Tag: Mental Health

108. OCD Personal Story with Michael Kheir

Written by Carrie Bock on November 30, 2023. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Michael Kheir, the author of “Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach.” Michael shares his personal experience with OCD, shedding light on the challenges he faced. He delves into how faith and a deep understanding of God’s grace were pivotal in his journey towards healing and recovery.

Episode Summary:

The importance of reducing stigma around mental health, particularly OCD and anxiety.

How OCD can lead to obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, even over seemingly insignificant matters.

The impact of strict religious upbringing on OCD and the concept of legalism.

The power of understanding and embracing God’s grace in dealing with mental health challenges.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 108! I’m Carrie Bock, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Michael, the author of Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach. Michael was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, which has been incredibly insightful for our discussion.

In this episode, we dive deep into Michael’s personal battle with OCD. He shares how his journey began in childhood and has evolved through adulthood. Michael has extensively researched OCD from both Christian and secular perspectives, and his book reflects this thorough exploration. He recounts a poignant story from his college days, where a seemingly small incident triggered a flood of obsessive thoughts and compulsions.

Michael also opens up about the stories he revealed for the first time in his book—stories he hadn’t shared with his family before. His openness underscores a crucial point: mental health struggles do not define our worth or intelligence. Instead, they are a part of our journey, and understanding this can help reduce stigma.

Michael’s reflections on his experiences highlight the importance of embracing God’s grace rather than being trapped by rituals and compulsions. This conversation is a powerful reminder that faith and understanding can guide us through the complexities of OCD.

Join us as we explore these themes and more. If you find this episode helpful, please subscribe and leave a review to support our mission of breaking the stigma surrounding mental health.

More to listen to:

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

Transcript

I have the privilege of interviewing some interesting people on this show and hearing their stories. One of the things that we are focused on is reducing shame, so I interview a lot of people—Christians who have personal stories with OCD or anxiety.

Today, here I have Michael, author of Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach, and Mike was kind enough to send me a copy of his book so I could read it. People don’t always do that—sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. That’s the secret to being a podcast interviewer. I feel like it goes much better when I understand the book and have read it.

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Carrie: Welcome to the show, Mike.

Michael: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: This is your personal story, really, of OCD and the things that you found that helped you. And I saw, as you were writing it, that you had referenced a lot of other books that you read on OCD—books that were Christian, books that were secular. But it sounds like you’ve done your research over the years.

Michael: Yes. I think I started reading about the subject a lot when I was about 24 or 25 years old. The first one that I read was Grace of Bounty by John Bunyan. I think my mom actually found it somewhere and gave it to me, and I remember I started crying when I was reading it because it was immediately relatable to me, and I thought it was so cool that somebody that was used that mightily by God had a very similar struggle. I kind of felt like God probably used that struggle to use him in big ways. That was really encouraging to me, and then from there, it was 2007, so we had iPhones, and the internet was very accessible, so I just started googling and researching a lot and found some stuff, but not enough that made me feel like everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said. That’s sort of what motivated me to move forward and start writing.

Carrie: In the book, you tell many relatable stories of how OCD affected you, starting in childhood and then going through adolescence, and adulthood. Would you mind sharing one or two of those?

Michael: Sure. I’m going to bring one up because we might come back to it.

There was one that happened in college, a bunch of kids from our church. I went on a spring break trip, and we were all sort of sharing living spaces. The guys had like an apartment, the girls had an apartment, and I remember I was in our apartment and there’s like a living area and I was talking to some of my roommates and then a guy and his girlfriend walked in and at some point, I remember thinking, my shirt untucked I need to tuck it in and I think I like unzipped my pants just a little bit, tucked it in and then zipped it back up. No one would think anything about it because we were in a living area. It was a very laid-back environment. I don’t even think I was close to any of the girls, but that one girl was there. I just remember obsessing on that and thinking, if she saw me do that, that would be horrifyingly inappropriate as a Christian man to do something like that, and I just obsessed on that idea not immediately, but probably a week after we got back from the trip. I just started obsessing on that, thinking I was in the wrong.

Every time I would try to read the Bible or pray, I would think, I believe it’s Matthew 5:23 that says, if anyone has an offense against you, leave your gift at the altar or your sacrifice at the altar, go make it right, and then come back. Every time I would sit down to pray or read my Bible, I would think, it’s like all OCD.

There’s a 1 percent chance or a one in a million chance that this girl’s offended because she might’ve seen it and she might’ve interpreted it wrong. This went on for, I think, a couple of weeks and I eventually was like, the only way I can get rid of this fear, the one in a million chance I offended her is to apologize, which, in part of my mind, I knew was completely insane, inappropriate, and like, she would be like, what on earth are you talking about? So, I knew that in part of my brain, but I just couldn’t get rid of the fear that I was in sin. I think I emailed her boyfriend and said, if she saw this, I’m really sorry.

My heart is pounding as I’m doing it because I know how crazy it’s going to come across, but I did it and the moment I did it, it was a very powerful moment in my life. I realized what I had just done was not at all, like, relieving in the sense of, okay, I’ve done the will of God. It was more like that was not right.

Something about that was off and that helped me, that was kind of a pivotal moment in my journey of realizing that giving in to every compulsion to remove the one-in-a-million chance of something happening was not the right approach. That’s the big one that sticks with me a lot.

Carrie: Were there any stories that your parents or others close to you didn’t know about until you started writing these things down?

I guess I was thinking that there was a story about you being concerned about suffocating your stuffed animals and they had to be tucked in just a certain way and you’d lay there in bed at night and like losing sleep. Like, did your parents know any of that was going on in your mind?

Michael: I would say that one they may have known, but there were so many that they did not know.

I can’t think of the ones offhand, but I would say most of them, they did not know until I was an adult. I remember sitting in a parking lot, talking to my brother in my 20s, and I was explaining some of the thoughts I was having, and they were all OCD thoughts, and they were overwhelming me, and I remember he goes, you have thoughts like that?

He knew I had OCD, but I don’t think he had any idea of what the toll it took, and how it looked in the brain, and that’s sort of what I really tried to convey when I told my story, is like, when I’m sitting in that moment, these are the thoughts going through my head, and even my mom, as she’s read it after it’s been published in the last couple weeks, has said, man, I’m learning a lot, and I think she knew most of it, but she probably didn’t know how to deal with it and ended up either suppressing it or just kind of putting it in its own little compartment in her head because it was Something she didn’t know how to deal with to help her child.

Carrie: That’s so great one of the reasons I love this show is because we’re able to break the stigma and talk about some of these things when you’re in your own mind having those obsessions There’s this element of feeling so alone and disconnected and nobody else understands what it’s like to live in this mental gymnasium.

Michael: Absolutely. I think part of the stigma is that mental health issues make you less than or less intelligent and I almost look at it like LeBron James, the best basketball player in the world right now, if he had an injury, we wouldn’t say, that guy is such a terrible basketball player. We’d be like, he has an injury and he has to recover from it or he has to compensate for it.

I see mental health the same way. It’s like, I have OCD. That doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent or I can’t function in society. I went to college. I got a master’s degree. I have a decent career. It’s just viewed. Incorrectly by a lot of people in society and in the church, of course, to which we will probably get to, I hope.

Carrie: I’ve met many people with OCD that I would consider incredibly smart, thoughtful, intelligent, and that ability to solve problems in their head that works well in other scenarios, like whether it’s people that work in software or computers or engineering that they can’t use that same type of logic and problem-solving and solving these obsessions and compulsions, which is frustrating because they’re good problem solvers, typically in other areas of their life.

Michael: Absolutely.

Carrie: One of the things that stood out to me in your book was the weighing the 99.99 percent versus the 0.01 percent.

Michael: Right. I want to touch on another story. I believe it’s chapter two where I go through my life story and it’s about another basketball player. Keep coming back to basketball. I was taking pictures of Michael Jordan, not as a professional photographer, but from the stands.

Me and my friend had gone to watch him. This was after he had Unretired the second time. I think it was 2002. He was playing for the Washington Wizards. So, we got these high-up nosebleed seats as the game wore on, and a lot of people left. I think it was a weeknight. So, the crowd just thinned out, and we kind of snuck down to some really good seats.

I think we were 10 rows back, right behind the side where Michael Jordan was scoring. So, he goes up for a dunk. I get a really good picture of it. I’m super excited. I go home. I develop the negatives. They’re really good and then I realize, what have I done? And I go through this long list of condemning thoughts.

Number one, I’m cheering for a team with a mascot, the Wizards, and again, these are all in my mind. I know these are all one in a trillion chance of being wrong, but it doesn’t matter that it’s one in a trillion, it’s still a chance, and I’m obsessing on the chance. So by cheering for a team with a mascot called the Wizards, there is a one-in-a-trillion chance I’m supporting witchcraft.

