Tag: OCD Personal Story

180. A Pastor’s Daughter Struggles with Scrupulosity: A Personal Story with Stephanie Smith, LPC

Written by Carrie Bock on June 30, 2025. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie speaks with Virginia-based therapist Stephanie Smith about her personal and professional journey with OCD, including how it intersected with her Christian faith. They explore the development of scrupulosity, the healing impact of ICBT, and the importance of separating OCD’s voice from the truth of God’s grace.

Episode Highlights:

Stephanie’s personal journey with OCD, beginning in childhood and evolving into scrupulosity during her teen years.
Why OCD often targets a person’s deepest values—such as faith—and how that complicates spiritual life.
The difference between fear-based religious behavior and grace-centered faith.
The role of perfectionism and guilt in religious OCD and the shift toward grace-based faith.
How Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT) helps individuals stay grounded in reality and resist OCD’s imagined narratives.

Episode Summary:

What happens when your deepest spiritual values become the very thing your brain starts to fear? Therapist Stephanie Smith knows that struggle firsthand—not just as a clinician, but as someone who grew up with undiagnosed OCD that slowly evolved into scrupulosity.

Stephanie opens up about how her struggles with OCD began in early childhood, long before she had the language or support to understand what was happening. As she grew older, her symptoms shifted into scrupulosity—a form of OCD that latches onto one’s faith, twisting deeply held spiritual values into sources of fear, guilt, and confusion.

Stephanie’s story highlights just how overwhelming it can be to live with OCD in a Christian context. She shares how intrusive thoughts, purity culture, and black-and-white thinking made her feel distant from God and unsure of her salvation, even as she earnestly tried to follow all the “rules.” We talk about the critical moment when she finally received an accurate diagnosis in her late teens, the relief that came with understanding her mind, and how therapy—especially Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT)—helped her reconnect with her true self and rediscover the God of grace, not fear.

Stephanie and I also reflect on the connection between identity development and OCD recovery, how perfectionism and guilt play a role, and what it means to embrace a spiritual life rooted in love—not performance.

We don’t just talk theory—we talk healing. Stephanie’s story is filled with hope, insight, and tangible wisdom for anyone feeling stuck in fear, shame, or spiritual confusion. And if you’re someone who’s navigating OCD as a Christian or supporting someone who is, I want you to know: you’re not alone, and you don’t have to stay in that place of uncertainty forever.

🎧 Tune in to the full episode to hear Stephanie’s powerful journey and learn how you can begin trading fear for peace, and perfectionism for grace.

Explore Related Episode:

162. Hope for Scrupulosity with Dr. Constance Salhany

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower wife and mother. Licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing. And helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you. Let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

Carrie: Another reason I like this interview is because it really shows you how scrupulosity often comes as a secondary OCD to an initial OCD theme that then gets latched into faith. That’s helpful for us to know because oftentimes we have to really look at tackling that initial OCD theme before we can unravel the spiritual pieces of it.

I know you’re gonna enjoy today’s episode, so let’s dive right in. Stephanie, if you can just go ahead and introduce yourself for us.

Stephanie: Yeah. My name is Stephanie Smith. I’m a psychotherapist, licensed professional counselor. Virginia located at a group practice in Richmond with lived experience with OCD.

Carrie: Awesome. And we met through the ICBT group, or was it through Instagram?

Stephanie: I think it was Instagram. I saw I was following some OCD accounts and had followed, stumbled across years. Why did you wanna share your story today? I think my diagnosis of OCD, just the intersection, I think of my faith and OCD and sort of how my own faith sort of.

I took hold of, or my OCD kind of had the theme of the scru moralistic, the religious OCD already as a Christian OCD really attacks your values. Just raising awareness, I think, of the forms that OCD can take and shedding some light on a sufferer of OCD, who’s also has navigated her faith. How that can kind of be complicated when OC D’S a liar and your faith is not.

And so trying to navigate what voice is what,

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about how OCD showed up for you, or when did you start to notice those obsessions coming on?

Stephanie: They really started. I think I was really young and we’re talking maybe like elementary school, and I would have really intrusive thoughts. They would just kind of, they were like violent or they were sexual or they were horrific and they would just be these images and I would just burst into tears.

I didn’t know where they were, what they were, how they came about. I. And I had a lot of separation anxiety, I think from my parents at the time, the separation anxiety. I was asking my parents, am I gonna be okay? Is everything okay? They didn’t have much knowledge about anxiety and OCD or there was not much mental health awareness in general in the early nineties.

I’m a millennial, so there wasn’t a lot, and my parents didn’t really know what to do except to reassure me. And we know with OCD sometimes reassurance. Can make it worse as a compulsions. There was a lot of reassurance seeking a lot of confessing that I had a thought or that I, and a lot of the confessing wasn’t even anything I was doing wrong, but I worried, what if I was doing something wrong?

And so compulsive praying a lot of that. So that’s kind of how it started when I was young. And I guess I can fast forward a little bit into middle school. With OCD, it tends to play whack-a-mole with themes. So at first it was kind of that harm OCD that worries that something bad was gonna happen to my family or me.

And this fixation in the nineties, around the time when I grew up and was a child and also a teenager in a lot of, I guess at that time I grew up in evangelical culture, so in youth group and stuff, where at that time there was a lot of talk about, I truly got hung up on obedience. I was like, oh, what if I go to hell?

What if I’m not pleasing? God? What if, what if? What if?

Carrie: Did you feel like you could share any of those concerns with your parents? Or were there certain ones that you would seek reassurance for and ask them about? And then other ones that you were like, oh no, that’s too scary to admit or tell anybody? I don’t think until later,

Stephanie: no.

A lot of what I was struggling with, I just remember lots of times I would cry to nowhere because I had an intrusive thought.

Carrie: Oh, but they

Stephanie: didn’t know why I was upset, why I was crying, and I couldn’t really articulate it. I did feel like I could come to my parents. My dad is a pastor and it was funny ’cause he was never really a hellfire and brimstone pastor, but I think in that culture there was just fixation on eternal damnation and I was like, oh no.

