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114. Vagal Nerve Stimulation for Anxiety with Dr. Hool

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

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

Episode Highlights:

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

Explore VeRelief through our affiliate link.

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Dr. Hool: Yes. Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

112. Finding Motivation to Finish with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

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

In this week’s episode, Carrie shares a six-step guide for finding motivation and achieving your goals in 2024. From understanding your why to making small changes, tune in for practical tips to overcome challenges and finish strong.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why knowing your “why” is crucial.
  • How to learn from past experiences to avoid mistakes.
  • The importance of researching the “how” for effective planning.
  • Strategies for handling challenging days in your journey.
  • Why seeking accountability can boost your progress.
  • Tips for choosing a good start date and successfully executing your plan.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD Episode 112! As we wrap up January, many of us are either pressing forward with our New Year’s goals or feeling like we’ve fallen short. If you’re finding it tough to stay motivated and need a boost to finish strong, this episode is for you. I’ll be sharing practical insights and personal experiences to help reignite your passion and keep you on track with your goals.

In this episode, I dive deep into finding the motivation to complete the goals you’ve set. We all start with great intentions, but maintaining momentum can be challenging. I’ll discuss how understanding your “why” and learning from past experiences can set a solid foundation for achieving your goals. This includes identifying what’s been holding you back and planning effectively to tackle those hurdles.

I also cover the importance of researching and planning your approach, especially when embarking on new habits or changes. From setting a realistic start date to preparing for inevitable challenges, having a clear plan is crucial. I share examples from my own life and how they’ve guided me through my health and fitness journey this year.

For the full breakdown of steps and additional tips on maintaining motivation, be sure to listen to the complete episode. I hope these insights inspire you to persevere and reach the goals that matter most to you this year.

More to listen to!

60. The Benefits of Fitness and Spirituality Combined with Jen Roland

Transcript

Hi, welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 112. I know it’s the end of January right now, and some of you may have the gung-ho in the middle of working on goals that you started at the beginning of the year, and some of you may have given up on them completely. And some of you may be somewhere in between.

I want to do this. I want to finish strong, but I’m struggling right now. So I wanted to talk with you today about finding motivation to finish. We can have good plans, good intentions, but if we don’t know how to execute and get our plan from start to finish, then we’re going to have a challenge. I think many times we get excited. Yes, it’s a new year, fresh start. I want to make changes to my physical health. I want to eat better. I want to actually stick to my budget this month instead of just spending erratically. I want to develop relationships. Maybe I want to put more effort and energy into developing friendships, mom, friends, dating relationships, whatever your story is, maybe you have a career goal you’re trying to hit.

I want to reach a certain number of sales or I’m looking to get promoted. Whatever it is, I hope that this episode will help you to find the motivation to do the things that God has laid on your heart for this year. I’m going to give you a step process, and I’m going to give you examples from my own life of something that I’m working through in 2024.

I’ve gone through that process, it’s really helped me solidify how to share it with you who are looking for motivation. You may have hard things that you need to do in therapy, and that may be another thing that you’re trying to motivate yourself towards.

Number one is find and clarify your why.

This is so huge. Why do you want to make this change? I saw a picture of myself in December. It was a picture of my family in front of a Christmas tree at church, and I looked at how I looked physically and realized I am carrying more weight than I want to be carrying at this point. I’ve gone through various weight fluctuations over the years.

I’ve lost it. I’ve probably lost the same 15 pounds and found it several times at this point. Another thing happened in December where something popped up on my Facebook memories four years ago. I had been working out regularly at the Y and it was a picture of me with that class and the teacher had, it was her last day.

So we had all gotten together and taken a picture to kind of wish her well in her new adventure. I contrasted those two pictures in my mind and I was like, “Okay, here’s me now. I’m not happy with not just the way that I look, but I’m not happy with the way that I feel.”

I have this other picture of me where I was feeling amazing. I was moving my body on a regular basis. My mental health was great because of that movement of my body. I was getting all of those endorphin benefit. Everything that was going on. I was sleeping. There’s so many positive benefits to exercise and eating right, so I decided I’ve got to do something different and actually got sucked into a Facebook ad because apparently the little algorithm knows me too well and bought a fitness program and diet and exercise program that involves carb cycling.

One thing I decided at the beginning of this experience was that I was not going to go hungry. That was a huge thing that I had decided like, “Hey, I’m going to figure out a way to not to be hungry.” So that was supposed to be one of the benefits of this program. I had done a lot of calorie tracking and different things before and just something felt lacking. This is a macro tracking program. It’s a little bit different.

All of that is inconsequential right now because we’re still talking about your why. Why do you want to make this change? For me, I wanted to feel better. I wanted to be happier about how I look. I wanted to be more toned. I wanted to have more energy to spend time with my daughter.

I found a cave tour at Mammoth Cave. It was kind of a more rugged cave tour, not just the ones that you do the typical walkthrough of, but I thought, “Man, I would really love to go on that rugged cave tour for some self care and feeling a sense of accomplishment for myself.” I’ve loved caves for a long time. Something I probably haven’t shared on the podcast before, but caves have been always just something that have been really interesting to me. I’ve done several different cave tours, even done several of the ones at Mammoth Cave. I decided I’d really like to go on this, but if I try to go in my current physical fitness level. I am not going to feel good about it. I am going to be absolutely hurting and my back is probably going to be wishing that I really didn’t do that. I knew that I had to strengthen up my abs more. That’s one of my goals that I’m working towards is being able to do that CAVE program. There’s a bit of a multifaceted “why” that I have.