I snuck down to the cheaper seats during the game, so now I’ve cheated Ticketmaster. Whoever deserves that money, I’ve now cheated them. It goes back to a very similar situation with that spring break trip that I had had several years earlier. I’m trying to read the Bible, I’m trying to pray, and I’m immediately thinking, I’m a thief, I stole from Ticketmaster or the Washington Wizards organization. I am just a terrible Christian, essentially, for promoting such an evil mascot. Again, I just want to reiterate that these ideas sound crazy, and I knew they were crazy in the intellectual part of my brain or mind, but I could not separate the fear from it. The one in a million chance that it was wrong is kind of what drives OCD and drives the compulsions and the obsessions.

Similar to what I did with the spring break trip, I decided I needed to repent of this before I could continue in my relationship with God for a couple of reasons. One, if I am promoting this witchcraft, then I’m possibly deceived. I’m sitting here reading the Bible, but I may or may not be interpreting it correctly in my mind.

I may be thinking, that God is promising something in this verse, but it doesn’t apply to me because I’m deceived. I’m under this cloud of deception because I’m promoting witchcraft. So I decided to make a list of things to do to repent. I’m going to call Ticketmaster, find out the prices of the cheaper seats we went down to, and pay the difference between what we paid and what we did down there and where we had sat.

I was going to stop cheering for the Wizards. Could I promote a team that’s involved in witchcraft? I was going to, the hardest part was to destroy the negatives. This was back when we had film and negatives, and destroy the photos, and then I’d have fully repented. And then when I go and read my Bible and pray now, I know that I’m not under some influence of deception or in sin against God.

After I had gone through that whole process for probably four weeks, I read something in Galatians that caught my eye. That said, “Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you,” which means who has deceived you, that you should not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified.

This is the only I want to learn from you. Did you receive the spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish, having begun in the spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? And I was completely caught off guard by that because I immediately realized all the things I had just listed out that I was going to do to be made right with God again were works.

I was going to pay more money, I was going to destroy negatives, I was going to stop cheering for a team. Those were the actual threats to being deceived, and I realized in that moment, it probably wasn’t a moment. It probably took a few days, but I realized that doing all of that work was not a risk-free situation. Meaning I was not going to do all of those things to become undeceived, which would then take the chance of being deceived down from one in a billion or one in a trillion down to zero. I was actually doing these things and the chances of being deceived were going up. They weren’t going all the way down to zero from one in a trillion.

Over time, I’ve realized there are so many things where we think we’re doing a compulsion to remove the one in a billion chance of something bad happening and we’re increasing the risk of the bad thing happening. I know this initially sounds like complete hell to somebody with OCD because you’re thinking, great, now you’ve just given me more scenarios to worry about, and more scenarios that I’m just going to become compulsive about. What I realized is that as Christians, our walk with God is all by grace and when I can acknowledge I’m not exactly sure what to do, I should maybe go destroy all these negatives and stop cheering for the Wizards, or maybe I should just walk by faith and not worry about that because that’s what the Bible says. Once I can sit in a place of having to trust God because I don’t know exactly what to do, then I’m in a place where I’m walking correctly with God, and that is so freeing. Because it’s saying, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, and now I can be at rest and not think that I have all these hoops to jump through to be made right with God again.

Carrie: I would normalize that as a human experience of not always knowing what to do.

Michael: Absolutely.

Carrie: Some things are very clear, defined in scripture, don’t do this, yes, do this, but there are many other things that may be personal decisions about, “Do I move this year? Do I move next year? Do I not move? Does God want me to stay here?” Those types of things that we really have to wrestle through that maybe don’t have just one right answer right now, or we’re unsure of, and that’s okay. It’s hard to sit with that discomfort or the unknown piece, though.

Michael: And I think this goes back to a general issue that a lot of people with OCD have is an obsession with what is God’s will. This hit me a lot, sometimes even now. I remember in college, there were just limitless choices about everything. Should I go eat at this dining hall or that dining hall? Well, what if I go to dining hall A, and I was supposed to go to dining hall B, and I was going to bump into someone that I led to Christ, who became the next Billy Graham? By not doing God’s will, 500 million people are going to go to hell in the next generation because I didn’t go to Dining Hall B, which sounds very arrogant and presumptuous, but again, it’s all based on a fear of I might be causing all this harm, not necessarily I’m so capable I can impact things in that way.

I think another part of the freedom that I’ve come to that I talk about in chapter eight and in chapter nine, God’s grace is what frees us from that. We’re only at the bottom of all of those fears. “God is harsh, God is judgmental, and God is not for me. If I mess up just a little bit, he’s going to whack me over the head as hard as he can.” But once we realize that he’s kind and loving and gentle with us, then the fear of should I go to dining hall A or dining hall B becomes almost irrelevant. It’s like God loves me if I have a child now. If my child made a tiny error like that, she went to my bedroom instead of her bedroom to look for something.

I’m not going to be angry if she went to the wrong bedroom she’s my kid I love her and there’s just so much grace and understanding in that relationship and I think that’s what ultimately leads to long-term freedom.

Carrie: Tell us about how having a child helped you have a greater understanding of God’s grace and I resonate with that as well with my daughter. There’s just something that you feel as a parent of just that sense of, I love you and I’m for you on your best days when you’re so well-behaved and on your worst days, when all you can do is scream at me, I’m still here for you and I still love you.

Michael: I feel like it’s almost supernatural and it’s part of being created in God’s image. He loves us so much, and God the Father loves his son so much, and you just see it all through society. Even the worst of the worst people love their kids, it’s just totally ingrained in us, and I think that’s totally because we were created in his image and the same was true for me when she was born. It was just this overwhelming sense of, I love this person unconditionally. It was more than emotion. It’s more than just the will. It’s just, almost supernatural, I would say. She’s now six and a half years old. As that relationship has grown, I’m starting to see so many areas where I’m like, that’s totally how God sees me.

She’s just had a rotten day. I love her just as I did yesterday when she had a great day. She’s just so pleasing to me, and she brings joy whenever I get to see her, and whenever she walks in the room, whenever I pick her up from school, and I think we get that intellectually in church. We know God is gracious, God is good, God loves us and it’s in our head. Very successfully, it gets to our head. Getting to our heart is much harder and I think having a child made it get to the heart a lot, a lot faster than it would have.

Carrie: My daughter teaches me stuff all the time. I was telling one of my clients and we were talking about sin and grace and God’s love for us and I was saying my daughter started walking roughly around 12 months and I think she was 18 months at the time. I was like, she’s been walking for a little while, but she falls down a lot and I’m not talking about a slight stumble. I’m talking about how your face is about to hit the floor and your hands just barely caught you from face-planting.

It made me realize that in our walk with Christ, we see that when we fall God is saying, “Can’t you get it together?” Whereas it’s more like, “Okay, get up, you fell, get up, let’s move forward. Let’s keep going.” It doesn’t mean that you have to get out of the race or stop running. Just kind of dust it off and move on.

Michael: Absolutely. That is such a good picture and so much closer to reality. I feel I think as we become adults, we think there’s so much in our control and our capabilities are so high, and we’re probably a lot closer, at least our spiritual capability, like that. We just fall and fall and fall, and God’s trying to show us that it’s His grace that keeps picking us up and moving us forward.

Carrie: When you were able to examine your own OCD, did you kind of define it as legalism, or this is kind of like the legalist part of my brain? Did that have anything to do with strict church upbringing or not?

Michael: I would say yes, and I don’t want to knock on my parents or my grandfather who was a spiritual giant in a way. He grew up in Egypt and came to Christ at 17 and started a church at 22 and just had an amazing, amazing ministry in Egypt and then also when he came to the U.S. My mom obviously was heavily influenced by him and he was a huge impact on my life. I would say that there was definitely the culture difference. Number one, because they were from Egypt and formalities are a big thing there and also just our parents trying to protect us because they were so culturally different when they got to the U.S., they basically had the mindset of anything we don’t fully understand we’re going to protect them from. Even watching certain kids’ shows, like on TGI Friday, I don’t know if you remember TGIF Full House, and like there were some of those shows that were a little bit too much, we couldn’t watch those, and rock and roll was bad, tattoos were bad, long hair on men was bad, just a lot of things that they decided, let’s just cut these things off, so definitely, I would say my upbringing led to or fueled some of that legalism and OCD getting mixed.

Carrie: A lot of times I find there’s a rigidity sometimes that people are raised in, and it doesn’t always have to do spiritually sometimes it has to do with kind of things that you’re saying, just like the household rules.

You have to load the dishwasher this way, or if you did something different, it’s wrong. Don’t hang out with anybody that’s doing that thing over there. I’m curious though, a lot of your stuff was scrupulosity-related. How did you come to decipher, okay, this is God speaking to me, or I know this is something God wants and, or this is OCD because this is a question I probably get asked all the time. How do I know if I’m coming under the conviction of the Holy Spirit or if it’s OCD telling me, you need to repent, you need to confess, you need to do this, that?