As a kid, when you have OCD, it just makes some things a lot harder to navigate

Carrie: and it just gives latched on to certain things and especially I think. OCD like structure, like, oh, well you’re telling me do A, B, C, and I’ll be obedient and I’ll be like the good Christian, so I’ve gotta like extra be sure that I’m doing A, B, C, so that I can go to heaven and please God, and he won’t be upset with me.

Stephanie: It was challenging to get to a place where I didn’t fixate on my face as much. I got to a place where I had figured out my beliefs for myself and things didn’t scare me. It was a journey, and there’s a lot of themes that sort of played Whack-a-Mole, but in sixth grade. There were rumors about me and a friend of mine that we were gay, and this is in like mid to late nineties where there wasn’t as much awareness or acceptance of the lgbtq plus community.

And so then it was like you were really ostracized. At the time, I didn’t think I was gay, but then I started to question it. What if I am gay and if I’m gay? What if I’m an abomination to God and I’m really going to hell? Yeah. Again, just this fixation and at the time I didn’t have a healthy understanding of, I don’t think, my faith and the concept of heaven.

Hell, as a child, you are very black and white with your categories of thinking. It’s either good or bad. Right or wrong. Yeah.

Carrie: Yes. Or. I think that whole period of sexual development too, back in that day, very much like purity culture. I don’t know if this was part of your story, but like not talking about sex and our only conversations surrounding it are no bad, don’t do it.

Wait till

Stephanie: you’re married. I had a really great youth group, leaders and things, but there were camps that we’d go to and so sometimes. Even if a youth pastor a leader was well-meaning if you’ve got somebody in the group that’s got OCD, you gonna latch onto something that you said and spin a story. And I tended to do that.

I did that a lot and just really thought that I was like too bad of a person for Jesus to love, which at the time really made me very depressed when I was, I wanna say in 10th grade or 11th grade, my dad had found a poem that I wrote. He thought was a suicide note. It wasn’t. It was just a really depressing sort of self-deprecating poem.

And he had taken me outta school to go to, I guess the hospital to look into counseling or medicine. And this is the first time I’m 17, so I have not gotten any help all these years for OCD or anxiety or any of it. And I got put on Paxil, which is SSRI, antidepressant, which really helped with my mood and I didn’t find out until later into my own career as a licensed therapist that.

Those types of medications also help a lot with OCD. And so when I got put on that, I was also given, uh, recommended or referred to a therapist who really spotted my OCD. I mean, it might have been the first session or something. She was like, this is what this is. So it was a huge relief to know, you mean this is a thing that I’m not wrong and bad.

I literally have a pulse condition, the psychoeducation piece, this is what OCD is. Your intrusive thoughts are actually the opposite of what you want. They’re not indicative of who you are as a person. That’s why you are so scared of them. ’cause you don’t like them. This is OCD and so that was instrumental in my career now as a therapist was having her.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s awesome that it was found so quickly and they didn’t just treat you for anxiety. Right. That sounds like you were having some pretty clear symptomology though, like just explaining the thoughts that were going through your head. And then did you stay with that same counselor for a while? I did.

Stephanie: She told me a little bit about ERP and gave me a book on it on exposure response prevention, which is a kind of golden standard therapy for OCD, but I found that just the knowledge of what OCD was significantly decreased. Not only my fear of my intrusive thoughts, but it dissipated the fear. So I wasn’t afraid of having them, and therefore it decreased the frequency because I wasn’t living in fear of having them ’cause I knew what they were.

So I could just, oh, that’s OCD. It was also interesting because when I told her about my fears of. At the time, oh, what if I’m gay? Or what if she goes, Stephanie, do you wanna ram your tongue down a girl’s throat? And I was like, no. Ew. She’s like, then you’re not gay. And I’m like, okay. So at the time, regardless of your thoughts on, as a Christian, as a believer and sexuality, it wasn’t like okay, like it wasn’t anywhere and was still wasn’t as much of acceptance or awareness really of the LGBT community.

And so I’ve since reconciled some of my thoughts on, and my faith and I. That just kind of was a growing process as I got older. But at the time in the culture in the nineties that I was in an evangelical culture, it was just this big no-no. And so after I kind of realized what OCD was, got the education from her, that sort of propelled me forward into.

Going into my career now.

Carrie: I mean, essentially what she did there in terms of I Ccbt was get you in touch with your true desires.

Stephanie: Yeah, I really like ICBT as a therapeutic modality for OCD because it resolves. It kind of at the root, tells you that your intrusive thoughts, like what you obsess about, is it random.

It’s actually a threat to kind of your true self. It scares you because it’s not how you see yourself. But OCD tends to be very strong in making you feel that the thought or the urge or the fear is true. And even if you know kind of deep down that something is not the case, OCD tries to convince you it is as it is the doubting disorder.

Carrie: I’m just realizing more and more how much of OCD treatment is about identity development, and I’m curious about. Your spiritual development from that point, of course, like OCD was trying to hijack that and distort really your view of God and distort like your beliefs about what it meant to be a Christian or workspace, salvation, however you wanna conceptualize that.

Yeah. But how did that shift? Over time for you, was it just kind of small ways of like reading the scriptures for yourself? Was it being around other forms of teaching? Like

Stephanie: after college? I think I had sort of, I’ve gone to your more conservative evangelical churches. I’ve gone to more progressive churches.

I’ve kind of like explored a lot to get to a point where I’m confident in my faith as I see it, I don’t fear it as much. And my grandmother. She had really bad anxiety and worry. My grandfather, her husband had OCD, which is where I get it from, which unfortunately, but both the OCD and the anxiety, one of my great aunt had told her one day, Jeanette, you read the Bible too much, it’ll drive you crazy.

The idea was if you obsess and you were compulsively, urgently seeking the scriptures, you were reading out of fear and you were not reading in a way that is where you’re at peace and you’re interested, you are afraid. And so I took that to really mean that I. If you are looking at stuff and you were forgetting about the grace component or the fact that salvation is a journey, a process through which Paul says to work out your salvation, it’s a sanctification process, so right, it’s not gonna be, you’re gonna get everything right in this moment.

You’re gonna obey 100%. It’s just not realistic. Nor is it indicative of the great heroes of scripture

Carrie: who also made their share of mistakes and messed up and. I think people forget that Paul was on a track murdering Christians before he encountered Jesus. I think somehow we’ve missed that part of the story.

