. So tell us what it’s about. 

Dr. Roseann: Well, thank you. I love this title. So I tell every person that I work with, it’s going to be okay. And that’s the first thing that I tell them because they need to hear that because you feel alone, you feel scared, you don’t know who to trust, and you definitely don’t know what to do. And you know, people find me in all these different ways. It’s unbelievable. And I work with people in person and remote and all different ways.

So this book is going to be okay. I lay out the eight pillars, what I call hope and healing. And I show people how to reduce mental health symptoms using only proven holistic therapies. And it is all there. All science-backed ways are over 40 pages of research citations. So I want people to know this stuff that made it and heard about.

But I can feel comfortable that they’re safe. I can try these out and as overwhelmed as we feel as parents in general, but when you have a kid who struggles, you feel even more overwhelmed, I encourage parents to get this book. Start with one thing. And when we do one small action consistently, it can create a lot of change.

And so I’m really, really excited. This is truly the 30 years worth my work in one book. And I really want parents to know it’s going to be okay and show them how to do it. 

Carrie: Awesome. Awesome. So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope. So a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person.


Dr. Roseann: Yeah. Well, you know, when you ask me this question, it’s actually hard for me to answer because I feel very connected to God. And so when I struggle in that moment and being a special needs, mom, times two, I have learned. That I have to be in the moment and really try to appreciate the moment. And so I think that I’m most connected when I’m with my kids and I am actually having fun and trying to laugh, not trying to laugh, laughing, just being there.

And so I have the blessing of having a million moments like that every day, being present and connected and having a lot of love around you. 

Carrie: Okay. Okay. Hey, so every day, moments of hope for you, with your family.

Dr. Roseann: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I’m so lucky that I’m able to bring hope to people because at a time when I feel that people have the lowest level of hope and trust I’ve ever seen in these 30 years, it’s a conversation that I’m starting wherever I go, which is why I start off by saying it’s going to be okay, because people need to hear that like they’re feeling overwhelmed and out of hope. And I just think taking the moment to be extra kind to anybody who’s in your presence just goes a long way. And I know it sounds really hokey, but people are so lonely and disconnected and scared very much so. And I think they were before the pandemic and the pandemic has really thrown some fuel on this fire.

Carrie: Yes, I would definitely agree with that for sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today. 

Dr. Roseann: Thank you for having this conversation. And if you think that, you know, your child has PANS or PANDAS, find a provider. I say this wherever I am, nobody ever regrets getting help. The only regret is when they don’t. 

Carrie: I knew a little bit about PANDAS from my previous work with children. However, I’ve found this interview to be very informative in terms of thinking about, we always have to look at the holistic picture of anyone’s health, whether that’s a child or adult, how are they impacted physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And if you’re looking at things from a holistic lens, instead of only being treating one or the other, usually something ends up missing in that picture. Unfortunately just with the way our current medical system is often doctors and counselors and psychiatrists aren’t always communicating together in the best possible way.

So it’s important for parents to really be the best advocate for their children in providing the linkage between some of those areas. 

________________________________

I wanted to announce to you all that our next free webinar for hope for anxiety and OCD is going to be sometime, probably in mid-September. I would love topic suggestions for this webinar.

What would you like to dive into a little bit deeper? What would you like to have questions answered on about? So there’ll be a very short, you know, 30 or 45 minutes of teaching for the webinar. And then I want to leave time at the end for questions. So if there’s something that you would like to see some helpful teaching on and be able to ask some questions, feel free to contact me through our website, www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.Thank you so much for listening. 

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.

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

31. Using the Gospel to Overcome Negative Self-talk with John Stange

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 31. Using the Gospel to Overcome Negative Self-talk with John Stange

I had the privilege of interviewing John Stange, a lead pastor, professor, coach, counselor, certified speaker and author. John has written several books and his recent one is called “Dwell On These Things.”

Pastor John Stange shares with us his struggles with anxiety and his great wisdom and insight on overcoming negative self-talk through looking at God’s perspective toward us. We also talked about dealing with perfectionism as I am also a recovering perfectionist. 

  • John Stange’s personal journey through anxiety, having sleepless nights, negative self-talk and excessive worries about “what if’s.”
  • Analyzing the root of his anxiety and preaching the truth of the gospel to his own heart
  • Factors that make people who are serving the ministry quit their role after a short period of time
  • “Why walk a defeated life when Christ already secured victory over our sins?”
  • Questions to ask yourself if you really want to understand Bible scriptures
  • Helpful concepts about seeing yourself through God’s eyes based on John Stange’s book, “Dwell On These Things”

Links and Resources:

John StangeDesire JesusDwell On These Things 

Support the show

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 31

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 31.  Today’s episode is with John Stange who is a pastor and author. He’s recently written a book called Dwell On These Things based on Philippians 4:8. John has some great wisdom and insight into overcoming negative self-talk and seeing ourselves the way that God sees us.

So let’s dive right in. 

Carrie: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. 

Pastor John: Well, happy to be here, glad to be with you.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Pastor John: My name is John Stange. I have been in full-time pastoral ministry for 23 years and my wife and I have four children. Two are in college, two are in high school. And in the midst of my ministry, serving as a pastor I’ve also gotten quite involved in podcasting and writing and have really been pursuing both of those as avenues where I really have a great opportunity to hopefully encourage people in their faith and hopefully help in a variety of ways. But that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my time in addition to my service to the church and my ministry, just to my family. 

Carrie: One thing that I’ve found really interesting about you in my research is that while you do have a degree in the Bible, you also have a master’s degree in psychology. How did that process develop? 

Pastor John: Well, one of the things that I noticed when I became a pastor is that a lot of your preparation to become a pastor trains you to teach and preach the Bible and teach and preach theology. And that’s very helpful, but there are two other aspects to your role as a pastor that you really need to figure out a way to invest in one is leadership. So I spent a lot of time just studying leaders and going to leadership training and reading books on leadership and really invested in that. But then the other thing that is typically asked of you is that you be involved in a lot of counseling. And so when I was deciding what to do for a master’s, I decided to pursue counseling and psychology because so much of my task as a pastor involves counseling.