Michael: One thing that really led me to not give up trying to figure out that issue was how many times in the Bible God tells us basically to test ideas. I wanted to just mention a few of them 2 Corinthians 10:5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. He’s basically saying you’re having thoughts and you can acknowledge them as being of God or not of God.

One of the biggest ones I liked was, for the word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart and I thought, well, sounds like the word of God is the answer to this question. Where can we get a level of discernment like this? and Division of Soul and Spirit? I read some theology, and it seems like that issue in and of itself is very complicated, but it’s almost like a promise from God, like, He’s saying you can actually understand this, and parse these thoughts from each other, using my word.

Another one is 1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things, hold fast to what is good. 1 John 4:1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world and that’s talking more about, obviously, actual people saying things that they maybe shouldn’t, and testing what they’re saying versus the word of God, but it also applies to our minds. That led me to think, where is it in the Bible? He says that in the Word of God, or you’ll be able to use the Word of God to decipher all this and I really came down to three passages that I thought did it for me. Galatians 5:22 and 23 say that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control against such things there is no law.

I thought to myself, If I’m listening to thoughts, and they’re eventually leading to actions, go evangelize to that person over there, they’re gonna go straight to hell. Well, is that thought from a God that’s producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control in me?

I kind of start breaking it down and I say, well, is that a gentle thought? Not really. It’s more of like a demanding, do this right now, do this right now. Which is then catalyzing really in a compulsion to go evangelize right this minute. So now I’m throwing self-control out the window. Was it brought to me in kindness? Not really. I think back to a time when I felt God called me to move. I did five years at Virginia Tech, and in my fourth year, I was in this nice, like, air-conditioned, upper-class dorm room and I just remember thinking one day, I should probably move to this all-freshman. It was this gross, non air-conditioned, freshman dorm. It kind of hit me for a couple of days, and I was feeling the same things, like, kind of guilt, is this really God? Confusion and I remember just looking up one day, I was praying, and I was facing it, it was probably a couple hundred yards away, and I could see it out of a window, and God’s peace just really came over me.

I was like, “I actually want to move there, that actually sounds like a good idea.” I was motivated, and it really sounded like the Spirit of God. I would describe experiencing the Spirit of God. There was joy. I was wanting to do it. I had peace about it. It was a very kind thought in the sense of like if you don’t do this, everyone in that building is going to go to hell.

That was not at all part of that thought. So it was gentle therefore, I was making the decision with self-control and it’s funny, right after that happened, I went back to my dorm room and a couple of hours later, my roommate came back. He’s like, “Hey, do you remember Steve? It was actually my roommate in freshman year. He wants to move into that freshman dorm across the way, and he’s looking for a roommate.” That’s funny because I just decided to move there about two hours ago, so we became roommates again, and it was pretty cool. Just starting to see how the fruits of our actions are pretty obviously indicative of us listening to God or not listening to God. So that was the first passage, and I go into way more detail in the book. Shameless plug for my book there.

Carrie: Why did you choose to write this book and share your story?

Michael: I alluded to it a little bit in the beginning. I think there were so many issues that if I had had this exact book back when I was growing up, it would have been so helpful. There’s a lot out there more now than there was when I was really in the worst parts of this, but a lot of it was just, I felt God was teaching me things, and I was reading and reading about this, and a lot of it was from the medical standpoint and the psychiatric standpoint. And there was a big gap between that and the church.

I felt like the church was, at least the churches I was involved in, leaned towards, “You are having anxiety and OCD. Well, it could be multiple things. You need to pray more. If you prayed more, you’d have the peace of God more. There’s a hidden sin in your life, and that’s why you’re struggling.”

You need to dig, which is the worst thing in the world to say to someone with OCD because now they’re fishing for something that doesn’t even exist, and they’re obsessing even more than they were, trying to find a sin that likely does not exist. They likely just have a chemical imbalance in their brain. There was that aspect of it, completely ignoring the medical aspect of it, and then there were all these brilliant medical doctors who were psychiatrists and then also the PhDs that were psychologists coming up with the truth of the medical side of it with no connection to the fact that there is a God and a Satan and there is spiritual warfare sometimes. I just felt like both sides were completely ignoring the other side and nothing was bringing more truth together.

Carrie: There’s nothing to bridge that gap between that theology and really good therapy and medical help.

Michael: Exactly.

Carrie: Usually towards the end, I ask people a couple of different questions, like, tell us a story of hope or something to your younger self, but I’m curious for you, If you will talk with us about what OCD is like now, does it still show up? It’s just you notice it and you’re more able to recognize it as OCD? I think a lot of people that I talk to, they’re just so focused on, “I want this to go away and I don’t want to deal with this long term.” I want to kind of give them some hope that just because they’re in the midst of the struggle right now, it doesn’t mean it’s always going to look that bad.”

Michael: I don’t want to embellish. I definitely still have OCD, but I would say I’ve gone from having crippling OCD back from ages 14 to 18 was really bad, and then in my early 20s right after college was really bad.

I’ve gone from that to much, much better. It’s much more manageable, and like you said, I can acknowledge what it is when I see it, as opposed to, it really took me so many years to even realize that the thoughts were completely irrational. I don’t know how many years I struggled with all of these thoughts until I realized, there’s a way to look at this and realize that some of my thoughts are totally normal and some of my thoughts make absolutely no sense at all.

I feel like once we get to that point, we’re definitely on the right track. I feel like that was a huge breakthrough. The second breakthrough for me was when, for some reason, the grace of God and the concept of grace just hit home. I listened to Dr. Tony Evans quite a bit, and he had I think it was a 10 or 11-part series on the magnificent grace of God. A few years ago, I was driving like crazy for many hours a week, and I just listened to those sermons over and over again and the crux of what he says is that the grace of God is unmerited favor, so it’s something we don’t deserve, which is great to an OCD person, because we think, “It’s my responsibility to fix the situation. That’s why we end up in these compulsive cycles, but grace eliminates that.

It’s for grace to exist, there has to be no payment for it. That’s a very freeing thing and he talks about it as an environment that is so foreign to us that it takes a long time to get used to and that was true for me. Like, I listened to them and I’m like, “The grace of God is real. It’s profound.”

This is the key to victory, but that doesn’t stop the engine still going in your brain right away. It took a long time. I listened to those sermons. I probably listened to each one at least five times, right? So that’s, what, 45 minutes each, 40 hours of just listening to “God is full of grace.” It’s hard to believe that in your heart and experience it.

He even talks about how if you move from America straight into a foreign country, everything is unnatural to you. Even going out to a meal is different. Making a phone call is probably not as easy as it is now just on your phone, you probably have to dial in some country code. Just everything. The clothing is different.

The culture’s different and he said, “That’s what grace is like.” When we realize, that it’s true, and we want to step into it, it takes a lot of getting used to. One, because it’s almost too good to be true, because the world never treats us with grace, right? Even just normal jobs, you perform and you get a raise.

If you’re off a little bit, well, we’re gonna ding you and we’re gonna notice that and relationships are the same way. Just to experience it with God takes a lot of telling yourself over and over again, essentially. You can definitely find victory and I think realizing how much God loves you, how much favor he has towards you, completely independent of your actions, is the number one thing.

It’s therapeutic to remind yourself, even just saying it right this minute. It’s just one more layer of reminding myself and experiencing that is a truth that I can speak to myself and to other people. I think that has been the most powerful thing. Essentially having a correct view of God just makes it so much easier to deal with.

Carrie: Oftentimes we project onto God, whether it’s been family members or past church leaders that may have had a little bit more of a strict view of God or harsher upbringing of God, or how we even see ourselves. I think sometimes if we don’t like ourselves and we struggle with shame and we can project that onto God, well God must not feel this way about me or that way about me. Really coming back to the true character of God and I appreciate you sharing that for so many people who are struggling today that victory doesn’t necessarily mean the elimination of all symptoms. It means that I know how to deal with these things now when they come up. I have somebody that I work with who will tell me, “This obsession came and I was like, here you are.I know who you are you’re back again,” and now is able to joke about it versus it being completely debilitating because she’s able to recognize that this is OCD. This is one of my themes that comes back around. I don’t have to totally freak out about this obsession like it wants me to. I’m just gonna like, I’m gonna move on with my life and keep doing the things that I love and want to do and are important to me.

Michael: That was very true in my life. I had a pretty harsh father, and he had a lot of great qualities, but he was definitely harsh with me specifically and I was never popular in school. I was bullied a lot. There were a lot of ways that seeing God incorrectly could show up in my developmental years for sure through those two major things. Also, having OCD probably exacerbated all of those problems, I would say, that’s why I think getting to see God correctly. We just have to constantly remind ourselves that that’s true. He is gentle and kind and loving and for us and not against us and full of favor towards us because we don’t feel that with OCD.