We’re like, let’s like just exclude that and pretend like that never happened. But OCD will have you getting stuck on like one small offense or some sin that you’ve committed. It could be something that you did a long, long time ago, and OCD keeps bringing that back up. Well see you’re this way or that way.

Okay. That was something I did 10 years ago and it’s not even relevant to my life today and who I am. Thank God I’m not the same person that I was that many years ago. I’ve just been processing, I think a little bit about what you’re talking about related to sin, forgiveness, grace related to scrupulosity, that those can be really challenging concepts for people to grasp understanding of.

It’s not about me doing all the things to be right with God. It’s very hard to shift out of that. I mean, do you wanna speak to that? Maybe a little bit?

Stephanie: Yeah. I think with, you had kind of mentioned earlier, like a workspace kind of, we can get into that mentality with OCD being a kind of black and white all or nothing, that it can really align with this idea that I have to earn, I have to do, I have to this workspace.

When the work has already been done. And that’s the beauty of it that I had to realize was that these are all things that I have been saved from and I don’t have to white knuckle it, grip my teeth and like push through and try to obey all these commands. It’s hard because I think sometimes why I used to look at Christ’s commands.

Christ can say some things that are pretty all or nothing pretty, like absolute obey. And he said, be perfect for your father in heaven is perfect. But if he said, be pretty okay, we’d all be patting ourselves on the back. We wouldn’t be motivated to grow and mature. So I think it was something to strive for because he knew that we weren’t perfect or he wouldn’t have had to die.

We just have to keep that in mind that this is what he came for. And I think OCD can really convince us. And keep us staying in this rut of self-loathing and things like that, that really is the opposite of what I think Christ came to do. We’re made in the image of God, and if we’re constantly self-loathing, we’re really just kind of showing that we don’t believe that, and I think it’s important to believe that we are made in God’s image and that we don’t have to let OCD be the

Carrie: judge.

I don’t have to keep like striving all so much and working so hard at something. I think it’s something that we’re meant to have like a natural abiding in Christ and connection to the Holy Spirit and making sure that our conscience is clear in the sense that we are connected to God, making sure that we are not actively repetitively sinning, that we’re allowing the Holy Spirit into nudge us.

To do that gentle transformation, that’s very kind for us. Like, Hey, you’re in the wrong here. Like do something different. And it’s a very big shift from feeling like we’ve gotta do all the roles or we’ve gotta complete all the tasks. And I think that so many people were raised in one system of thinking.

It can be very hard for them to experience God for themselves and to start to shift some of that thinking and looking at these things a little bit differently. Maybe there is grace for me too. It’s not just some kind of foreign concept out there, but I think accepting that we’re not going to be perfect, accepting our imperfections is just so huge part of this process.

Like striving for it, but then also understanding we’re gonna fail. It’s very strange, right? Right. It’s like a dance.

Stephanie: It’s like it’s, you do what’s in your power or what’s a response to God’s love and grace and he meets us where we are. He’s there first and we sort of take a step. I definitely feel like it would take pages and pages to kind of like really flesh out.

I think Cru velocity, OCD is a very challenging thing to have, especially when you are religious. You are a believer in work. It’s, yeah, it’s hard. Because there’s a book of rules, but I really think it takes the right disposition approach to scripture. When we read, are we reading out of fear or are we reading out of a willingness to be loved and understood and a response to the love that’s already there?

Carrie: I like the dance metaphor ’cause it’s very active, it’s very engaged. You can’t do it by yourself. I mean, I guess you can dance by yourself, but in this sense of having a relationship with God, I can’t do that by myself. God invites me into that process and into that relationship because he loves me and I’m gonna have some missteps in the dance and that’s okay.

Like God continue to lead me back to where I need to be. And so I think that that’s a beautiful, it just shifts your faith from, is this about rules? Just doing the quote right thing all the time, or is it essentially Jesus told the Pharisees like, you’re doing a lot of things, but like your heart’s not in the right place.

So it’s just, are we gonna look at, okay, where is our heart at and allowing God to continue to mold and shape that into who he wants us to be. Why else do you think that just from your clinical and like kind of professional glasses now, why do you think Scrupulosity is so challenging to treat?

Stephanie: I think probably because I think scrupulosity of cd, you are probably already very conscientious.

You probably have a very loud conscious and a sense of right and wrong and guilt and like, and you’ve got this constant condemner of OCD here and I think if anything, maybe there’s. Some hope in knowing that I’m probably doing the right thing more than someone who doesn’t have OCD and has a thing that’s really trying to, not that we should compare ourselves, but I think it’s totally challenging because there are people who maybe who have Cru philosophy OCD, that will fixate on past mistakes as evidence that they’re doing something wrong or that they shouldn’t do.

Because then with ICBT, we talk about what’s the evidence? Do we have any direct evidence for this? Someone might say, oh, well I’ve got this experience with it, or this past thing I did, which I guess partly we call real event ocd. Yeah. But if we have a OCDs, logical fallacies or the reasoning categories it uses to try to convince us of these.

Erroneous messages that does become challenging to navigate. Really say that, okay, this might have happened in the past, but I think is it your intention to be a terrible person? Do you even feel angry when you worry, oh, what if I harm this person? Are you even angry in the moment? Do you have an intention?

Because that matters too, just because you did something in the past. Or struggle with this or that doesn’t mean that you are actively intending to do these things versus an actual person that is doing bad things or is an actual, I guess, bad person isn’t concerned that they’re bad or isn’t concerned.

They don’t care. And so I think it’s important to realize that we’re not perfect. So again, it is a dance with the Holy Spirit. It’s a dance with God. We’re gonna mess up. It’s some perfectionism, I think, falls into that true velocity, OCD two.

Carrie: Absolutely, definitely. I see a lot of perfectionistic tendencies in the clients that I work with.

Is there anything else that you wanna share about like ICBT and how you’ve seen it be helpful? Would you say that’s primarily what you’re using or you use some ICBT, some ERP kind of depending on wanting or. I do more ICBT currently,

Stephanie: but I’ve done some ERP as well. I think that one of the most helpful things about ICBT others have found is that there is this space where we go from reality into our imagination and we kind of, there’s this bridge where we get triggered.