And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to discover that over the course of this past year in particular, I had more counseling than at any other time in my ministry. To the point where I actually had somebody tally up in one given week how much time I was spending on counseling when things were at their worst. And they said a full 29 hours of my week is being spent just counseling. In addition to all the other things that you have to do. So I actually had to figure out a way to balance that a little bit better because it was becoming quite excessive, but that is definitely a role that pastors are asked to actually step in and help out with. And so I wanted to make sure I did it well. And when I got my master’s, I thought, you know what? I’m going to pursue counseling, psychology. Learn these tasks and learn these skills so that I could serve our church even better, hopefully.

Carrie: I think that’s an important point because you can be a really great teacher and lack people skills and being a pastor, you have to find that balance between being able to communicate the word of God and also being able to relate and lead people, like you just talked about.

Pastor John: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I’ve seen that a lot where people are really skilled in a particular task, or they have a lot of knowledge in a particular area, but they really struggle to take that from their brain to another life. And because that relational piece seems to be missing, so yeah, I agree.

Carrie: I’ve also interviewed a few people on the show who started out as pastors and ended up becoming therapists. And those stories are really interesting as well as kind of like an outflow of just the ministry that they were doing. 

Pastor John: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. That’s great. 

Carrie: We’re talking about anxiety today and incorporating that with spirituality, obviously. And I’m curious about your particular struggles with anxiety. 

Pastor John: Yeah, it’s interesting because I don’t know that at one season of my life, I would have really thought of myself as being particularly anxious. In some respects, I tend to think I’m an easygoing person. And then as life went on and I took on more responsibilities and as I was trying to lead my household well and try to lead our church well, I started to notice seasons where I would really struggle to sleep. 

I’m not a great sleeper to begin with. So I’m just going to confess that I think there’s something biological there that factors into that, but it was even worse than normal. And I can remember certain times where I would just find myself looking out the window of my bedroom, just looking outside, wondering in my mind why can’t I sleep.

And then as I try to lay my head down on the pillow, I would be thinking about all these what-if scenarios. What if this happens with your family or what if this happens with the church or what if this happens with your finances, all sorts of things. And I realized that I was becoming a rather anxious person.

I don’t know that I always demonstrated that to other people, but within my own mind. In fact, I actually think I tried to make a pretty strong effort to not demonstrate that to other people just to kind of portray that everything was fine. But in my own mind, I have to admit to you I really have gone through seasons where I felt particularly anxious and kind of went on a journey to try and figure out what’s at the root of this and what can I do that would be actually be helpful so that this doesn’t become such a dominant feature in my life.

If I’m going to be doing the things that I think God’s called me to do, I can’t be paralyzed by anxiety constantly. And I can’t give this full sway over myself. So I need to call it out into the light and I need to do something that’s going to actually help me overcome it.

Carrie: What was that process like for you? 

Pastor John: I had to kind of analyze what was at the root of it at first. And what I noticed about myself is that I was trying to control too many things, and I was trying to do too many things without help. And I don’t know if that was a pride issue. I think that’s part of it. I, you know, I think certainly it was a pride issue in some respects, but I also think it comes from this thought of not wanting to burden other people with your problems.

And then also just this thought that sometimes you get in your mind when you’re trying to lead, this is your responsibility. So you just think, look, this is my job. I have to handle this. I can’t give this to somebody else. I just have to do it. Right. It’s just my role. And so the first thing I needed to do was just figure out what was at the root of this.

And again, it was just control issues and a desire not to burden other people and just, you know, the burdens that come from leadership. But the solution for me was multifaceted. And a lot of these things I think come back to preaching the gospel to your heart, where sometimes if you’re trying to do too much, it’s almost like you’re trying to take Christ’s job and do it instead of relying on him to be the strength that we need. And so it was almost like a works-based false gospel that I was starting to preach to my heart that can be very unhealthy. And when I phrased it that way in my mind, my theological triggers went off and said, “Wait a second. You can’t preach something false to your own heart. You have to stop this.” And so I thought, all right, well, what does it look like to actually apply the truth of the gospel to my own heart? What does it look like to be content in Christ and to trust him to do the things that I can’t do and to rest in the fact that he is perfect? I am not, and I’m fine with that.

And so this was part of the journey that I went on, but when I started analyzing that seeing what was at the root and then preaching the truth of the gospel to my heart, that really made a huge difference. 

Carrie: I can really relate to that because I started this podcast and I was doing entirely too much. And I ended up hiring an assistant this year and it was super scary in the beginning.

Just the sense of like, “Okay. I’m like, yes, it’s a great thing that I have help, but I’m also like having to let go of control of things that I’ve been doing and what’s going to happen if I start letting go of that control and somebody else is gonna take over, and I think we do that with God so much in our own lives. We try to take control over things that we have no control over, even things like our own health like I’m up at night worrying about all of these things that could be happening to me are going on. And instead of saying, okay, I don’t have control over this. God loves me. He cares about me. He’s for me.

And I think that’s what you’re talking about in terms of having a theology of how God sees us. And really speaking that into ourselves is so important. 

Pastor John: Yeah, exactly. I agree. A hundred percent. 

Carrie: So, talk to us about negative self-talk because I think a lot of people really struggle with that. And what have you found to be helpful in your life?

Pastor John: There’s a variety of things that I have found helpful. And one of the things that I’ve noticed that is helpful for me is to know that I’m not the only person that wrestles with this. So when you serve in a public role, right now you’re putting yourself out there publicly doing a podcast, right?

So you’re just basically, you’re subjecting yourself to the opinions of others. And that could be a challenging task to do no matter what role you do it in. So you can imagine when I became a pastor I was subjecting myself to the opinions of many, many people and my opinion being sometimes the harshest and frequently, I would find myself preparing a message.