Carrie: I appreciate you sharing your story with us and also through your book, we’re going to put a link to that in the show notes and I’ve recommended it to some of my clients because I just feel like it’s very relatable and there’s some helpful information in there on just really examining your thought process. So thank you for coming on the show today.

Michael: Thanks so much.

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

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Written by Carrie Bock on September 28, 2023. Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

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

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

Episode Highlights.

How Greg Atkinson’s life experiences, including anxiety, inspired his commitment to kindness.
The importance of forgiveness in fostering a kinder world.

The significance of vulnerability and openness in sharing personal stories and breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health.

Practical ways to incorporate kindness into your own life and make a positive impact on those around you.

Greg’s Book: The Secret Power of Kindness

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tune in for another inspiring episode:

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

Transcript

Welcome to the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast. I am your host, Carrie Bock. This is episode 104. We are here with Greg Atkinson, who is a speaker, author, and educator on mental health issues and entrepreneur.

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Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Greg: Thank you for having me.

Carrie: You wrote a book recently called “The Secret Power of Kindness.” In the first part of the book, you talked a little bit about your story. Can you tell us what caused you to want to open up about that or tell us a little bit about how you got to this point?

Greg: I had a desire to write a book that anybody could pick up and read, and my previous books were written to pastors and church leaders, which is a very small niche. I knew that the average or typical reader, if they weren’t in the church pastor world, you may not know who I am. I wanted to open up with here’s who I am, here’s what I’ve been through, here’s why I wrote the book, here’s why I hope you will want to read this book. I had a mentor here in Charlotte who passed away a few years ago, but he told me when he first started mentoring me and he mentors men, he said, “Greg, every man has a father wound and a church wound.” I believe that’s true for women as well, but he was specifically focused on discipling men and mentoring men. I wanted to open the book with a chapter on forgiveness and talk about my father wound and my church wound because I have both and I have found since this book came out. That a lot of people can relate to it and a lot of people have been encouraged by my story.

I talk about issues I went through growing up with sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse. And then I talk about mental health and being diagnosed with anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder. And then I share a situation of even being fired from a job due to disclosing that I had a mental illness. I had no performance issues.

I’d worked there two and a half years, but when I finally felt comfortable enough to tell my boss, then he fired me the purpose of the chapter. The whole focus was forgiveness. It’s that I have forgiven my boss. I’ve forgiven my dad. I have forgiven those that have hurt me. And it’s not a quick and easy thing.

This is a process of years and thousands of hours of therapy and thousands of dollars worth of therapy. Just a lot of individual therapy, group therapy. I talk about in the book going to on site in Tennessee and I have been through everything you could go through to deal with my father when in my church when I just wanted to read her to know that I have wrestled with forgiveness and I found that I was able to forgive those that have hurt me or wrong me, and that as the 1st chapter of 10 keys in the book, 10 keys to unlocking kindness.

This allows me to lead a kinder life because people that struggle with unforgiveness and are hurt and angry and bitter and have anger under the surface, they could snap at people or be rude or gruff and come across as unkind. It’s the opposite of kindness. So I wanted to start with a lot of people have said a very deep chapter, for a first chapter and just share my story and say, here’s what I’ve gone through to be in a place where I could respond with kindness and treat people kindly, but it has been a long journey.

Carrie: We have had a lot of guests talk about forgiveness, and I appreciate the perspective, too, that it’s a process because I think sometimes when we learn about it in church, we think it’s supposed to be just some kind of instantaneous thing, like, “Okay, I forgive this person” but it’s almost like a journey and a lifestyle that you have to adopt between you and the Lord to say like, okay, I’m recognizing when this anger comes up. I’m recognizing when this bitterness comes up and I choose not to go down that path.

Greg: Absolutely. It is a process. And that’s what they say at onsite, trust the process. They have coffee mugs that say, trust the process, but yeah, it is definitely a process and it’s been a lifelong journey with several therapists that are trained in different skills to get to the point where I am now.

Carrie: How long did it take you from when you first started showing symptoms until you got a mental health diagnosis?

Greg: Great question. I think when I look back on my teenage years and my 20s, it was obvious there was something going on, but I actually did not get diagnosed until I was 30 years old. Which is later than a lot of people, but when I got diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and bipolar, I was 30 years old now that I know what they are and what the symptoms are and what things to look for, I can totally see it in my twenties.

Even in my teenage years. I just had no words for it, I was truly ignorant. I thought everything was spiritual and you just pray and it’ll go away and pray more and do a devotional and have a quiet time and you’ll never get depressed and everything will be fine. And I was super ignorant and I did not know anything about mental health or mental illness.

Now, as an advocate and somebody that writes and speaks about mental health. I’m trying to educate those in power and leadership to be careful with their words because they may not realize that you can’t just pray it away and that some people like myself need to take medicine when I speak out and when I talk, I tell people if you need medicine, it’s totally okay.

It’s not anti Bible, anti spiritual. If you need medicine, just like if you had diabetes and you had to take insulin, If you have something going on with the chemistry in your brain, and you need to take a mood stabilizer or something to help with anxiety, whatever your doctor thinks is right for you. I have tried to educate pastors to not shame people for needing medicine or for struggling with anxiety.

I was just flipping through social media 3 days ago. And a pastor had uploaded a reel where he was preaching and he referred to anxiety and depression as sin. And so pastor that I love and respect and know, and I followed him for a reason, but he had talked about going through a season of depression and anxiety, but he referred to it as he had overcome it and he had got the victory. And that kind of made it sound like he was sitting when he was depressed and he was sitting when he was anxious. For somebody like me that has a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, I know that those words from a person on the pulpit can be very dangerous.

Carrie: Yes, and I think unless they’ve experienced mental health disorders or have that self awareness, pastors and ministry leaders, they may not understand what it’s like to deal with anxiety or what it’s like to wake up and not want to get out of bed in the morning. Really giving them these types of personal stories and insights, I think is really helpful and It goes to show you, too, that we’ve come a long way in the church in some ways, but we still have a long way to go, and we still have people that are giving these messages about anxiety is only a spiritual problem instead of it’s a physical, emotional, spiritual problem.

Greg: As s you know, mental illness is often hereditary, and often you have relatives that have that. When I was in my early twenties, I knew that my cousin and my aunt had bipolar. I knew they struggled with depression, but I was ignorant. I was super ignorant. And I remember saying to my wife, if they would just pray more, if they would just have a devotional life and a quiet time, they would be fine. And then when I was 23, right in the prime of my life, and used to be super athletic, I had three ruptured discs and had to have major back surgery, and I was flat on my back in a hospital bed for two months, and I wanted to die for the first time in my life. I experienced true depression. It was the first time ever, but I remember telling my wife, depression is real.

It’s a real thing. I want to die right now. I was 23 years old, laying in a bed for two months. And when I did get up to go to the bathroom, I had to use a walker and I was, all my muscles had atrophied and then I went from a walker to a cane and then I had to go to physical therapy and it was a long journey back and recovery from back surgery, major back surgery.

It was almost like God opened my eyes of depression is real. This is what it feels like. I asked for forgiveness from God for how things I had said about relatives and my perspective of thinking if they would just pray it away, it would be okay. Now, as I have loved ones that struggle with depression, I am very aware that it’s real. And like you said, sometimes you don’t want to get out of bed. Super aware of that now, I don’t struggle as much with depression, but I do struggle with anxiety and take medicine for that. So I’m very aware that you could be fine with God. You could be having a devotional life and praying and worshiping and you and God are great and still you get anxiety or depression. That became real to me at the age of 23.

Carrie: How does anxiety affect you today?

Greg: There’s sometimes physical symptoms like I may be holding a cup or opening something and my wife will say your hands are shaking and I’ll notice there’s like a physical symptom of a tremor or something, which could be a side effect of the medicine, or it could be just how my anxiety manifests.

There’s also a lot of mental games that I go through of thinking worst case scenarios. Thinking about death. I have pain in my back. Is that pain cancer? I have a pain in my head. Is that a brain tumor with my anxiety? I think worst case scenario. I also at the age of 21, as I talked about in the book, my dad died, just dropped out of a massive heart attack.

I experienced a close death very young at 21 years old, and my kids are older than that now. When I was younger than them, I had lost my dad. When I have indigestion or heartburn and I feel my chest hurt, I think worst case scenario, am I having a heart attack like my dad? Am I going to die young like my dad?

When I look back on losing my dad at the age of 21, that’s when my anxiety kicked in, and that’s where my fear of death really came from. I’m sure there’s chemical issues as well and brain issues, but as far as the mental gymnastics that I go through to try to calm myself, everything became more intensified after experiencing a death of someone so close at such a young age.

I will oftentimes feel a symptom or wonder something, and I will think worst case scenario, or my counselor calls it sense of impending doom. You think that you’re going to die, and thank God my wife is a nurse and has talked me out of multiple ER visits of, no, you’re fine, stay home. But I still have those moments where I’ll go to the ER because I’ll think, no, my chest is hurting.