We walk past a doorknob and we think, what if it’s dirty? Or what if my hands are contaminated? And then we have this space where we can stay rooted in reality and say, with my five senses, do I see or smell dirt? My common sense says that I am clean. We have a choice to stay rooted in direct evidence. And the here and now.

Or we can choose to go over that bridge into the imagination and then start spinning a story which never gets resolved. OCD can say, well, you know, it might be dirty. You might not be able to see these germs. Or, what if you just thought you washed your hands earlier? What if you didn’t actually wash them enough?

What if there’s a spot on your hands that didn’t get washed? And then there’s like point of no return. Like you’re over the bridge at this point. And so I like ICBT ’cause it helps us to be mindful of when we’re going into Ooc D land. The bubble. Yeah. And how to stay rooted and grounded in the here and now.

And in reality,

Carrie: it really allows you to slow down. And I also like too that you talked about the shifting of themes and sometimes that can be so jarring work through one theme and then. For example, okay, I’ve kind of worked through this. I feel like I’m okay with it now, but then some new theme just seems to pop outta nowhere, and then they feel like they’re okay.

Now I’ve gotta expose myself to this. Make sure that I’m not avoiding, make sure that I’m not seeking reassurance, and it just can be very jarring. Versus with I ccbt, you’re really learning all of these skills that can help you across whatever theme that you’re gonna face or that’s gonna pop up for you.

You’re like, okay, let me go back to, like you said, kind of what’s in here and now let me look. How did I get carried over into this OCD land? What was the story or the reasoning behind it? I’m, I always like to tell people because they’re like, Carrie, I can only talk to you about this type of stuff. It makes zero sense to anybody else.

In OCD world, I understand your logic, like I understand how you got to this point. And so then we have to teach you to like retrain your brain to learn like all of the OCD, I don’t know, prosecutor arguments, how you can kind of be over here on the other side and go, that’s really not relevant to what you’re saying over here.

You’re bridging right there into something else. Yeah, that’s really good.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Carrie: I

Stephanie: think of OCD as, like you said, prosecutor like this, almost like a Pharisee saying, pointing its fingers, saying you didn’t do this, and just who could stand up under that sort? And Jesus condemned, he rebuked kind of the legalistic tendencies of you are putting people under the weight of burdens they can hardly carry.

I wonder if externalizing OCD kind of like that could also be helpful with scru velocity, OCD and that theme to be like, okay, what is the truth of. The gospel say to me versus this condemnation that OCD is, it’s like, no matter what way I spin it, I’m gonna be damned so to speak by OCD. It’s like it’s a lose lose and so better with ICBT not to get into that OCD bubble to begin with.

And ICBT teaches you how to do that, how to not get caught up in the story of OCD with the narrative.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a complex therapy and really you have to kind of go through it layer by layer understanding. Okay. These are totally new concepts. Let me get my mind like kind of around the concepts. Let me maybe apply it to somebody else if I don’t feel like I can apply it fully to myself.

And then I feel like I can move forward and apply some of these things to myself and look at the reasoning AR arguments. But a lot of people who are just very logic based really enjoy it. They do. I found it the same. Yes, absolutely. I’ll put a link to your practice in the show notes and where people can find you.

If they’re in Virginia, then that’d be great. Thanks so much for sharing. Is there anything else that you wanted to share? There is hope for OCD is very

Stephanie: treatable with therapy, those two modalities. But also there’s medications that work to help that Part of the brain is in that obsessive loop. Sometimes a combination is helpful.

There definitely is hope

Carrie: if you have OCD. So if you’re in a really negative place right now and you get nothing else from this episode, that’s why we’re here on the podcast talking about these things and letting you know that there are other people that have gone through treatment. That’s what this whole like summer series is about is, hey, there were people that were in really rough places with their OCD and they’ve come to a much healthier level.

Let me ask you this, what does recovery for you.

Stephanie: I think recovery for me looks like I’m not as hung up on things as much anymore. I think that with recovery I have tendencies. I still have OCD. Mm-hmm. But it’s less sticky. The thoughts are less sticky. I am much more willing or able, I guess, to stay rooted in reality, to let go of a thought or a what if, or a maybe I’m, however, it, it can show up in images, urges, thoughts.

Whatever way OCD manifests in anyone. Like for me, it’s easier for me to kind of let go and be mindful of, okay, what’s in the here and now and what’s my common sense and my true self say about this? And it’s a lot easier to stay

Carrie: grounded. Well, thank you so much for sharing today. You’re welcome, Carrie.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any show suggestions, guest suggestions, or would love to share your story on the podcast, you can reach out to us at kiri bach.com/podcast.

Stephanie: Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

177. Being Diagnosed with OCD Later in Life: A Personal Story with Heather Vignali

Written by Carrie Bock on June 11, 2025. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie welcomes fellow therapist Heather Vignali to share her personal journey with OCD, including how symptoms emerged during a major life transition—and how ICBT, EMDR, and her Christian faith played a role in her healing.

Episode Highlights:

The ways OCD impacted Heather’s life, including obsessive safety concerns and compulsive monitoring of her daughter.
What “anxiety tongue” is and how somatic symptoms can signal deeper mental health struggles.
How Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT) helped Heather understand the root of her intrusive thoughts through concepts like the Feared Possible Self.
Ways EMDR and other integrative therapies can support healing when trauma and OCD intersect.
How OCD can impact faith, and how to navigate scrupulosity while reconnecting with spiritual truth.

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode is part of our series sharing real and personal experiences with OCD, and I’m so excited to introduce you to Heather Vignali—a licensed professional counselor serving New Jersey and New York. Heather works primarily with adult women navigating anxiety, OCD, self-esteem challenges, and relationship stress. And for clients who want to bring their Christian faith into the counseling process, she offers that too.

Heather shares her own journey of recognizing and getting diagnosed with OCD—something that didn’t fully surface until a major life transition: her daughter’s senior year of high school. As she prepared to launch her daughter into the world, Heather started noticing signs that went beyond everyday anxiety. Physical symptoms, compulsive checking behaviors, and relentless fears about her daughter’s safety became daily struggles. Like many, she initially didn’t realize these were signs of OCD.