So I’ll use a sermon as an example. I’d prepare a message. I’d have it all straight in my head. I’d get up and I’d preach it. And then afterwards I’d have this thought that it didn’t go as well as I thought, or maybe the feedback I got on it wasn’t exactly what I was anticipating. And I would find myself spending the rest of Sunday beating myself up over perceived weaknesses in my presentation or times when I tripped over my words or ways that I could have said something better or something that I forgot to share that I meant to share or someone’s reaction that I misinterpreted or whatever it may be. And I just have all these thoughts going through my mind. Just the imperfections of what I had just shared and all this negative self-talk about, oh, why can’t you be as good of a speaker as this individual or that individual. And that’s a very unhealthy thing to start drilling into your mind. And I would suspect that’s probably one of the contributors to a lot of people who serve in public ministry roles quitting after a short period of time because they just spent a lot of time in self-accusation instead of refreshing their heart with the truth of the gospel and preaching the same message to their own heart that they just preached to their congregation. And eventually, I needed to get to the spot where I started to see the opportunities that I was being given to speak or to lead as opportunities to help people, not opportunities to look good while you’re helping people. And what I mean by that is this: Yeah it was a big change in my mind. I thought I used to wrestle with after I would preach a sermon, or lead a meeting, or whatever it may be. “How did you look doing that? Did you do okay?” And it was basically “how did you look doing it?” And then somewhere along the way, the Lord helped me to flip that in my mind to say, “did you help somebody?” And judge what I had just done by whether or not I was seeking to glorify God and help people. And when that became the measuring stick that really helped me with probably the major area of negative self-talk that I was wrestling with. Just trying to understand what it looks like to glorify God and help people Instead of worrying about how I looked while I was trying to do it.

Carrie: I think that’s been probably one of the greatest gifts that this podcast has ever given to me, just like, you know, through the Lord’s work, it’s showing me that it doesn’t have to be perfect to help people and I consider myself a recovering perfectionist. So I know that I have to go back and listen to these episodes and we joked. Before I hit record, there was a squeaky chair in one of them and it drove me crazy like I can hear that chair. And probably other people are listening to this in their car or they’re in the bathroom getting ready in the morning and they don’t care. You know, they’re probably not even noticing that. And somebody is going to be really blessed by that episode. But here I am and all I’m focused on is that annoying chair in the background.

Pastor John: Right. Instead of thinking of all the ways that you’re producing helpful content, you’re just hearing that chair that needs a little grease or a little oil.

Carrie: Right. So now I’m like, you know what? It goes out. There’s some people that like it and it’s helping some people and that’s all it really matters and it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to benefit other people. So that has been an unexpected gift, I guess, of going through this process.

You actually were really gracious enough to send me a copy of your book, “Dwell on these things” and I am really enjoying it. So I appreciate you for writing it, and you encourage readers to dwell on 31 different truths in God’s word. It’s written a little bit like a devotional, right? To kind of read one each day.

Pastor John: Yeah, it could be used that way for sure. Yeah. I wanted it to be useful in that way. If someone wanted to use the chapters in that kind of fashion, they definitely could. 

Carrie: So would you be willing to share a few of these with us and how they can transform our thinking and self-talk. 

Pastor John: Sure. There’s a variety of things that are mentioned in the book that kind of point us to things that the Lord is trying to communicate to us that sometimes we forget to communicate to ourselves, or we forget to repeat to ourselves after he’s communicated them. And so when you look through the book, you’ll see on day one, we talk about the fact that you are loved more deeply than you realize, and we start off the book with that concept because we want that to be a baseline for what we’re thinking about as we start to adopt God’s perspective toward us as our perspective toward us, as well as we work through the book, we talk about the blessing of walking by faith rather than by sight to experience greater joy.

I think a lot of times we think that there are all sorts of things we need to see ahead of time or know ahead of time to be able to actually experience contentment in life. But scripture shows us that we can walk by faith. We don’t have to walk by sight If we’re going to experience the greater joy that the Lord wants us to have.

I think something else that’s in the book that is most certainly a helpful concept for any of us. If we’re feeling anxious or just worried about a variety of things is the fact that scripture encourages us to have hearts that are ruled by the peace of Christ. And so when we get into the third section of the book that we talk about letting your heart be ruled by the peace of Christ.  And I can tell you just from experience, there are all sorts of things that I have tried to soothe my heart within this world or all sorts of things that I have told myself, this will bring you peace if you just acquire this or achieve this or obtain this or whatever it may be. And there’s nothing this world offers me that has ever produced lasting peace in my mind or in my life.

And when you look at what scripture teaches us, scripture teaches us that we can let our hearts be ruled by the peace of Christ. And when his peace is ruling in our heart, we’re actually being ruled or led by something that’s everlasting, not something that’s temporary, not something that’s just here for a moment and then goes away.

Some of the chapters in the book talk about ways in which we can live out the things that the Lord has taught to us. And so there’s a chapter where we talk a lot about giving grace to those around you. And that can be a very helpful thing for us internally as well, because we start to realize that we don’t have to demand perfection from ourselves. And we don’t have to demand perfection from others. And as recipients of the grace of God, we can demonstrate the grace of God to other people. And I love what scripture tells us in the book of acts, where it reminds us that Christ taught that it’s better to give than it is to receive.

And in a moment like that, where you’re giving grace to somebody else. I think we even have the opportunity to see how that plays out where just giving grace to somebody that ends up being a blessing in our own life and in our own heart. So those are some of the concepts. There’s 31 different concepts that we focus on in the book, but those are just a few of them-just a sample of some of the things that are in the book that I truly hope will be helpful to others. If they’re trying to develop a perspective of what does it look like to actually talk to yourself like God talks to you and repeat a message to your heart that actually lines up with the truth of his gospel. 