I’m pretty sure this is a heart attack. And I have had numerous EKGs where they say it’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with your heart. It’s just heartburn. Go home. But like I said, I have loved ones that struggle with depression. I really struggle with anxiety and it is exhausting. The medicine can help chill you a little, but the way the mind can race and the way the mind can think of worst case scenarios is exhausting.

My heart goes out to anyone that struggles with anxiety, and I know you addressed that on this podcast. I can very much relate to it. And as I have opened up to others, I’ll hear from people. Oh, my sister has anxiety or my mom has anxiety. I have found that there are so many people that struggle with mental health issues, but we’re just not aware of each other.

One of the tactics of the enemy is isolation, thinking we’re alone and we’re the only one that goes through it. Whereas, on any given Sunday, when a pastor stands up to preach, at least one fourth of the congregation has some type of mental illness. They say 25 percent or more. When they’re standing up to speak, a fourth of the congregation is struggling with something and it could be anxiety. My heart goes out to them.

Carrie: I’ve heard from some pastors too, who have been really vulnerable and I think that makes a huge difference to see a spiritual leader get up there and say, Hey, I’ve been to therapy or I hit a rough patch in the road and I needed to go talk to somebody or I needed to look at medication as an option.

We had a pastor on here not too long ago who talked about how he started having panic attacks and developing anxiety in his process. Of working through that. It’s always helpful for us. We’re scared, I think, sometimes to be vulnerable and share our story, but it blesses other people in the body of Christ when we have the courage to do that and to open up.

I appreciate you sharing your story here and also in your book. Why a book about kindness?

Greg: Well, it’s no secret, we live in a divided world, and there’s a lot of hatred online. There’s a lot of device in this. There’s a lot of anger and tearing people down instead of building people up. And, as you know, kindness is a fruit of the spirit. And I thought if this is what the Bible teaches that Christians should be known for, then we as the church have got to do a better job. I met with my publisher who I’ve known for 20 years. He flew to my house, met with me in person. I had shown him some thoughts I wrote down four years ago. He said, “I love talking about a fruit of the spirit.” He said, “I think you need to go all in on kindness and write about the power of kindness.” I adapted what was a previous book proposal that the subtitle was “The Power of Kindness,” and then we went all in on it and made the title, “The Secret Power of Kindness.” I start the book with a sentence, “Imagine a world where everyone is kind to one another,” and I end the book with that.

That’s kind of my dream of no matter who picks up my book and no matter what faith background they have, if we could treat one another with kindness, what I have found and what I talk about in the book is that kindness is contagious, and kindness unlocks kindness. I’m kind to you, and you’re kind to me, and we’re kind to others. We can change the world.

When I talk about kindness being contagious, I share a story of my youngest daughter when she worked the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts. She had a day where somebody paid for the car behind them, and that went on for 27 cars, like paying it back or forward or whatever it is—they kept paying for the car behind them 27 times. And I have had times where I arrived at Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ Donuts, and I get to the window, and they said, “The person ahead of you paid for yours,” and it made my day. That’s what I talk about in my definition of kindness.

I had written it down at like 1:00 A.M., one night, but in the preface, I wrote, “The secret power of kindness is the self-awareness to know that you have the power to make or break someone else’s day and eventually change the world.” That kindness being contagious when somebody bought my meal, I just lit up and just made my day because it was surprising. And when somebody reacts to us in a harsh way or a critical way or a mean way and we respond with kindness, it surprises them and kind of catches them off guard, and they’re like, “Oh, wow, I thought you would bite my head off.” They don’t expect you to respond with kindness.

What I am proposing is a kindness movement, where kindness is contagious, kindness unlocks kindness, and together we are kind to those that we come into contact with, realizing that we do have the power to make or break someone’s day. And I share personal stories in there of how I’ve done that with servers over the years, waiters and waitresses and people that I’ve come across where I just try to make them smile. I try to make their day.

I was literally having a business meeting with my designer last night at 11:30 PM at Waffle House. And we blessed the waitress there, and she is amazing. And I’m going to go back to see her again because it was the first time I’d been to this particular Waffle House. And then before that, I had another business dinner with a friend at my favorite Mexican restaurant, and my favorite waitress Wendy came over, and she loves when I come in because my goal is to make them smile, to lighten their load. I share real stories of that in the book, of things that I’ve done over the years ever since college to build relationships with people in the community.

But, there are stories that go back 30 years of trying to live a life of kindness. And the first chapter is important because I did not receive kindness from my dad, and I never heard, “I love you,” from my dad when I became an adult and left the house. I decided that I’m going to end the cycle, that this stops with me. And I am going to tell my kids I love them, and I am going to be nice to people. My dad used to make waitresses cry in a restaurant. He was very mean, very harsh, is what one of my friends from high school just recently described him when I told him about my book. He said, “Oh, your dad was a harsh man.” And I remember him making waitresses cry. He was just brutal. I remember family dinners around the kitchen table of crying because he just ruined the whole dinner. And I just, when they decided this ends with me, my kids are not going to grow up in a dysfunctional home. They’re not going to go through this, and I choose kindness.

There’s a lot to it that I dive into the book about abiding with Christ and developing a relationship with Christ so that those fruit of the spirit come out of me naturally and I don’t have to force it. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to be kind. I’m going to be kind. I’m going to be kind.” It’s another thing to have it come out naturally as a fruit of the spirit. There’s a quote I share in the book of when the toothpaste gets squeezed, whatever is in there is what comes out. The Bible talks about your heart being revealed, out of the overflow of your mouth, the heart speaks.

I want to spend time with God in such a meaningful way that when my toothpaste gets squeezed, what comes out is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. So the fruit of the spirit comes out naturally. And I don’t always get it right. I’m not perfect. I’m not the kindness expert. But I talked about things that I’ve learned. One for me that was very important was learning to forgive so that I would not hold onto anger and bitterness. Another chapter in the book that was super practical that came from my therapist in life was about the importance of sleep and rest.

There’s a whole chapter for me with bipolar and with anxiety disorder. I really wrestle with sleep and my therapist had given me a worksheet on sleep hygiene and how to get a better night’s sleep and things I can do to set myself up to succeed and to win when it comes to getting proper rest. There’s a whole chapter in the book that addresses rest because if we are not well-rested, then we’re going to snap at somebody, and we’ll again come across as the opposite of kind, and our heart may be that we want to be kind. We want to be known for kindness but we’re so tired and exhausted that we’re snapping at people. That’s a very practical chapter right in the middle of the book of this is something you can do to be at your best.

We’ve all seen the examples of the toddlers that are throwing a fit and fussing and whining and having a mental breakdown in the middle of a store. You hear the mom say, “Somebody needs a nap.” A lot of time it just comes back to something as simple as rest and vacation and days off and a sabbatical if needed, but taking the time to be properly rested and sleep is a battle for me. It’s a battle for one of my daughters. I often say sleep eludes me. It is so hard to get good sleep when you have certain types of mental illness.

I wanted to talk about things that I have learned and tried and do and practice to get a good night’s sleep because I am not at my best if I am short on sleep. As much as I want to be known for kindness, if I had three hours sleep, I am not going to be in a good mood. And I found that that’s pretty universal. Everybody can relate to that. So that’s a little bit about why I wrote about that.

Carrie: That’s really good. We’ve had a couple of episodes on sleep on the show, one from a spiritual perspective and one from a mental perspective and kind of behavioral change perspective. It’s been good conversations about those things.

You reminded me of a story that I wanted to share with you. I was just about 2015. I was going through a divorce. My husband was up and left, and I was trying to work, and I just couldn’t even think straight really sometimes. I went into this gas station. They had these refillable cups and if you take the cup back, you get a discount or whatever it is. You don’t have to pay the full price for the drink. So I’m in there in the gas station, and I’m struggling with this lid. For some reason, the plastic lid that I had would not fit on there very well. And this guy comes over, and he said, “You know, you can get another lid. It’s okay. Try this other lid.” It was just such a kind moment for me that someone would step in when I couldn’t even think straight and kind of solve what is a relatively simple problem, but I just remember that moment. It’s almost like bookmarked in my mind of that guy really did make my day that day because it was just tough going through that grief process and him being able to do something so simple. He has no idea how much that affected me.

Greg: That’s where the title came from. You experienced the power of kindness. I went to my barber a few days ago, and she had just opened up a new salon, new suite, and she had a framed picture up that said “The Power of Kindness.” I had already given her a copy of my book and she said, “Look what I got.” And she pointed to this picture that said “The Power of Kindness.” She had read my book, but that is something like you said, that is landmarked in your mind. It made such an impression that you’ve never forgotten it. And that is the secret power of kindness—to make someone’s day and thus change our world.