Through this conversation, we talk about what it looked like for her to begin questioning her own thoughts, how she discovered Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT), and what it’s been like to walk through the ups and downs of treatment. She gets real about what it felt like to live in the “OCD bubble,” and the shift that happened when she understood her feared possible self—this internal fear of being negligent or careless—and how it was driving so many of her compulsions.

We also dive into how OCD started to impact her faith, bringing in scrupulosity and intrusive doubts about salvation. If you’ve ever wrestled with thoughts that feel out of alignment with what you know to be true about God, this part of her story will really resonate. Heather shares how she found grounding again, how remembering God’s faithfulness helped her re-anchor her faith, and how both therapy and truth-telling community played a key role in her healing.

Tune into the full episode to hear more of Heather’s story, how ICBT helped her reframe the way she relates to her thoughts, and how she’s now using her experience to support others.

Related Links and Resources:

www.facebook.com/HeatherVignaliLPC

IG: @heathervignalilpc

Transcript

All right, welcome to the show. Everyone. We are doing a series on personal experience with OCD, and I’m very excited about this because I know that it’s a popular topic that a lot of you look for. You’re just really wanting to hear from other people who have been in the trenches where you are, who have made the struggle to get the proper diagnosis and help for their OCD,

Hello and welcome to Christian faith and OCD with Carrie Bock, I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD, get to a deeper level of healing when I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode today on the show I have Heather Vignelli. She is a licensed professional counselor in serving New Jersey and New York, primarily working with adult women who are struggling with anxiety, OCD, low self esteem, relationship stress. And she’s able to offer a Christian perspective for clients who are desiring that as part of their counseling process. And she is going to share about her story today. Welcome to the show, Heather.

Heather: Thank you. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about your process of noticing OCD symptoms. Or did it start more as general anxiety? What was that like for you? Yeah,

Heather: Super funny. Kind of how it came about. I always have had sort of an underlying current of anxiety in my life. I don’t think I ever didn’t I definitely noticed that as a trend throughout my life, even as a young girl, and it wasn’t until probably I was just about a year ago. And keep in mind also, I recognize now that there were things before last year that certainly contributed to the diagnosis, but at the time, what kind of triggered it was? My daughter was in her senior year of high school, my one and only and just definitely noticing triggers kind of coming up one after another, and the end of an era I have been, of course, very close with my daughter. When she was born, I was a single mom, she was like my pride and joy. That

Carrie really speaks to OCD symptoms showing up in a time of stress and transition. So you’re preparing for launching her out into the world after you’ve spent all of these years raising her.

Heather 3:03

Oh, yeah, and I’ve had help. Of course, my mother has definitely been so helpful to me, and I actually met my husband when she was four, so he kind of came into the picture a little bit later, but for all intents and purposes, until we were married and then living together, I was very much the primary caregiver, and kind of doing it, a lot of it on my own, let’s say, when she got into her senior year, it was like, Oh my gosh, right, I’m losing my baby. There were a lot of different things that kind of came up throughout the tail end of the year, September of 2023 I noticed a little bit of an uptick in the anxiety, and I was wondering, Hmm, that’s weird. But then it wasn’t until the beginning of 2024 that I started noticing not just my stress levels going up and my anxiety going up, but also like different symptoms that I hadn’t really necessarily noticed before. One of the things that I noticed was this weird thing that my tongue would do, Huh, interesting. Okay, yeah, super weird tension in my tongue and in my jaw like a tick, not so much like a tick. It felt like my tongue was swollen and almost like it hurt, very weird. So I was doing a lot of biting on my tongue and like, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Like, maybe I need to go to the doctor. And I knew also that my anxiety was like, kind of ticking up. And so I thought, Geez, I wonder. I’d never thought about it before, even being in the clinical world, I’m like, I wonder if this could be just a somatic symptom of anxiety. So on a whim, I just looked up anxiety and tongue issues or something like that. And it was like, anxiety tongue.

Carrie 4:38

There’s something called anxiety tongue. You’re educated now. Who

Heather 4:42

would have thought, right? And so I thought, Okay, this could be related to the anxiety I’m feeling. I certainly have a lot of triggers going on. This is kind of making sense, but it started to get very uncomfortable. Like, really uncomfortable. I felt like, anytime I was talking, I was tripping over my own phone. Felt like, oh, can people. Even understand me. Even though they could, they could totally understand me. But it was just constant as the year progressed again, triggers keep continuing to come up events, while the senior stuff comes up senior sunrise. And, you know, she was a competitive dancer. She’s still doing that, but didn’t know she was gonna continue doing that. We thought it was like her last competitions ever. So we’re like, this is the end of everything. So everything’s kind of coming in, prom, graduation, all these things are coming up. I started examining some of the thoughts that I was having. I feel like the only way that I can explain it is not so much with words, but more like gesture in my face. Like, Huh, wait, these thoughts are weird. Some

Carrie: Some of these thoughts are a little off. How did it show up? Like, what kind of things were you thinking?

Heather: I was always like, I said, very connected with my daughter, but I was noticing that I was extra worried about her safety. Some of the thoughts that I have and still do struggle with, I would not say that I am, like, fully recovered. I definitely still have some polls. I mean, it’s only been a year now since the diagnosis, but once I started recognizing the thoughts that came up. They were more about her safety and just having this feeling of impending doom anytime she left right, she started driving. Her she got her license right. She’s driving, she’s applying to college, all these things that made me feel like she was unsafe in the world. I’m thinking terrible, awful things. I mean, the worst of the worst. Do you think the worst thing? That’s what I thought. And it was constantly riddled with thoughts that something terrible was gonna happen to her, completely unwarranted.

Carrie: Did that cause you to check in on her extra often, or you’re like checking the app to see where she is or not.

