Tag: OCD therapy

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.

I know some of you have been hearing about this for the last few weeks, but you are down to the wire on the last few days to sign up for the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. You can sign up at hopeforanxietyandocd. com/challenge. We are going to do some fun giveaways. We’ll give you some coffee gift cards. There’s going to be free coaching with Carrie given away. I’m so excited to be talking with you about ICBT and how that can really help. The way I explained this to someone the other day is if you’re dealing with a physical compulsion, like I’ve got to go check that doorknob lock, from me to my doorknob or my door lock, that might be five to ten seconds, depending on where I am, and I might have some time to think about not going back and checking that, but if you’re struggling with mental compulsions, your brain is always right there, and it’s an easy, quick go to.

ICBT will literally help you train your brain to think differently and to recognize these obsessions as an invalid argument. At the time of this recording, we’ve already got several people signed up, so please come join them: hopeforanxietyandocd.com /challenge.

Today I want to talk with you about three strategies to help stop obsessive praying. Some of you are going through and repeating prayers over and over again because the first time you pray it, something just doesn’t quite feel right, or maybe you’re repeating the prayer because you didn’t feel like you were sincere the first time. Maybe you’re finding that you’re confessing over and over again throughout the day.

We’re going to talk about each one of those things today. The first strategy I have for you is to try something new in your prayer life. This is just good advice for all of us as Christians. Get into a rut of speaking with God the same way all the time. And it’s not bad to follow certain prescriptive prayer methods.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Acts, which is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, kind of helping you process instead of just going to God and asking for something, using some of these others, making sure that you’re praising him and thanking him, confessing your sins, all of that. Those types of strategies are good.

If we’re going get out of a rut in our prayer life, be willing to try something new, and this is going to be uncomfortable especially if OCD is telling you, you have to pray this certain way, or no, you didn’t do it right, or it wasn’t good enough or sincere enough. I want to refer you to a couple of previous episodes that we’ve had on prayer. In episode 48, I talked with Rich Lewis on this practice of centering prayer, just really more of a meditative type of prayer, where you’re sitting in silence, you’re focusing in your mind just more on an image, maybe of Jesus, or the focus is more on spending time in God’s presence, allowing God to utilize that time to fill you and bring you at peace in his presence. This is very different than many of us pray. So, I encourage you that if you’ve never done that before, maybe try that. Maybe try sitting in silence and listening. Maybe just taking some time to slow down. There are many different ways to pray, so don’t allow OCD to get you stuck or pigeonholed into just one way of praying.

In episode 75, we talked with Jennifer Tucker about breath prayers. This is where you have certain words that you would say like on the inhale, and they’re based on scripture. For example, you could inhale, “The Lord is my shepherd, and exhale, I shall not want, or you could exhale. I have all that I need.” You can inhale, “The Lord is my refuge and strength.” Exhale, “an ever-present help in times of trouble.” With anything, this in itself could become compulsive as well. You just have to play around with some different things. If you are really sitting and trying this out, I know some people have obsessions about breathing, so that may throw you off. It’s just an opportunity or an invitation to calm your mind and your body while you’re breathing and also speaking out scriptures. Jennifer talked about how breath prayers really helped her get through a difficult time where a lot was happening with her daughter and she just didn’t have a lot of words at that point.

When you’re so overwhelmed or stressed, sometimes, less is more, and really focusing on what is the purpose of our prayer. The purpose of our prayer is to connect with God and to align our will with His. We’re not trying to make something dramatic happen. We’re not trying to change God’s mind or bend His hand.

We are just saying, “Okay, I am here.” I am intentionally focusing myself on connecting with the presence of God because God is the source of everything. That’s it. God has everything that I could ever need in this life, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I want to be abiding in the vine and receiving that nourishment.