Carrie: That’s good. I know that in my counseling practice specifically, I work with a lot of people who have OCD sometimes like there’s a form of OCD called scrupulosity. And we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s where you have all of these intrusive thoughts about God. You know, maybe God is angry at me. Maybe I’ve sinned. Maybe I’m going to hell, even though I know that I’m saved, those types of things people tend to ruminate on. And a lot of times people I work with are somewhat spiritually confused because they’ve sought out teachings to try to soothe some of this from a variety of different sources. You know, this person says you can lose your salvation. This person says you can’t lose your salvation. How do I know who God really is? And I know a lot of times people say, “okay, well in order to know God read the Bible that’s his word that’s his love letter to you.” How do we form this healthy theology of an understanding of who God is if there are so many different teachings that are saying are based on scripture. 

Pastor John: Yeah, that could be a tough thing for a new Christian, in particular, to try to discern. Thankfully we have the internal witness of the holy spirit and he points us in the direction of truth. So I believe that any suggestion I give needs to come under the fact that the holy spirit will actively point us in the direction of truth. I do believe he does that. So I would encourage anyone that’s really wrestling with that to just begin with prayer and trust the holy spirit to lead you in the direction of truth. And then as we’re looking at scripture, I think it’s also helpful to know that when you’re reading through the Bible if you really want to understand the Bible, you need to ask the question, what does this section have to do with Jesus? Or maybe I could say it this way: how is this portion of scripture trying to point me to Christ?

So if I’m in the book of Genesis, I need to be asking that question. If I’m in the Psalms, I need to be asking that question, but I mean the gospels or the letters of Paul or the general letters or the book of revelation, the whole thing is trying to point our minds to Christ. And specifically, when you look throughout scripture, you see the message of redemption as the Lord is trying to redeem lost humanity. And he’s trying to redeem fallen creation, right? Like it’s all, there’s this message of redemption all throughout. And so that points us to the gospel and the gospel is if you want to summarize the gospel, you could summarize it this way. It’s the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.

And so in Christ lived the perfect life that we could never live. He lived that on our behalf. He walked a mile in our shoes. He’s our merciful sympathetic high priest. He knows all details of all things, and he actually walked it and lived it. And he did it perfectly without sin. And then in his death, he paid for our sin.

He took our sin upon himself so that ultimately we could be justified so that we could be declared righteous because he who knew no sin became sin for us. And then in his resurrection, he defeated the power of sin, the power of Satan. And the power of death. And he shares that victory with all of us who believe in him with anyone who trusts in him.

So the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, I think it all comes back to that. So now, you know, let’s think about some issues that sometimes we deal with and let’s plug it into that metric. If I’m dealing with, and we were just joking a few moments ago about perfectionism and the desire to kind of get everything right.

You know, whether the chair’s squeaking or whether all the words we say are exactly right, or whatever it may be. We deal with perfectionism. Well, let’s plug that into the gospel. Well, scripture tells us that we are not perfect. But Jesus is, and he came to live the perfect life for us because we couldn’t do it, which tells me I need to stop pressuring myself to be perfect because I’m not perfect.

And if I’m pressuring myself to be perfect, I’m preaching a false gospel to my heart because Christ came to this earth and was perfect for me because in my own strength I couldn’t be perfect. And so, you know, so that’s one element of how I think preaching the gospel to our hearts. Actually helps and it helps point us in the right direction. But then when you get to issues like Christ’s death, you know, I think sometimes we think that we have to be some sort of sacrificial martyr who can’t ask for help or can’t ask for assistance that we need to somehow, you know, die for our own sin or suffer for our own center, whatever it may be. And yet Jesus came to this earth to die in our place because we couldn’t die for our own sin ultimately, and have any sort of redemptive aspect come out of that.

And so Jesus who is perfect died in our place. And then scripture tells us that he rose from the grave. He defeated sin, Satan, and death. And so that victory gets shared with me because I trust in him. He’s already secured that victory. So what sense does it make for me to walk a defeated life or to just spend all this time telling myself how I’m defeated in this area or this area, or this area? Christ already secured victory over my sin Christ secured victory over my faulty thing.

He secured victory over death. I don’t even need to live in the fear of death because he’s already secured victory over it. He defeated death and even the deception of Satan or the accusation of Satan scripture tells us Satan loves to accuse God’s people. And I think sometimes we repeat Satan’s accusations in our own minds, almost like we’re trying to do his job for him. And that comes right back to the resurrection as well because Christ secured victory over sin, Satan, and death. And so Satan is defeated. So I don’t need to act like Satan is victorious. He’s been defeated. And so for me, it comes right back to preaching the gospel to my heart and understanding that the message of the gospel is woven all throughout scripture.

And if someone teaches something that does not line up with the truth of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, then that gives me a good metric to know how I can actually filter that out and not welcome that into my thinking. 

Carrie: That was a lot. That was good though. It was a lot. I was really trying to filter in thinking through some of the things that we just talked about like is God mad at me? Well, you know, God loves you. God loves you. He sent his son to die for you. There’s no greater love than that. Nobody else is going to be out here giving their life for you. 

Pastor John: Right. When you look theologically, what scripture says, it says, you know, prior to coming to faith in Christ, we were under the wrath of God, right?

We were like, yes, you were under the wrath of God. It speaks of that in the book of Ephesians. Okay. But then Christ came to this earth and took the wrath of the father upon himself so that we could become objects of mercy. Instead of objects of wrath. And so scripture actually says, you’re an object of mercy now. So if scripture is telling me I’m an object of mercy and that Christ already took the wrath of the father upon himself, then why don’t I just believe what it says instead of just trying to make it up. You know, it’s like, we’re trying to make up the opposite of what scripture says because we want to make ourselves feel bad sometimes.

And it’s like, let’s not torture yourself. You know, just believe what it says and believe what he is. 