Heather: Just one app, three apps, three apps. Okay, three apps. I got very creative and wound up with three apps on my phone. And my kid is great. She understands because she actually had been diagnosed with OCD at a young age. So she does understand the struggle to a degree. Of course, our themes are different, but she does understand the struggle. And so she’s very kind to me, very gracious with me. But yeah, so there were definitely things that I was noticing, not just in my thoughts, but in, like you’re saying, with what I was doing. So for years and years, I’d been checking her window every single night, without fail, like to make sure or locked, or to make sure it was locked, and we live on the ground floor of an apartment building, okay, and so I don’t think it’s out of pocket to be thinking, Oh, well, gee, probably a good thing to lock your doors. But I mean, I have bars on the doors, and it started to occur to me, it is interesting that the only window that I check at night is hers. I trust that the other windows and doors are perfectly secure, but I don’t trust even if it looks exactly the same way that I left it, I know I left it the night before, I still felt compelled to go over and check make sure there was a ritual to it, the way that my hand felt on the blinds as I peeked through to look at a certain area on the other side of the just certain things that I was like, Wow, this seems super selective and super specific. And I thought, well, that’s odd.

Carrie: Did you find yourself devoting the sensory information like icbt talks about, that’s part of the inferential confusion is that distrust to the senses. And so I’m wondering, maybe that’s why you needed three apps on your phone, because it’s like, well, what if this one app is wrong and she’s not really where the app is saying that she’s at was that kind of what it was like, like, I don’t know if I believe this one. I’ll have to pull up another one and just

Heather: Aabsolutely so yeah, with the apps, I have three different ones that check three different things. One is on her phone. One is on her car, the other one is also on her phone, but it allows me to listen to the environment. Opens up her microphone so that I can hear on my end, what’s going on. I know it makes me sound a little cuckoo, I know, but it definitely was something that I felt like I needed to have. There was an urgency to know what was going on around her, even if I knew, for all other reasons, that she was perfectly fine, that if something terrible was happening, that I would somehow know, I would somehow find out. You would hear

Carrie 9:09

the scary, mad guy on through her phone, and be able to call the police and say, I know where she’s right. She’s right over here. Sure,

Heather 9:16

even if I had just texted with her 30 minutes prior, that couldn’t just be enough for me to believe that she was okay. Yeah, I started kind of thinking, Gee, I think I need to look into this a little bit more. And it wasn’t until that point that I started really understanding what OCD was and getting a better. Started taking credits in OCD treatment or just understanding it, because I didn’t realize how very different it is from just regular run of the mill anxiety I had no idea, just did not recognize that. Now, a year later, I’ve basically redefined everything that I do, because I definitely feel called to help other people who are struggling in the same ways with OC. D. So it wasn’t until that time, though, that I started getting my own treatment, learning about OCD for myself, because I started recognizing these things in my clients, and I got the diagnosis, which later on would become meta OCD and starts to become OCD. About OCD,

Carrie 10:18

right? Yeah. Do you really have OCD? And oh gosh, are you sure you’re not just, like, faking it or making it up?

Heather 10:27

Oh, gosh, yeah. What if you’re lying to people? How awful would you be if you were lying to people? It’s been interesting, because since a year ago when I got the diagnosis, I feel like I’ve actually gone through ebbs and flows. It’s like, kind of like, there have been peaks and valleys with the experience of like, now knowing that that’s what it is, I feel like I definitely get sucked into the bubble from time to time, and it can be pretty troubling when you’re in the bubble.

Carrie 10:53

Did you find an icbt therapist? Was that something that, as you had kind of done your research, that you were wanting to do or wanting to pursue, like, how did you get to the treatment phase and kind of connect with somebody?

Heather 11:06

I had started to ponder whether this OCD, I should probably know more about what OCD is, and I took a workshop fundamentals type, okay, yeah. OCD, 101, yeah. OCD, 101, and I’m like, I need to figure out, because I think I might not only just be seeing this in myself, but I think I’m seeing it in other clients. I knew ERP was a gold standard for treatment, but literally, I think on Facebook looking for OCD providers, and I stumbled across the icbt Facebook group, and I started asking questions, and I started seeking out people that might be able to help me figure out if that’s what I’m dealing with. I had a woman reach out to me on Facebook messenger who was so gracious with me and so lovely. She’s like, everything you’re describing sounds like it’s probably an OCD type thing. You’re going to want to get yourself connected with OCD therapist. And since I was already in that group, and for anybody who is a clinician and wanting to know icbt Like that is the group to be in. It’s a wonderful group. Just amazing resource. Oh my gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Facebook group with other therapists that’s been so positive, unbelievable support. And so I put up a post and I said, Hey, I think I have OCD. I don’t know, but I would really love to meet with someone who might be able to assess and treat and so I heard back from a couple of therapists who were also in network with my insurance. Oh, that’s great, praise God. And I started work right away, did the assessments and started with icbt. And icbt really clicks for me. It’s like, really super logical, and it just kind of aligns with the way I already think,

Carrie 12:44

yeah. That’s super interesting is, I just heard that feedback from a client this week. This makes so much logical sense to me as I’m learning it, it’s like, yeah, and I’m a very logical person, and so I like that this makes logical sense. So I appreciate you saying that, because I do think that it’s connects and resonates with certain people, definitely.

Heather 13:04

So that’s how I wound up finding my icbt therapist. Unfortunately, I had to move from her to another one, because then she no longer took my insurance, but still with an icbt therapist, there

Carrie 13:16

are resources online for people to find an icbt therapist. Icbt dot online, if that’s something they’re interested in. I’m in Tennessee, and so as you’re processing that for yourself, and I think before you teach it to somebody else, you kind of have to understand it yourself. So those kind of grade that you were able to, like, kind of integrate and work without on yourself. Was there a particular like point in the process where you were like, something clicked, and you were like, oh, or it felt like this is a game changer. Because I think in the beginning, people go into the process and they’re kind of like, okay, this is nice. I’m kind of sort of getting some of this, but they’re like, how do I apply it? And there’s this, I said, okay, just hold on. Just hang in there. You got to build the foundation of the house. First you got to know and understand the concepts. You got to wrap your mind around it, then you will know how to intervene. And as you get into the later modules, of course, it gives you what to do, the intervention modules, but initial ones, you’re just assessing, and you’re building awareness. Was there a particular module or somewhere in the process, or something clicked, and you were like, oh, oh, yeah, okay.