That’s what our prayer time is about. It’s about connecting with God and surrendering. It’s not about me. It’s not about what I want today. It’s not about here’s my list of 50 things I want to happen. Yes, it’s totally fine to ask God for things. He wants us to come to him with our needs, with our joys, with our sorrows, with everything, but prayer is about at the end, God’s will be done. “These are the things that I’m laying before you, God, but ultimately I want you and I want your will and your desires to be above my desires.” As you pray and you align yourself with the will of God, then God gives you a heart for certain things that maybe you didn’t have a heart for before. All of a sudden, you start feeling passionate about certain areas or like, “Okay, I feel like God is leading me in this direction.” Maybe you feel like, “Oh, God is asking me to give something up so that I can focus on something else that’s more important. God’s giving me comfort that whatever situation is going to work out.” We can approach it different ways. It may be that you approach it as kind of like a checklist item. “Okay, this is one more thing. I know I really need to pray. It’s a spiritual discipline. I need to do it.”

Maybe you’re in a Christian tradition where you repeat certain prayers. I know in the Orthodox tradition, they have certain morning prayers or evening prayers. I know that in the Catholic tradition, they say certain prayers, and if that’s a part of your particular tradition, you still want those prayers to have meaning and significance and connect you back to God.

Another strategy you can try to shake up your prayer life a little bit if you’ve never done this before, is to pick specific scripture verses to pray. They may be scriptures from the Psalms, or they may be scriptures from the New Testament. So, for example, in James 1, 2, it says, “Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature, incomplete, lacking, and nothing. “That’s actually James 1, You could even turn this into a prayer regarding your OCD, so you could say, “Dear God, please give me joy in this trial of OCD. Develop my endurance so that I may be more mature, complete, and lacking in nothing.” Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 say, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own understanding.”

In all your ways know him and he will make your path straight. This is a familiar scripture. So if we were to pray that scripture, we would say something similar to, God, I want to trust you. I want to really trust you with all of my heart. Help me to know when I am relying on my own understanding instead of trusting you.

Allow me to know you at a deeper level so that I can follow your path. I know when I do that, that you promise to make my path straight. So there we have a New Testament and Old Testament example of praying the scriptures. Let’s face it, there are going to be times where you’re in a low point, you may feel really overwhelmed, you’re lost, and you just don’t even know what to pray or maybe your mind just feels so full, you may feel down, depressed, lonely, whatever it is. I can think of a couple of different times in my life where that definitely fit my circumstances. One was when I went through my divorce in 2015. That was a really low, depressing point for me. And another one was when I lost my parents, but I remember reading this, another verse in James.

One, where it talks about, the scripture basically says that every good and perfect gift comes from God. So when I realized that, it caused me to shift into this attitude of gratefulness and I just started thanking God for everything that I did have in my life because the loss felt so big. and so overwhelming that at the time was overshadowing the good things that were in my life.

So I intentionally focused my prayer life on gratefulness. Let me just make a very specific list of everything to God that I’m grateful for. I was driving in my car going down the road just saying, okay, God, thank you for this car. It’s old, but it runs well. It gives me where I need to go. I’m able to go to work and back.

I’m able to go to the store and get food. Yes, I’m so thankful I have food on my table. I’m thankful that I have a place to live where I feel safe and comfortable. Just things that we take for granted that not everybody has. If you start thanking God and being in a place of gratitude, that will absolutely shift your mood.

I don’t know how it could not. Gratitude is so good for your mind and emotions and obviously your spirit. Maybe you take some time in your prayer life to really sit and praise God for his character. Praising Him for His holiness, His righteousness, His faithfulness, enduring love, God is incredibly patient.

These are just a few of God’s attributes, but when you start to go through those and praising God, and thinking about his true character, that shifts our mindset to realize how big and how vast and how incredible God is. And if you realize, like, how big and vast and incredible God is, yet at the same time, So profound he wants to have a relationship with us.

This is absolutely mind-blowing when we break it down I know these are things we hear in church, but we don’t really sit and marinate them The God of the universe is holy set apart yet loves you and wants a relationship with you incredible When we realize how big God is, we realize how small our problems really are.

There is no problem that God can’t solve. God is in the business of doing God-sized things. that humans cannot explain or take credit for. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation in your life where you’re like, okay, how am I going to make it through this month? How am I going to pay this medical bill? How am I going to get to work? I got laid off. How am I going to get a job? And then somehow God just shows up because he’s that good. I did not mean to get into all this today, but somebody needed to hear that.