Carrie: Or sometimes we try to take over maybe the role of the holy spirit and almost like over-convict ourselves. Sometimes people can air on one side or the other, right. Then they’re never open to correction or conviction. But then on the other side, it’s like, let me pick apart and confess every single thing I’ve done. Even the things that I know I’m already forgiven for. I keep bringing up the past sins over and over and over again. And we’re just really torturing ourselves at that point. 

Pastor John: Yeah. You’re absolutely right.

Yeah. We’re prone to extremes. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So tell us where people can find “Dwell on these things”.

Pastor John: “Dwell on these things” can be found literally anywhere. So you’ll be able to find it on Amazon. You’ll be able to find it at Barnes and noble. You’ll be able to find it pretty much any store you go to and which I’m really excited about the wide release that the book is receiving. But if you’d also like to find out some more information about it, or if people would like to read the first three chapters for free and just kind of see if it’s for them, just go to my website: desireJesus.com and you can read the first three chapters of the book right there on the website for free.

The publisher gave me permission to be able to post that. And so that’s right there. You’ll see a link to it right on the front page of the website. 

Carrie: That’s great. And we’ll put a link in the show notes too. So since our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Pastor John: Certainly. So in 2008, my wife and I feel like the Lord was calling us to move to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which was a couple of hours south of where we were living up in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania. And we felt like the Lord was leading us to move here and replant a church that was just about to close down.

And you know, shut its doors forever. And so we moved here to get involved in church planting, church revitalization. And I remember at the time being very convinced that the Lord had called us to do that, but that doesn’t come with any guarantees. So when you’re moving to a new area, you’re not certain if you’re going to be able to connect with people. And I believe that the Lord was paving a way for us to do so. And in my heart, I did believe that it was all going to work. But I remember at one point very, very early in the process, this was just a couple of days or a couple of weeks, I guess I should say before we moved down to this area, I agreed to do a wedding down in this area, in the building that we were going to use. So in the church building. And I remember at that point, there weren’t really very many people that were part of the church. There were just about six or so active people that had been part of the church that hung on to help us plant the new church. And I remember as the wedding was about to get underway, I started watching people pull into the parking lot and I saw one car pull in and another car pull in and another car pull in and before I knew it, the parking lot was filled and I thought, wow, this is exciting to see for this wedding. I’m just hopeful that the day comes when we have worship services here, that people will actually become part of this church, that we actually have the opportunity to build a church. And I just remember looking out at that full parking lot and just praying to the Lord, just a very simple prayer.

I just prayed, Lord, may it be so. May this be the type of thing that we get to see again when this church really gets underway, not just for a special event, but for the believers gathering together for worship gathering together on a Sunday morning gathering together mid-week whatever, whatever the Lord willed. And so I just remember having filled with the hope of Christ in that moment. And just a confidence that the Lord was going to help facilitate that even though I was certainly tempted to drift toward anxiety in that process because it was certainly a big step of faith for our family to come and, and move to a new area and try and get the church going.

But I remember sometime after that, a few years after that, when the parking lot really was filling up on Sunday mornings and looking at that in my mind, coming right back to standing on that porch and thinking, all right, Lord, this is wonderful. You answered that prayer. You filled us with your hope.

You gave us confidence in you. And now we get to see with our eyes, the type of things that we were seeing by faith for the past several years. And that was a real blessing to me. It was confirmation that when the Lord leads you in a particular direction, it’s best to just obey because he’s got the details already figured out. And sometimes he asks us to make big steps of faith. And so we just go and we get to see what he has planned on the other side of that step. 

Carrie: It’s so beautiful when you’re able to just look back and see how far the Lord has brought you in a particular area and things, and all the challenges that there were, I’m sure along the ways of like, are we ever going to be able to do this? Is this ever going to grow? That’s awesome. 

Pastor John: Yeah. You’re right. Big challenges. 

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for being on the show and talking with us about preaching the gospel to our hearts. I think it’s been a great conversation. 

Pastor John: Well, Carrie, thanks so much for having me on. It’s been a real pleasure.

_____________________________________

I felt like we had a little bit of therapy on myself today on this episode, talking about my perfectionism and difficulty letting go of responsibilities and delegating them to my VA. In all seriousness, I really needed those reminders today that Jesus has overcome sin, death. Nothing is too difficult for him.

As I like to remind myself on a regular basis, God is way bigger than my problem. So allow that to encourage you today. If you would like to stay up to date with what’s going on on the podcast, you can join our email list at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening. 

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of by the world counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. 

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

30. Developing Self Awareness with Lola Sodunke

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 30. Developing Self Awareness with Lola Sodunke

In this episode, Lola Sodunke of Joy In Purpose Podcast shares her wisdom and insights about self-awareness and how it can lead to a greater connection with God.

By listening to our conversation, you will learn about:

  • Self-awareness and its importance
  • Setting boundaries and learning your values and beliefs 
  • Ways you can become self-aware as a Christian 
  • Involving God in your self-awareness process

Links and Resources:

Lola Sodunke, MA
Joy in Purpose

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Transcript of Episode 31

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 30. Today, I got the opportunity to sit down with Lola Sodunke where she talks to us about self-awareness. She did a great job incorporating how God is involved in our self-awareness process as Christians and our Christian community that we’re around. I really hope this interview blesses you today.

Carrie: Lola, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lola: First of all, thank you for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be a part of your, this episode is a little bit about myself. So I will say that I am a child of a Nigerian immigrant. So I came to the United States with my parents.

I came with my parents. I was 12 years old. So I have what will be considered a bi-cultural upbringing. So being Nigerian and living in the United States, I am a fourth-year doctoral student in a counseling psychology program. It’s been an amazing experience. I’ve gotten opportunities to work with clients. We’re dealing with depression, anxiety, trauma. I’ve also got into the experience of administering psychological assessments to understand client’s strengths and weaknesses, and then potential problems and cognition or emotional reactivity. And most importantly, I really like administering psychological assessments because it also helps inform treatment recommendations. 