Carrie: The Bible talks about loving our neighbors as ourselves. And how does being kind to ourselves help us be kind to others? Because I truly believe this and what I’ve seen in my own life and the lives of my clients.

Greg: I write about this in the book. I have a whole chapter on love, which is also a fruit of the spirit. I talk about loving yourself so that you can love others. I talk about being kind to yourself so that you can be kind to others. I talk about forgiving yourself so that you can forgive others, but it all starts with us and self-reflection. I talk about meditation. I talk about journaling. There’s so much that has helped me in a therapeutic way from journaling, and my devotional and anxiety that I wrote came from journaling. It came from writing about what God was showing me in scripture.

I have found that oftentimes, and this was new to me, about a decade ago, I had learned and was taught, and then as a pastor taught, the great commandment poorly. We had bumper stickers at my church that said, “Love God, love people.” And I always taught love God, love others, love God, love people. And it was a two-prong approach. And then the last church I was on staff at, nine years ago, the pastor talked upward, inward, outward, love God, love yourself so that you can love others. It was a three-pronged approach, and that’s exactly what scripture says. Love God, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I have found that oftentimes when we talk about loving ourselves, we cut ourselves out of the equation. And we exhaust ourselves by saying, “Well, and I know the Bible says to love God and love others. So I’m going to try to do it with all my might.” But if we haven’t stopped to love ourselves, we’re not properly able to love others. We won’t have the strength and the resilience to do it. In this book, I do a deep dive into love and the great commandment. And one of the most beautiful and healthy things that you can do is to love yourself, to forgive yourself, to be kind to yourself. And the byproduct of that is you’ll love others, be kind to others, forgive others. It’s a win-win scenario, but it starts with loving yourself.

Carrie: Right. I think one of the things that we do, especially in trauma work, is people will be very shameful or angry regarding things that they’ve done in the past as a teenager, as a young adult, or just a really low time in their life where they made some bad choices and went down the wrong path. And really helping that person gain empathy for that younger self, like, did they have the knowledge? Did they have the skills to act differently? Did they know how to regulate their emotions? And once you’re able to kind of go through all that, it’s like, “Oh, wow, no, I was completely ill-equipped, and I was acting out of my woundedness.” It didn’t make it right or okay, but I can have compassion towards my younger self, understanding how I got to where I was.

That’s often like just a really breakthrough, beautiful moment for someone that helps them also be compassionate towards other people who are acting out of their own woundedness and their own hurt. I think sometimes when we encounter people that are maybe a little bit prickly, we forget, well, maybe they’re really hurting right now, or maybe they have their own struggles they’re going through that we can’t see or we don’t know about.

Greg: I talk about that in the book. There’s a quote that somebody said that I referenced in the book of when somebody is harsh to you, critical of you, or rude to you, or just comes at you in a hard way, oftentimes we want to respond with, “What’s wrong with you?” instead of “What happened to you?” Everybody’s got a story. Everybody has a background. Maybe they were abused as a child, maybe they just went through a divorce, maybe they had a bad night’s sleep. Instead of responding with “What’s wrong with you?” if we have the approach of, “I wonder what happened to them that led them to this point,” because everybody’s got a story.

As I mentioned in the book, almost everybody I’ve come across has a father when there are things that have happened in our life and our childhood and our early adult life that bring us to a point where we are not acting like our character is and like we want to be known for.

There are things that people go through that lead them to maybe treat us poorly. And if we can start with compassion and realize that, wow, that person could have been through a whole lot in their life. I’m going to extend grace to them. I’m going to extend mercy to them. And grace is undeserved. It’s unmerited favor. People don’t have to deserve grace. It’s just something we give. It is not only my favorite word, I named my daughter Grace, my first child.

Grace is unmerited favor. It’s undeserved. It is a gift, and a gift doesn’t have to be earned. It’s just given. When somebody comes at me in an attacking way or a rude or tough way, I can choose to extend grace to them, whether they deserve it or not. And just saying, maybe they’re having an off day today. I’m going to choose to be graceful.

Carrie: If you can go back and tell your younger self something that didn’t have the awareness that you have now about mental health issues or what you were struggling with, what would that be?

Greg: Great question. I think because it’s fresh on my mind, I probably have a new answer now. My oldest daughter, who has now gone off to grad school, she’s getting her Ph.D., and she was at the house visiting before she moved into her new apartment over the summer. And somehow we got to talking about Matt Damon or something. And I said, I know it was before your time, but have you ever heard of Good Will Hunting? And she said, Yeah, I guess I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it. I said, “Well, let’s watch it.” So we watched it and that scene where Robin Williams says to him, “It’s not your fault.” That’s what I would tell my younger self because I was abused, but it wasn’t my fault. I was molested, but it wasn’t my fault. My dad was terrible to me, but it wasn’t my fault. That’s what I would tell my younger self because I grew up with just terrible emotional pain because of all that I’ve been through.

On-site, they do exercises where you speak to your younger self, and they walk you through all types of therapy where somebody stands in and you speak to another person in the group that is representing your younger self, and you address that person, but I think now, after freshly, after nearly 30 years, rewatching Good Will Hunting, I would just say to Little Greg, “It’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”

Carrie: Yes. I feel like we could have this conversation for hours. This has been really great. I hope that people will look into getting your book, “The Secret Power of Kindness.” Thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Greg: Thank you for having me.

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Carrie: I appreciated this episode so much because I know those that struggle with anxiety struggle to be kind to themselves and often can struggle to be kind to others as well. We all have opportunities to practice kindness every day. All the little acts of kindness do add up to make the world a better place and allow us to share Christ’s love with others. In a couple of weeks, Steve will be back to join me on the show as we talk about what we’ve learned in our third year of marriage. Thanks so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. 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 Maingrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

82. Trauma-Informed Ministry with Suzanne Burns

Written by Carrie Bock on November 9, 2022. Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode.

Suzanne Burns, founder and executive director of Foundation House Ministries and BeCharityWise. Today on the show, she will share with us about creating a trauma-informed ministry.

Episode Highlights:

How Suzanne started her work with mothers in crisis situations
What led her to do some more research about trauma-informed
How to effectively minister to people
Reframing the role of ministry
More about BeCharityWise

Episode Summary:

In Episode 82 of Christian Faith and OCD, I dive into the topic of trauma-informed ministry with Suzanne Burns. As the founder and executive director of a maternity home and crisis program for mothers, Suzanne has dedicated years to helping women facing challenging situations such as coming out of jail, rehab, or homelessness. Her work focuses on guiding these women toward sustainable stability and reunification with their families.

Suzanne’s work is deeply personal, inspired by her own experience with a crisis pregnancy and years of single motherhood. After volunteering at a pregnancy center, she saw the need for more support, leading her to open a maternity home in 2014.

She shares the challenges faced early on, such as dealing with trauma-related behaviors. A key turning point was learning about trauma’s physical and behavioral effects, which helped them transform their approach. By combining trauma awareness with understanding poverty and addiction, they now have a 97% success rate in helping women maintain stability.

We also explore how childhood trauma (as studied in the ACEs research) links to long-term health issues, highlighting the importance of addressing trauma for lasting change.

Tune in to learn more about how trauma-informed ministry can make a real difference.

Related Resources:

BeCharityWise

Foundation House Ministries

More Episodes to Listen to:

107. Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) with Diana Rice, LMHC, CIMHP, CTP, QS

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 82. I am your host, Carrie Bock, and if you’re new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today on the show, I’ll be talking with Suzanne Burns about creating a trauma-informed ministry.

I feel like this is so important people in the church to understand and know about, and we’ve had other episodes about helping people with anxiety in the church. So I’m excited about this episode as well. Suzanne, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Suzanne: Yes, I am the founder and executive director of a maternity home, residential and non-residential program for mothers in crisis.

We serve women coming out of jail, out of rehab, pregnant, and a. Sometimes they’ve lost custody or are working towards reunification, whether that’s with family members or with the state. And so we’re part of that process towards getting them to a place of being able to build sustainable stability. And out of what we’ve learned through doing that for the last eight years, we’ve also launched a kind of a side to other churches and nonprofits to help them understand how trauma and poverty mindset and addiction affect the people that they serve so that they can serve more effectively as well.

Suzanne’s Journey and Mission to Support Women Coming out of Difficult Situations

Carrie: Awesome. Now, how did you get started in that work in, you know, mothers in crisis pregnancy situations?

Suzanne: Yeah, I was actually a single mom for a number of years, myself.

I had a crisis pregnancy when I was in college, and then, um, got grew up in a very, very Christian home and found myself by the time I was at a junior, at a Christian university, I was smoking, I was drinking, I was experimenting with illegal drugs, and then I ended up pregnant. And we did get married and it was not good a marriage as it wasn’t a dating relationship, which led to divorce when my son was just right at two.