We’re talking about three strategies to help stop obsessive praying. So our first one, we only got through number one. Try something new. Two is have a dedicated time of the day for confession. This is a ditch that you really might be falling into because I see it time and time again. You’re going through your day, you feel really bad about something, you confess it, but then you’re starting to question, Did I sin? Did I not sin? What happened? And then you’re confessing again. Confessing for stuff you’ve already confessed that happened five years ago. It can really cause that obsessive cycle loop to be going on. Let’s not do that. Be intentional one to two times a day, okay? Maybe in the morning, maybe at night, if you’re not fully awake in the morning, do it at lunch, but a couple of times a day where you sit down and you say, okay, Lord, let me think through and be intentional about the things that I’m confessing. And here’s the deal, if you can’t remember it, or the Holy Spirit doesn’t prompt you to remember it, to confess it, wasn’t a sin, we’re not worrying about it, moving on.

We have to trust the conviction of the Holy Spirit as Christians. The Holy Spirit is not going to let you go way off track. The problem is if we start to ignore him. Most of you who are listening to this episode and are trying to be conscientious about confessing, I don’t imagine that you are stiff-arming the Holy Spirit.

I’ve had clients who have practiced this dedicated confession time and they have told me that it really cuts down on getting stuck in that confessional loop spiral where you’re feeling questioning sin and feeling like you’re having to confess all day long. And the third strategy is I know it’s going to be hard for some of you.

Resist that urge to repeat that prayer because here’s the story that OCD is going to spin you. It’s going to tell you that your prayer wasn’t sincere enough. Were you even thinking about what you were saying? You need to go back and do that again. Just to make sure. And then OCD might start attacking your character and your relationship with God and all this other extra.

You have to remember that OCD brings up these real intense feelings of anxiety that are going to lead you to believe, or it could be a feeling of guilt, or may just feel like something just doesn’t feel quite right. And in those moments, you can’t trust those feelings because they are a false alarm of your threat detection system.

So when OCD is encouraging you to repeat that prayer, you don’t need to. God heard it the first time. My daughter is only two years old, so she doesn’t have a full vocabulary, but she’s starting to speak more and more in sentences, which is really cool because When she was younger, you just had to guess at what she wanted or what she needed.

It’s kind of hit or miss, but the cool thing is I do want her to talk to me. I don’t always understand what she says. She blurs things together because she’s still learning. But I want to hear from her. I want her to speak to me. God wants to hear from his children, too. And quite frankly, we don’t always get it right.

Sometimes we ask for some dumb stuff. My daughter might ask me for cookies right before dinner. I’m gonna be like, no, you can’t have that. I look back at things that I thought I wanted. I’m glad God didn’t answer those prayers, okay? But he heard everyone and he cared about me enough as a good father to give me what I needed, not always what I wanted.

So if you’re having perfectionism issues with your prayer life, Know that it doesn’t have to be perfect. God wants to hear from you. Communicate with him. If you find OCD is really messing with your prayer life, please join us at the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge. You only have a few more days to sign up.

It is on August the 5th at noon Central Time. We’re going to be talking about how ICBT can help with mental compulsions. I’m going to be teaching through the 12 modules of ICBT very soon and would love to see you there. I want to share with you one of our iTunes reviews. This is by Marnie. I cannot thank you enough for this podcast and how much it is truly helping me.

I’ve been listening to as many episodes as possible since I found it last week. I’m beginning a new counseling journey where I now feel so much hope to be vulnerable and heal from shame due to lifelong anxiety and OCD. I feel a sense of relief and grace, encouraged and so hopeful. I truly cannot tell you enough what listening to these episodes has done for me already.

I will be forever grateful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Marnie. I received two emails this week from individuals in Canada as well. So hello to our Canadian listeners. We’re so glad that you’re here. And until we get our new website built, don’t get me started. Breathe. Patience. We are still at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts App on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

Christian Faith in OCD is a production of 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.