I’m very passionate about the field of psychology. So I like doing community outreach at my church and just providing opportunities for people to ask questions and provide psycho-education and mental health topics. 

Carrie: Awesome. That sounds really good. So are you hoping once you get your doctorate to focus on psychological testing? 

Lola: Yeah, I would like to because I really like how we can integrate that. Like I said with treatment recommendations and even for the older population, it’s helpful for assessing diagnosis for dementia, for the different types of dementia.

Sometimes some people have TBI traumatic brain injury to see where they’re at and then make sure to make recommendations to help improve their quality of life. 

Carrie: Right. On one of our first five episodes, we talked about assessment and about the importance of that and the difference between anxiety and OCD. Why it’s important to differentiate those in terms of getting the treatment and help and support that people need.

So that’s really awesome that you’re going to be contributing to that. Today, we’re talking about self-awareness, which I guess is a big concept. So how do you define that? 

Lola: Yeah, it is a big concept. I guess for some people it could be overwhelming. I became passionate about this topic because I realized how people become sufferers wherein therapy you see that light bulb moment.

I also noticed that it can also be a reason why people come to therapy when they realize some things about themselves that they would like to change. So self-awareness is a skill that we can work on. It’s basically a way to be able to understand yourself, understand other people, and understand how other people view you.

So when there’s something called internal self-awareness, think about being able to look at your personality. So looking at yourself as objectively as you can. Even though we have our own blind spots and biases, knowing your strengths, your weaknesses, your thoughts, your beliefs, your motivations. What emotions do you experience on most days?

Are you still one that is generally sad? Always anxious. Sometimes we just go through life and we’re just going. Self-awareness allows you to be able to pay attention to different parts of your life. You can focus on my feeling fitness-wise. How am I doing psychologically with my relationships, with finances, with friends, if you have kids with your kids, with your spouse.

So self-awareness is being able to look at yourself as objectively as you can. There’s also something called external self-awareness. Like I was saying earlier, external self-awareness is how other people feel about you. As much as some people might say, they don’t care what other people think. We also know that no matter how smart you are, if you don’t have a good social network, you’re not going to progress much in life.

You might be good at your job, but if you don’t have a good relationship, they don’t see you as a good leader, you might not get promoted in your job. So I’m not talking about when people just don’t like you because they don’t like you, but where people and we’re tribal, so we are made for human connection and social connection.

So it’s important to also know not to be hyper-focused on it to also to have people view you. Are you telling that maybe you just sit there and you’re smiling, but then you think you’re having a good day? So you’re just being yourself and throughout the day, people are like, are you upset? Are you okay? Because they’re interpreting your body language and your facial expression is different. In your mind, you’re happy. You might even think I thought I was smiling. Other people see it as if you’re frowning. Self-awareness, there are two components to it. How you see yourself and also other people see you. There’s a healthy balance and there’s an overboard, or sometimes you could be in a group in a social group where the social norm is gossiping, but then internally your values telling you that you don’t gossip.

You know that you don’t fit in with that crowd so you don’t associate yourself to that. Sometimes there’s a social norm, there’s a social group and it’s toxic. So being able to also navigate your own beliefs, your own values, and then navigating the values of this other external social group and seeing does it align with you?

Because sometimes some people they’re part of a group and because they’re so self-aware of the group and they want to please the group. They’ll just go along with the group. So there’ll be the one there’ll be gossipy, but internally it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t align or doesn’t align with their values.

So it’s important to know where you stand with how you view yourself and also how you view other people. And to some extent, how they view you. It’s important. 

Carrie: I agree with that. Let’s kind of break that down a little bit. I think one of the things that we learned from this pandemic was that in America we’re such a go, go society.

A lot of times we don’t take the time to just sit and maybe self-reflect and check-in with ourselves. How am I actually doing? Am I stressed right now? What are the signs that I’m stressed right now? How does that manifest in my body? And then I think too about what you said about other people and how they perceive you.

One of the things I had to learn earlier on in my life was that I have a thinking face. And that my thinking face really disconnects me from the people that are around me. And actually, they think that I’m mad, but I’m not mad. I’m just really lost and kind of deep in thought. And that actually inhibited some of my early client work. Someone came out with me and was able to give me some feedback on my session and found that was really helpful. Another friend from church who said, “you know, I wondered when I first met you if you ever smiled.” So then it was my effort really like, I probably need to smile more, especially when I’m around other people.”

And it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, but that was really how I was perceived. And maybe I think maybe I wasn’t fully as happy as I am now, but I wouldn’t say necessarily that I was in a depressed state or anything of that nature, but people could have perceived me that way. And I think this is important in terms of anxiety and OCD.

Oftentimes we also have misnomers about how other people see us like, “Oh, well, those people think I’m a bother” or “I really shouldn’t speak up here because then they’re going to see me as too aggressive or mean.” Oftentimes that’s not even how people are perceiving the situation. If I set a boundary, people are going to think that I’m mean. That may be true in your family system, but it may not be true in the larger societal context, which is kind of what you were saying there a little bit earlier.

Lola: Absolutely. This is why it’s important to know your own values and your own beliefs because it’s not just about other people. First, it starts with you.

What do you value? What are your own beliefs? How do you see yourself? What is important to you? I gave an example earlier about gossiping. If gossiping is not something that you want to engage in, even if you are in a group of people and that’s what they do, they might not like you but you know that’s not something that I want to do. It’s the same with setting boundaries.

What is the most important thing to you? It’s important that I go to bed at a certain time. So you stick with that time. Sometimes you think that other people are going to be upset, but then you also have to give yourself time to stick to that boundary. To really see that other people are upset or maybe they were just using you and monopolizing your time.