And then several years of single parenting, I met and married my current husband. We’ve been married now almost 20 years, had a second son. And as I began to kind of rebuild and restabilize, I wanted. Be able to give back to women that were in the same situation that I had once been in. And so I began volunteering at a local pregnancy health center, and I was there for seven years.

I ended up really, really loving it, loving what I did. But we just began seeing more and more women coming through that needed a deeper level of support. They were pregnant and living in their cars. They were afraid of being kicked out by, you know, angry stepdads. They were 24 and didn’t have a g e d kind of floating like a leaf in the wind.

So many of these girls, one particular mom that I recall, she came in one day and she was really frustrated because she had been looking for a job. And so I’m kind of a fixer. So I was asking her, “You know, maybe, are you applying for the wrong kinds of jobs? Are you a poor interviewee? How can I help you fix the problem?”

And she said. “Well, you know, at some point in the interview the baby gets fussy or he needs a diaper change and you know, I’m pretty sure the interview is kind of over at that point.” And of course, my first thought was, “Oh, I’m pretty sure the interview was over when they saw you pushing in the baby stroller.”

But I had been there long enough that I knew that’s never the full picture. So as I began asking more questions, I realized that the reason she was taking her child with her in the first place was because she was living with the baby’s father who was a violent drug dealer and people in and out all day and night.

And so she did not trust him to watch their son even long enough for her to get a job. And I went home that day and told my husband, We have got to do something. It has to be. No one else has stepped up. It has to be us. It took about two and a half years of fundraising and developing, and we opened in 2014 and that conversation was in June of 2011.

Getting Started and Early Challenges

Carrie: Wow. Tell us about, as you started that ministry and were working in it, some of the challenges that you had earlier on that led you to do some more research about trauma information.

Suzanne: Yeah, it was pretty much everything I’ve learned has been because a client came in that we didn’t understand or we didn’t know how to handle, and that is what sent us then to the research.

The Lord is so gracious in giving me a picture and then giving me the education behind it, and then bringing others who need me to know that information. So first it was a poverty mindset, understanding how chronic poverty kind of reshapes. Thinking the worldview of individuals living, especially those living in generational chronic poverty.

Then we started getting some clients coming in who had a history of trauma, but we didn’t understand what that meant at the time because I was used to seeing clients like. One hour every three weeks. You know, living with them is a whole lot different. And so we were getting frustrated and, and we were having a lot of girls come in and go right back out again.

We had one girl come in and she was sick constantly and it was always like an E.R worthy trip. She would go in to, you know, about every three to four. And we began to like time. We began to say, Okay, well it’s been, you know, this period of time we’re about due. And it was always like bladder infection, urinary tracted infection.

It was always something similar but not exactly the same thing. And it was always validated by the doctors, because of course we were like, well, you know, at some point she’s gotta be faking it. and simultaneously with this, she was also losing jobs because of the time off that she was having to take her cycles was six weeks.

And so we were seeing that about every five weeks she was, you know, getting sick, not able to go to work. Her work isn’t happy. They end up firing her, she goes to the er and then we start the cycle all over again. She ended up that year with 13 different W two. And we were so confused. We were so frustrated cuz she was super, super sweet.

And then we had another girl move into the house who like used unbelievable amounts of toilet paper just by herself. This was way pre-pandemic, way before there was an actual toilet paper black market. But we were just like, how is this disappearing? How can one person be using this much? What is going on?

Understanding Trauma-Informed Approach

And then we had a student intern, a Masters in Social work Intern, doing her their practicum with us, and she had us watch a video by Bessel VanDerKolk, who is the author of The Body, Keeps the Score and instantly pieces fell into place. Immediately, we began to realize that this is the physical outgrowth of the trauma that these women had experienced.

That was the big awakening, eye-opening. We were immediately addicted to absolutely everything, trauma-informed to the point that we began teaching others just because we knew so much. We just saw the vast needs. There’s such an ignorance and such a lack within the church to understand. It was so fascinating and it was also such a relief that, “Oh, that it can be fixed.”

There is reason why her stomach issues were so constant. There is the reason why she was unable to process, to digest the healthy nutritional foods we were giving her. Her body had actually acclimated to Mountain Dew and Cheetos for lunch because that had been for years. So when we’re having salads and you know, fresh fruit and.

That was what was abnormal to her system. So layering for me, layering the poverty mindset with the trauma made it so much easier for us to then deal with women coming in with a past of addiction. Those coming in with a history of mental health because it, to me, it’s just like a layer cake based in the generational chronic poverty thinking that then the trauma is, it is components, you know, it’s either affecting or affected by the client and.

That leads to addiction as a coping mechanism, right? It leads to mental health as an epigenetic response to the trauma. It, it’s all interrelated, but it’s all rooted in their trauma, but also rooted in poverty thinking. Just from learning all of that, we have radically revolutionized how we work with.

And we now boost a 97% success rate of our clients being able to maintain their stability at least a year post-graduation, which to us is a housing, transportation, employment, and childcare.

The ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study and Its Connection to Chronic Health Conditions

Carrie: Wow. That is really amazing because those are a lot of pieces and a lot of times what we see is people come into programs and they’re doing okay and then they leave the program and they relapse or something happens and you know, they’re back into that cycle again, like you were talking about. We wanna talk a little bit about the ACEs study, and I’ll have to kind of explain this a little bit to people, and then I have a question for you. So many years ago, I think this was actually done maybe in the nineties or early two thousands, Kaiser, the eighties early is when it started.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, so Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare company that’s out west in the US, they said, we really wanna look at these people with chronic health conditions. We weren’t even talking about mental health. They were talking about physical health, things like high blood pressure, and diabetes, and looking at the connection between what they called adverse childhood experiences and these chronic physical health condition.

They had a scale where there’s 10 items on the adverse childhood experience scale. Some of them are things like parental divorce, obviously types of abuse, you know, physical sexual abuse. I think maybe having a parent with an addiction, isn’t that on there? These types of experiences that people had in childhood, and what they found was that okay if you had one or two, there was maybe a little bit more of a risk for you to have a chronic health condition, but once you got four and above, all of a sudden it was like a graph skyrocketed at that point like “Whoa, for these people to have addictions and actually end up with not just addictions, but that was one of the things they were looking at. Like I said, the high blood pressure and cholesterol, and so. and looking at people who have had more adverse childhood experiences may even have a shorter lifespan because of some of these chronic health issues that also arise.

What you had told me when we had talked previously. The average church attender has zero to two adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs are usually and the average range for your ministry is seven to nine, so obviously, that’s a big gap to bridge in people kind of understanding what some of these women have been through like can you talk to us about like the challenges of bridging that gap?

Suzanne: Yeah, exactly. So many of them have this significant trauma history. Someone with an ACEs score of seven to nine means that they have experienced at least one instance of seven to nine of those items on the ACEs study. And just for your audience, they are physical, emotional, sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect, and then household dysfunction category is a family member with mental illness and incarcerated relative domestic violence, mother treated violently, substance abuse or divorce, but that also can include fatherlessness. What we found was that these women are coming in and they’re carrying this load of trauma.

They’re carrying the past pain, they’re carrying the physical effects of this. They’re carrying the social and emotional and cognitive impairment because of that, you know, many of our moms about 70% did not graduate with a high school diploma or GED because all of this trauma is happening as children.

And so that is significantly affecting them as far as school goes. Then you get labeled a bad kid, and so then you begin adopting those risky health behaviours, whether it’s teen boys that are driving too fast, whether it’s dating the wrong kinds, whether it’s, you know, drugs and alcohol and, and all of these different things that then lead to disease, disability, social problems, you know, in and out of jail, in and out of rehab programs, which can then lead to early death. It can also lead to chronic heart disease, to certain forms of cancer, to COPD and so many different things that we don’t even associate usually at. For an 18 to 22-year-old, the ACEs study does demonstrate.

So we have women coming in from the church who want to volunteer. You know, in this world that have experienced, like me, the ACE questionnaire asks you from birth to age 18 that to answer that I was a zero. All of my ACEs occurred during this one single relationship. And I went from a zero to a seven and then kind of back down again once I began to get my life back together.

Challenges in Ministry and Volunteer Engagement

I have a certain degree of experience, but I cannot relate to the majority of our clients. In the fullness of what they’ve experienced. And so these little volunteers from the churches would want to come in. I experienced this when I was young, you know, I did that. And so they think that that is enough to balance out the relationship.

It really isn’t because they can’t understand the depth of the brain changes that have occurred. So one of the most important things for us when we’re talking with new prospective volunteers is to really get them to understand what has changed in the brain development of our typical client. They think differently. They respond differently. They have been conditioned to think in these certain ways, and so their behavioral patterns. It takes a long time to change those. So you’re going to see more rapid outbursts of anger. You’re gonna hear foul language as just as common. You’re going to see and hear things that you’re not going to expect in a typical ministry, and you don’t necessarily have permission to address it.