Heather 14:16

I think it was feared possible. Self module four, okay, yeah, I was pretty early on. Everything up to that point made total sense to me. Again, this was a modality that was like, it fit right into the way that I already thought. So it was like, oh, like, That makes so much sense. Sometimes, with other modalities, it can be like, Wait, what are we doing and why? What’s the purpose? Again, where does this How does this work with icbt? I didn’t feel that way. It felt very straightforward. It felt very like easy to grasp. And I think by module four, when we really started to break down the feared possible self, that’s when I started to be like, Whoa. I definitely connect with that feared possible self that we kind of which was carelessness. This negligence. And actually, even going further, my therapist is pretty firm on it just being like bad, because carelessness is bad, negligence is bad, but this theme of carelessness and negligence definitely resonated for me. So I started, I think, at that point, looking through the lens of, oh gosh, is this like me behaving out of my real self, or my feared possible self, which we didn’t get to the real self at that point yet, but the feared self, I started to kind of examine a little bit Oh gosh. Is this coming out of this fear that I could be somebody that’s careless or negligent? And so I think it was from there that it just clicked. It was like, Oh my gosh. This has been the thing. This is why I’ve been so worried about my daughter. What if I miss something? That was always the question, what if I miss that she got into an accident? Or, what if I miss and I’m just gonna say, one of my thoughts was human trafficking. What if there’s a school shooting? Or what if, basically, what if she’s taken away? Yeah, what if I miss that, though? What if I miss something? And if I’m not on top of it and checking all the time, all the time, then I might miss it? Yeah. So that was kind of where I started to

Carrie 16:10

kind of boils down to, like, bad mom, which is, I think really fits in with that feared possible self of it’s the opposite of who you actually are like you’ve been very attentive and involved in your daughter’s life, it sounds like through school and extracurriculars and all those types of things the whole time. So it’s completely the opposite of what your actual behavior is showing you, right? So in some sense, I don’t know, it’s like this transition. There was this fear of, like, losing her forever, that maybe was a distorted from losing her to, like, launching to college or something like that, like, it’s a loss at a smaller level,

Heather 16:50

absolutely, yeah, my brain was definitely glitching out, for sure. Wasn’t the way that I was making sense of things, which is so unusual, instead of, like, if she’s not answering me, automatically, she’s dead. Yeah, automatically she must be dead. That was just the thought. I know that sounds terrible. I know that that’s probably maybe shocking for some ears, but

Carrie 17:10

that’s so OCD, right? Like, not just like, this is a possibility, but this is going to happen. Like, you know, this is the probability of what this means. It couldn’t

Heather 17:21

be that she was just busy doing a project, or that she was talking to a friend, or like it couldn’t be her phone’s on silent or something, nothing like that. Nothing normal, no normal reasoning with that. It was like

Carrie 17:33

totally obsessional. Were you able to get through all the 12 modules?

Heather 17:37

I am working through eight, and still working through them little by little. Done some 10. My therapist now does them a little bit out of order, so that’s okay with me. She also integrates a little bit of the metacognitive treatment too, which is kind of probably good for me considering the presentations. Yeah, yeah. So that’s another thing that she kind of integrates as well.

Carrie 18:02

Just started doing some metacognitive therapy with clients. It’s been an interesting side note. I’ll update people on the podcast at some point how that is, but it’s very, very different in a lot of ways from other types of therapy that I mean, there’s some integration of different things, but it really just teaches you that, hey, if you can learn to leave your thoughts alone, kind of like a dog that’s going after something and you just say, leave it. Just leave it there. Don’t engage with it, don’t try to solve it, don’t chew on it, don’t ruminate on it, don’t worry about it, let it go. And that is hard to do. And there are different exercises in metacognitive that trains you to really, like, learn how to do that and to they call it lazy mindfulness, which is interesting, but that’s hard for people with OCD, because you’re not used to being lazy, right? You’re like, no, I need to get on this hot right now. I gotta do something that’s urgent. Yeah, it’s urgent. Probably my clients that have had the most success with that, I think, have had some secondary depression along with the OCD. And so if they’re able to let some of those hopeless, worthless, negative self talk cognitions like if they’re able to let some of those go, then it helps them be able to move into more of the icbt process. So everything all if you have a good therapist, they know how to integrate these different things into it. We have people in the icbt community that use ifs parts work, some that use EMDR for trauma when appropriate. That’s another thing I think I love about this therapy, is that it integrates well with other therapies. It’s not like you can only do this one thing. It’s kind of like if somebody’s able to go in and assess and say, Hey, you might need some a little bit of this, or let’s try that and see if this can go as well. So I think that

Heather 19:45

having that ability to sort of like bob and weave in between modalities, I think if you can do it, great. I’m not trained in all of them. I’m trained in EMDR, and so that’s something that for my clients has been super beneficial, and I haven’t felt as. As inclined to use EMDR with my clients in general, probably because of the OCD that I have right as far as negligence goes, and that’s like, you know, I just want to make sure I’m doing it right. You don’t want to give my clients the best care. But once OCD kind of came onto the scene with icbd treatment, I thought, oh my gosh, this is a great way to interweave EMDR, because I have seen so many clients, myself included, who have the trauma in history that is being used. It’s like OCD hijacking that trauma and then using it as personal experience, right? Like you remember that time. Don’t forget about that time. Be negligent. Now, keep yourself safe, right? Being able to, kind of like, pause in the icbt treatment and then go to clear some memory that is being hijacked by the OCD is super cool to be able to do that with the EMDR. I think