I just have to realize I have to let certain people go. You have to have a balance in what do I think of myself? How do I view myself? How do I want to be in this world? And how do I want other people to see me? It can be tricky and it takes time. This is what I encourage people to do on their own. And when they’re still having issues with what they to seek the help of a therapist. We are always objective. And sometimes it was saying it out loud “I like to go to about a certain time.” And then Frank always likes to talk till midnight. After seeing it, I realized my boundaries are important for my own well-being and engaging in that. Another example that you give that was really helpful was you talked about how a client shared something with you or a friendship or something with you.

So those are like two people that their opinion was important. If a friend from church that they’ve already known you for a while. They know you’re a good person. I know they’re saying something to you. So you’re able to take it in and say, okay, they might be right about this. And this is not what I’m thinking. So I can change it. We want our client to know that, okay, this is my thinking face. It’s not about you. I’m thinking. I’m processing. Maybe thinking of the next question to ask you and things like that. Also, the people that we talked to that this feedback confirms is also important. I can help us to navigate where we want to make the changes and what changes we want to make.

Carrie: Right. Is this person giving me feedback because they’re trying to help me? And it helped me improve as a person or are they trying to tear me down or make me kind of go the path that they want me to go on. I think those are helpful questions for us to ask when we’re receiving any kind of constructive criticism.

I’m curious for you to put kind of like a spiritual lens over this. How do ourselves as Christians becoming more self-aware? Do you feel like that leads us to greater connectivity with God? 

Lola: You know what I think that’s a great question. I don’t think that you should go into self-awareness and leave God out of it. As a matter of fact when people ask me how do they develop self-awareness? I say it’s a skill that can be developed. Start in your prayer time. Ask God to open your heart to what he would like for you to change about yourself. Also, some of us are only focused on the negative. We don’t even recognize our strengths.

So going to a prayerfully where you take your paper, your journal, your pen, and even start with your strengths. Ask him to open your eyes. What are my strengths? Because some of us, we pick ourselves apart with our anxiety, with our worry that we don’t even know what we’re good at. So look what your strengths are. 

What are the things that other people have said that you’re good at? Write down your strengths. What are your weaknesses? I need them to address those weaknesses because sometimes I put focus on our weaknesses. It’s like there’s grace. Even start with one thing at a time.

What are scriptures that are aligned with the thing that you’re trying to change, and just also invite God into it. Invite your Christian circle, your support group into it. And also, like I said, go to someone that you trust. It’s easier for some people to be more self-aware than others.

So sometimes we have to ask a friend, trust a friend, not just anybody. Trust a family member. And if you’re someone that you feel like you’re sensitive to criticism, tell them that so that they can use that in their feedback to you. “I’m really nervous, but I want to grow. I don’t want to stay the same.”

What are some things that I can change? What are my strengths? my weaknesses? You tell me one strength. Tell me one weakness. If you feel like you’re going to be overwhelmed. You can also ask them what are ways that you think I can change.  How can you hold me accountable? So, this is why we can rely on our brothers and sisters in Christ. Whatever you want to share, whatever you’re working on, they can hold you accountable and be prayerful about this. Sometimes you’re focused on one thing. Maybe on giving back to other people. Maybe you’re someone that has internal self-awareness, you’re good there, but when it comes to reaching out to other people, making sure that you’re being kind, you’re being patient, you show other people grace. Maybe that’s something that God wants you to work on. So I would say be prayerful as you’re navigating stuff for when it’s and what to work on and also invite your brothers and sisters in Christ to hold you accountable. Someone that you trust, that you have a relationship with that you trust. Be gentle on yourself. Like I said, you can start with one strength and one weakness. We’re all working progress. So don’t feel like, “Oh my goodness. I have all these weaknesses.” Many of us have a lot of weaknesses and just take it one step at a time.

Carrie: I absolutely agree with that because I think some of the clients that I work with have multiple issues or multiple diagnoses. They have a lot of stuff that they’re working with. And so always starting small. The small changes in our lives and the slow and steady progress. That’s going to be the most sustainable.

But I like what you said really about allowing God to reveal those things to us in prayer in terms of behaviors that we might need to change in our lives. Oftentimes just having clients be able to develop the tolerance to sit with things that are difficult is really important. Sometimes we’re in a lot of pain and we use unhealthy ways to get out of it, whether that’s stuffing, whether it’s exploding.

Whether it’s just complete avoidance like I’m going to pretend like that’s not actually there. Do you feel like maybe knowing some of those things, the ways that we get out of self-awareness, do you think that that’s helpful for us as well? 

Lola: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give an example there. People don’t want to hear any bad news.

Someone is like, the old teacher that you knew, something she’s going through, something that like, “No, I don’t want to hear it.” It’s like they put a blinder on. They just want to ignore. I don’t want to hear any bad news, only good news. You have to ask yourself. Okay. That’s good for the moment, but it’s not good with helping you build relationships. Self-awareness is paying attention to the patterns of your life. What patterns do you gravitate to? How do other people see you? Maybe when you’re by yourself you’re cool, but other people see you as angry as exploding. It’s important to know your patterns, but like I said, it takes time to work on those things, to move away from them. But even recognizing those patterns is powerful because then you can look at yourself in an objective manner and say, do I like being like this? Do I want to continue in this way? And then the next step is, what can I do about it? This is where your community comes into play and then seeking therapy to help you with that.

It might make you feel uncomfortable to know that while I am one of those persons that when someone does say something that might be sad news or bad, I just ignore it. And I just don’t want to hear. I just shut them down. How does that make that person feel? I don’t even come off as self-compassionate. It might make you feel bad in the moment, but the goal is to work on it and to improve because it’s going to help you to connect more with other people and help you to have more fulfilling relationships. 

Carrie: Absolutely. I think what you’re talking about is especially true in very intimate relationships. If you will have a hard time being self-aware and you have a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend, that’s probably the person that you could ask first tell me one strength or one weakness. If you’re not married, just a very close friend that you spend a lot of time with.