That’s usually the hardest part because that is hard. They haven’t built trust with our clients. We have, many of our volunteers want to come in and they wanna do bible. Well, many of our girls just flat aren’t interested first of all, and second of all, even if they are interested, they’re not ready for that level.

There’s a great deal of biblical illiteracy, but there’s also a lot of church hurt and church abuse that has to be gotten over before they’re ready for these types of things. And so many times they wanna come in and volunteers from the church want to come in and do these big deep Bible studies with the.

That impacted them, but they’re not a good fit for our clients because maybe they can’t read that well. Maybe they’re not equipped to do the amount of homework that is associated with some of these types of programs. Maybe they’re not ready emotionally for what is going to be unveiled. Maybe they’re not ready as far as just being able to read scripture specifically.

Some of those Old Testament names are really complicated, especially if you accidentally ask one of ’em to read out loud because you’re wanting to draw them in. You’re doing the things that in a typical church environment you want to do, it can backfire. And so we have to be really, really careful to equip our volunteers wisely so that they’re not set up for failure because our mission is not our volunteers.

Our mission is our client. And so our volunteers cannot run off our clients, but there have been several times where our clients run off volunteers.

Carrie: Yeah, I can imagine that. Yeah. If you haven’t been used to that, kind of, that experience of what those people have been through in terms of the emotional reactivity that can happen with PTSD over something that, to you seems very slight, but it was a huge deal exactly for that individual.

It was a huge trigger and I think, one of the things that you’re touching on is a lot of times what the church can be guilty of is in these types of ministries going in and trying to like clean people up, like, “Here, let me help you. Here’s some money, or here’s a job, or here’s some clothes and you know, we’re just gonna fix you all up and everything’s gonna be good.” When really true transformation has to happen from the inside out.

The Importance of Understanding and Patience When Working with Individuals in the Healing Process.

I’m curious in terms of like what you’ve seen regarding that may be in your work with other ministries, kind of how you’ve helped them to like reframe that like their role.

Suzanne: Exactly. A lot of times. Well, so it’s two-fold. One is the focus internally and how you work with clients, and the other one is how you message that to the greater community, to your donor base or to your volunteer pool, or like your occasional volunteer pool.

A lot of times, I’ll use the analogy of a pound, because sometimes if you can change the picture from people to animals, it’s a little bit easier to process. Not that I’m equating our clients with. But sometimes it’s just an easier word picture to process. You find a, you know, a stray dog on the side of the road and he’s dirty and matted and, and filthy and you know, you’ve got all sorts of insects and everything crawling all over him.

He’s just really unhappy, starving. And you pick him up and you take him to the pound, they’re going to do a lot of work. They’re. Be checking him out by a doctor. They’re gonna be cleaning him and, and de fleeing and debugging him. Whatever’s crawling on him, they’re gonna be getting him the nutrition that, that he needs.

That’s a process. It’s not an instantaneous, “Oh, I found a dog on the side of the road and now he’s ready for adoption into a new home”. They have to see what’s his temperament. What kind of personality he has. Does he get along well with other animals? Does he get along with small children?

Before they can put this animal into the adoptable population, they have to do some rehab work. But when we look at people on the side of the road, it’s like we have the expectation that all you need is a shower, a hot meal, and a change of clothes, maybe a haircut. But you ought to be fine now and go get you a job and let you know.

Start paying your own way, and it’s not at all the same. The women that we work with are so broken and they have been holding themselves together for so long that a lot of times our first few months is just giving them space to finally acknowledge their broken. And finally, feel all the feelings that they have been hiding from for so long before we can even begin the process of rehabilitation to get them to the place where they can then learn, then grow, and move forward.

Our motto is rescuing mothers, rebuilding lives and restoring futures. And that is very much the progression that we walk through with these women. Rescuing can take upwards of six. Rebuilding. That’s the point where she’s finally ready to start working and getting the job skills that she needs and figuring out, you know, credit and starting to save money to buy her first vehicle because we, we live in a semi-rural area where there is not public transportation, and so a car is almost always her first goal.

And then getting daycare and getting healthy, getting her into the ob-gyn office and, and checking her out, making sure the baby is doing well. And then as she begins to kind of master some of these things and start looking towards the future. Now we can start thinking about what does rebuilding look like for her.

What does living independently look like for her? And that whole process. Overall, pre-pandemic, we were looking at six months to a year for most. And since that time, it really is more like 18 months to two years, partly because of economic changes and partly because we are seeing a significant increase in the severity of the women that come to us.

And just for a frame of reference, we’re the only maternity home within 150 miles. So we serve 13 counties by design and several others by default. So it’s a really vast population that many, many, many are in this boat, but they are not being served because we are so limited on staff in size.

Carrie: Where are you located at?

Suzanne: Right outside Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Carrie: Okay, great. Tell us about BeCarityWise.

Suzanne: Yeah, that is our training arm. We have online videos and we also do in person, whether live via Zoom or local trainings to help other churches, and nonprofits understand how trauma and poverty mindset and addiction affect the people that they serve so that you can serve more effectively if people are interested in going to becharitywise.com.

I’ve written a short little book called The Accidental Social Worker that helps you get a feel for the why behind some of these things, why poverty mindset is an issue, and why trauma is affecting [hysically. Many times we just assume that, okay, well you’re not in trauma anymore. I’ve rescued you out of that. I’ve got you a safe bed to sleep in. I’ve got new food. You know, that should be enough. But the trauma carries with them because the trauma is not actually the event that happened. It’s the emotions associated with the event that happened, and that can carry through really for a lifetime until these women are able to find healing.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s huge. A lot of overlays between what you are talking about and foster care. You know, this sense of like, okay, so we’ve removed this child from the home where there was addiction and poverty, neglect, and now we’ve put them in the suburbs with this. Nice family and everything’s safe and good, but they’re still responding as though they’re in that abusive, neglected environment. You know that that happens.

Suzanne: Exactly.

Carrie: Quite frequently and a lot of times people, they’re very confused by that. Like, what in the world is going on where? Responding this way? I think that what you’re doing is so important in terms of us being able to effectively minister to people out in the community, like the real world, real life stuff that you’re seeing, and so I appreciate you sharing with us about that.

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.

Suzanne: The one that sparks me is actually what got me out of my first marriage and on this long journey, even though at the time I really didn’t realize it. I was so, I was still in active addiction with my first husband, but I was managing it, You know, he was a musician, which meant he didn’t have to work apparently.

and so I was doing what I could to earn more like I had sold mortgages at this time. I was selling insurance and I had had a really frustrating day and I went to go to my mother-in-law’s to pick up our son, and I was just kind of complaining, you know, these were good little church people as well. And so I was still talking the talk when I was around them, and I just said, You know, it was so frustrating.

I just, I don’t understand why God just won’t bless me. My mother-in-law just very graciously turned around and said, Well, What are you doing that God can bless? And then she just went back to filling my son’s little backpack as we got ready to go home. But in an instant, I was just stripped naked. I was so raw and open and vulnerable.

I finally saw myself through the Lord’s eyes, and that was the day that I had to shift everything. That was November. 2000. And from that point forward, it took several weeks for me to quit smoking. But uh, that was the only thing I was really personally addicted to. But the cigarettes, the alcohol and the drugs just stopped immediately.

My marriage was, was more of a challenge. But by February, my son and I were living independently because I couldn’t stay any longer. The veil had been, And I couldn’t unsee it. And I knew that if I stayed in my first marriage because my first husband was not willing to leave that lifestyle, I knew that I would not be strong enough to stay stable on my own.

It was either with him and clean or without him and clean. And he chose without. And so, that to me is one of the defining conversations of my life. And it was probably 15 seconds long.

Carrie: Yeah. Sometimes all you need is that like kind of one or two sentences and it just sparks something within you.

That was huge, Sounds like a turning point. And change the whole trajectory of your life.

Suzanne: It sure did. Yeah.

Carrie: Wow. And we’ll put links in the show notes to where people can find you and hopefully, some people will kind of take advantage of these trainings for their churches and, and ministry sites.

Suzanne: Yeah, I would love that.

Tag: Mental Health

108. OCD Personal Story with Michael Kheir

Episode Summary:

Episode Summary:

Related links and resources:

More to listen to:

Transcript

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Episode Highlights.

Episode Summary:

Related links and Resources:

Tune in for another inspiring episode:

Transcript

82. Trauma-Informed Ministry with Suzanne Burns

Episode Highlights:

Episode Summary:

Related Resources:

More Episodes to Listen to:

Transcript

Suzanne’s Journey and Mission to Support Women Coming out of Difficult Situations

Getting Started and Early Challenges

Understanding Trauma-Informed Approach

The ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study and Its Connection to Chronic Health Conditions

Challenges in Ministry and Volunteer Engagement

The Importance of Understanding and Patience When Working with Individuals in the Healing Process.