Carrie 20:58

sometimes, once you get into modules three and four, where you’re talking about the obsessional story and really working on, okay, how do we even get to this particular theme, obsessional sequence? What consequences are we afraid of? And then when you get into that feared possible self, you’re like, Okay, now you can start to see some of that trauma bubbling up potentially, and are able to address it with EMDR. So yeah, like I said, that integration is really helpful, and EMDR is a little bit of a wild card. People have different experiences with it, and I don’t know, sometimes when people have OCD, they have a hard time really like dropping in down into their emotional experience and their body sensations, because they’re so used to problem solving and thinking things in their head, and that can be a barrier sometimes to people doing EMDR, it may take them longer, or the processing may look a little bit different. So if you tried EMDR and you’re like, it failed, for me, there’s probably you didn’t fail. It’s not a pass or fail thing, just maybe that your therapist didn’t know how to kind of tailor things towards you and finding somebody that can help you get there. I’ve had many people who feel like they’ve had failed EMDR experiences be able to process through trauma. That’s why we have other things too, parts work and all kinds of stuff, because sometimes that’s super helpful in those experiences, or helps process through those memories and time periods. I think what you’re saying, and I would echo, is really, you have to look at this holistically in terms of OCD treatment. People are not cookie cutter. They’re very different. I will never get bored specializing in OCD like never, because each person has different nuances. You could have 10 people who are compulsively washing their hands, and they will be compulsively washing their hands for 10 different reasons, and you really have to get in there and figure out what’s going on and what’s the story, and how did we get to this point, in order to figure out how to tailor their treatment plan in such a way that, unfortunately, we have these therapeutic tools and modules to help us be able to have some structure surrounding that. Because I do believe structure is helpful and important, while also knowing how to utilize that for the individual. I think in the past, in my earlier days of therapy, I was much more of like, oh, okay, step one of the therapy says this, like, we need to do step one. And now that I’ve been doing therapy a lot longer, I’m like, okay, and this is what the therapy is saying, and this person’s step one is gonna look like this, and this person’s step one might look a little bit different, and that’s okay, yep, we’re just gonna go with it, kind of depending on what they bring in and how the flow happens, might

Speaker 1 23:41

have to go back to something else. How would you say this

Carrie 23:45

has impacted your faith? Or have you struggled with, why can’t I seem to just let go, or why can’t I seem to trust God with this? So did any of those things come up for you?

Heather 23:55

So funny, once I got the diagnosis, I think again, there was definitely obsessions over obsessions. It wound up starting to attack things that it had never attacked before. One of them was my faith. So there was a scrupulosity piece that definitely showed up on the scene. There was a lot of like, wow, what if you’re not saved? How do you know you’re saved? All these questions of true faith. I mean, right, as Christians, like, I mean, that’s what we stand on. It’s like salvation. The fact that the OECD, again was hijacking something super important to me, was cause for concern and felt really urgent. And I think as Christians, we can all agree that salvation is urgent and important. Yeah, super important. I think that it did kind of cause a little bit of like a toggling back and forth between, like, knowing and then questioning, right? Knowing the truth like you’ve never doubted this before. You’ve been a believer for how many years, and now, all of a sudden, it’s being hijacked. That’s odd, right? Yeah, there was a lot of scrupulosity that started to kind of play in, which then, yeah. It kind of broke down a little bit of my natural ability to sort of just lean into the Lord and trust that he has me don’t have to be overthinking this. It did kind of break that down a little bit right. Since then, I’ve done some work to kind of get out of that bubble, to kind of like bring myself back to reality, on it, and to not be ruminating on it, because I

Carrie 25:25

think that’s vague for people. Like, how do I sink into the reality of my faith? Because it is unseen. I always say faith requires faith. What does the reality of your faith look like? Like? Did you pinpoint certain times in your life? Like, Oh, I know God was at that time point. Or

Heather 25:40

I definitely was doing a look back on those kinds of moments when it was like, okay, clearly I don’t have to worry about this, because even at that time, I wasn’t even thinking about how God had me and was securing me, but he did. So those moments definitely helped, and I did lean into my pastor, which my therapist gave me permission to do that. She was like, one time you can go the one conversation you may have. And so I did that was very helpful to me, to just get some reassurance that that I already knew what I knew. So that’s the tricky part about OCD, I feel like, is we forget that we know what we know. We forget to keep our eyes on the things that we know for sure because we’ve seen it. I think that a lot of people that I speak to have had experiences or encounters with the Lord, right? People that are Christians, that are believers, right? They’ve had those experiences or encounters with the Lord, and I think that when they look back at those moments, it’s like it’s undeniable. So we have to remember to look at that as truth. I think there’s

Carrie 26:42

so much power, and that’s why the Bible talks to us about remembering so much, even in the Old Testament where it went through, I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You remember these people? Remember these guys, remember these heroes of the faith. You’re a part of that lineage. And I am still here, like I am, still I am, yeah,

Heather 27:00

so definitely keeping those things in mind, remembering those things, and then, of course, having that conversation with my pastor was certainly help to me. And also just recognizing that God isn’t the author of confusion. I wouldn’t be sitting here confused if this was something that was God ordained, right? Like, that’s not God. So knowing to kind of pull away from that, because I already know that this could not be from God, yeah.

Carrie 27:25

And so that helped you, almost like, disengage from some of those thoughts, thought processes,

Heather 27:29

correct, I would say, if anything, though, the one thing that wound up kind of coming from it is that it did strengthen my relationship with the Lord in a big way, just kind of feeling the closeness like he’s like, I’m a year like, I got you. I’m right here. So I think that out of all the nightmarish parts of sort of wrestling with OCD, the one thing that I can say that’s been kind of a blessing out of the muck OCD is just that the relationship with God has been strengthened as

Carrie 28:01

we kind of wrap things up. Is there anything else that you would want to say to people just who are struggling and they’re Christians with OCD and they just feel like maybe they’re at a really low point or a really bad point, like, what would you want them to know or to take away from this conversation? It

Heather 28:16

doesn’t have to look like this. Okay? Stay this way, right? You don’t have to be trapped in the OCD bubble all the time. There can be relief from it. And for me, I think that’s always gonna be best with God. So yes, there’s gonna be a mental health component. In my personal opinion, I feel very strongly that, yes, we have spiritual components to who we are. We’re living in a spiritual world, yes, but there’s also a mental health component. Especially when it comes to OCD, there’s a mental health component. And so I would caution anyone like you, don’t have to handle it on your own. This isn’t something that you have to pray about. It absolutely lean into the Lord for help with it, yes, but you can get treatment from a therapist that will help you to actually deal with what is happening in your brain. It is a glitch in the brain. I really do strongly feel like there can be help for that. You know, not just spiritual, but mental health wise.

Carrie 29:11

Yeah, that’s right, beautiful. Thank you for sharing with us today. I know that this is going to be encouraging and a hopeful story to share with people.