It really knows you because oftentimes when we’re in relationships with other people, that’s where we notice our differences in terms of how other people approach situations. And we can become really frustrated by that because they don’t approach situations the way we think that they should or the way I like. They don’t do it the way I would do it.

And then it causes us to kind of look in the mirror and go, “Oh, well, why do I approach this situation this way?” or “Why did that make me so distressed when they acted in that manner? And that those types of times are really good for self-reflection. Anytime that you get really worked up about something or you have a conflict in a relationship instead of avoiding that really kind of trying to be curious about it and be reflectful on yourself as well as the other person. How were they impacted when I shared something? How was I impacted when they shared something? That’s good. 

Lola: Yeah, absolutely. 

Carrie: Do you feel like that it’s possible for people to be too self-aware because someone might say, “well, you know, in Christianity we really just need to focus on the needs of others and being giving to them. You know, I don’t want to focus on myself too much.”

Lola: Okay. Yes. Okay. I really liked that question. I think that sometimes we can be too focused on certain areas of our life. Like I said, some people know their strengths, some people know their weaknesses. I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re prepared for a presentation as you’re about to get up, you realize you forgot to add an image to a slide and that’s all you’re focusing on. Oh my goodness. And you’re nervous. You’re focusing on your heartbeat. You’re focusing on the peak you have in your stomach. You’re sweating. In that moment, I will ask someone to pay attention to what’s going on in their body. Why don’t we try external self-awareness?

Are people in the audience connecting with the topic? How come you’re not noticing the person that is not in their head? The other person that is raising their hand to ask a question. So you have people who are focused more on external self-awareness. They care about pleasing other people more than what is their values and their abilities and their motivation.

So I think as Christians, and I think it’s the same criticism with this personal development. As a Christian, I would never tell anybody to focus on something without including God into it. We all have our own area of growth and you have to be willing to be open to what area of growth God wants you to focus on.

There’s some people that they’re so self-aware that they only notice the problem in certain situations. What about the positive things that are going on? They can tell you the problem. They can tell you the problem with the particular project and maybe they’re right about those problems that will come up in a particular project. Maybe you don’t have the answer to that problem and still want the answers to that problem. What about the good things that are coming out as a result of this? I think with anything we can pay too much attention on it, but the best way I can answer this question is to say, bring God into it.

There’s also a healing that comes in when you’re focused on yourself and focus on being the best you. You’re also more gracious to other people if you’re more patient with yourself. You’re more likely to extend that grace to other people by being patient with them. If know that you have flaws and weaknesses, you’re also able to be gracious like they have flaws and weaknesses.

Like the Bible says. I’ll put it this way before we correct someone else’s wrongdoing, it’s important to you to correct our own wrongdoing as well. And to be able to make sure that we’re making those changes in our life. When you know that you’re a human being and you’re a sinner, it’s easier for you to be able to say, you know what. I have baggage too. I have things I’m working on too. So I’m not perfect as I’m trying to correct you in what you’re doing wrong or whether I think that you could be doing better.

Carrie: Absolutely. Grace is one of the topics I’d love to dive into the podcast at some point in time. I absolutely agree with what you said, that when we are able to receive grace from God ourselves, it’s so much easier to give grace to other people like it has to flow through us and out of us. That’s very good. I know that you have a podcast. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your podcast? 

Lola: Yeah. So my podcast is titled Joy In Purpose. The name of that podcast came about because on this path of fulfilling your purpose, whatever it is, some people are at a stage where they’re like, I don’t even know what my purpose is.

We all go through disappointments and failures and good times as well. I noticed that sometimes when we go through road bombs or we’re facing people telling us no, it can really bring us down and make us question ourselves. So that’s why on this journey to purpose, on this journey of navigating our purpose and fulfil our purpose, there’s going to be disappointment along the way. So my podcast is talking about the journey of purpose and just finding the joy in purpose, finding the joy within ourselves in purpose. So I invite other people to talk about their journey of purpose. Just talk about what I call their purpose stories.

And I also curate conversations related to purpose and mental health.

Carrie: Awesome. So at the end of every podcast, I like for our guests to share a story of hope because our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD. So this is a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Lola: This past year, 2020, and even this year, societally, we’ve all gone through a lot. And for me also with my program, there’s a lot of work, dissertation papers, classes. Just this year has just been stressful, just a lot going on. And the previous year too. Recently, I got awarded a scholarship from my program and the scholarship was determined by the faculty and they picked myself and another applicant to receive the scholarship for the summer semester.

And I am so grateful for that. So in the middle, a lot of things going on. To me, it felt like, “Wow, hope.” That’s hope. It just really made me look up and just be appreciative of God and his faithfulness. 

Carrie: Yeah, it’s just always so good. And when you’re in that moment of provision of like, oh God came through for me in this situation. It just gives you encouragement that next time you’re facing another situation that he’s going to open a door, come through for you.

This has been a really great conversation on self-awareness and I really appreciate you being on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. We wish you the best in your studies. 

Lola: Thank you very much. I’m glad that you had me on to speak with your audience. I really appreciate it. 

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I hope this interview causes you to be curious about how you can become more self-aware and what that looks like in your process.

Something I realized that I forgot to tell everyone about is that we now have hope for anxiety and OCD t-shirts. Isn’t that fun?  I designed this t-shirt on Teespring. And so if you go to our hope for anxiety and OCD website, and then click on the store, it’ll actually take you to an external site when you click on the t-shirt.

I don’t actually print them here or mail them out or anything like that. There is another company that does. I did order one just so you know, I wanted to feel it and see how it looked. The color is great. The printing is high quality and it’s a super comfortable shirt. So if you are looking for a way to help promote the podcast, or you just want to add a t-shirt to your collection, you’re welcome to go onto www.hopeforanxietyandocd/store. You’ll also find my ebook on there as well, which helps you find a therapist that’s a good fit on the first try. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.

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