Now, your why may be completely different. A lot of times our whys, though, have to do with our relationship to self and others. If you say, I want to have a better relationship with God, That’s a good piece, but why? Try to dig down a little bit deeper. “Okay, because I know that when I’m more spiritually connected, I am more present in my family life. My priorities are in the right place because I’m putting God first and then these other things are following, just like scripture tells us.” Wen you can really dig down and find your why, and find the things that have gotten in the way in the past, I can put that as number two. I just created an extra step because we’re ad libbing this right now, which is welcome to podcasting.

Find out what has failed in the past and your learning from your past mistakes. One thing that I’ve learned from past health journeys is that the number on the scale really screws me up. I can’t be focused on that. If I’m focused on that and it doesn’t fluctuate the way that I want it to, I end up getting discouraged. If it fluctuates to a certain level, then I’m like, “Hey, I can eat more.” Sometimes I get derailed on the diet aspect of things. I knew that that’s an issue for me. I also have gotten squirrely about numbers in terms of counting calories in the past. I don’t know if that’s a little bit of an anxiety thing where I think it has different manifestations, but it can be things like, “Oh, I only have like 300 calories left today. What if I eat these 300 calories and then I’m still hungry? Do I want that 300 calories? It just can really mess with me. Did I track all of the calories correctly? That can be really derailing for you if you’re dealing with anxiety and trying to make positive health changes. So I knew that that was kind of a problem that I had run into in the past.

What I talked about a little bit earlier was I had a lot of excuses for not doing this earlier. A lot of times for me, it was easy to default and my daughter was the excuse. Well, I don’t have time because I’m a working mom and I’m busy and I’m either working or I’m taking care of my daughter. I’m taking care of my household, so therefore I don’t have the time and the energy that I need to work out. I also know for me that there are certain things I’m just not going to do. I am not going to get up at 5 am. and work out, so not set yourself up for failure if you’re not a morning person. You’ve tried in the past to get up at 5 a.m and work out and it has not gone well for you.

Why are you going to continue to try to do that which you know completely crashed and burned in the past? I see people who do that all the time. You have to find what’s going to be most successful for you. For me, sometimes that meant I have to work out after my daughter goes to bed. It may look like I have to work out at work before I pick her up from daycare or on a lunch break. You have to find what’s going to work for you. Sometimes finding what works for you is learning from the past experience and past mistakes that you’ve made. Learning from the past experiences that you’ve had.

Point number three, research the how. With this new program that I’ve gotten involved in, it’s tracking macros very different from tracking calories, and that has been a huge learning curve for me. I spent a chunk of time towards the end of December, instead of saying, “Hey, I’m gonna start this diet tomorrow, and I’m gonna be like, completely on it.”

I really looked at and researched what types of foods have less carbs. What has more protein? How am I going to get the amount of protein that I need in a day? What are some recipes that I can feed my family? Because I’m not trying to cook three different meals for three different people. I know that that’s not going to work very well. Really researching different recipe websites. What can I prep ahead of time to be able to make my life easier beecause I am a busy mom, I do have responsibilities at home and with my own business. Thinking through my meal planning process and figuring out the different types of food that I can eat to get enough protein or the right amount of carbs depending on the day because it’s cycling between low, medium, and high.

Researching of the how is important. There’s a saying that says “if we don’t have a plan, we are essentially planning to fail.” Having a plan is super important, so before you take any steps or take any changes, Let’s look at this from the mental health standpoint, when I’m encouraging clients to practice skills outside of session, whether that’s deep breathing for anxiety, whether that’s mindfulness for OCD, just learning to notice those thoughts, learning to notice their just thoughts, learning to notice that you can let them go. You don’t have to hold on to them. When they have therapy, they have set appointments to do therapy, but when they’re at home, they don’t necessarily have a specific time of the day where they do that. We talk through that. Would it be best for you to practice this in the morning when you first get up or after you get ready? Would it be best for you to practice this for five, 10 minutes after you eat lunch?

When we want to start a new habit or have a new behavior, it helps us to connect it with something that we’re already doing. You can learn that from the book by James Clear called Atomic Habits. It’s an excellent book. It talks about developing positive habits in your life and removing negative habits, which we all struggle with. I want to go back and read that book some more and really work on implementing some of the things in my life to review some of our points here.

We talked about finding and clarifying your why we talked about learning from past experience of what didn’t work, researching the how and now we’re going to talk about number four, which is plan for challenging days.

Look, I don’t care what you’re trying to do or what new thing you’re trying to implement or what you’re trying to finish. You’re going to have hard days. Make a decision upfront what those days are going to look like. How am I going to handle the sugar craving? How am I going to handle that day that I’m exhausted and don’t want to work out? How am I going to handle the week that I get sick and I’m not able to follow through with the diet exercise plan? This may look like a lot of different things for you. It may look like you writing down your why and saying, “Hey, here’s why I’m making these changes for me.” It’s going back to when I want to eat something that maybe wouldn’t be the healthiest for me. Going back to that picture of this is where you are and you have a picture of where you are and you have a picture of where you want to be. Let’s move towards the picture of where you want to be. Instead of continuing to stay in the picture of where you are, it may be certain affirmations that you write down to yourself, like God is bigger than any challenge that I’m going to face today. That’s something that I tell myself when I feel stuck, when I feel like I can’t do something.

All the strength and the power that you need, you can access through the Holy Spirit, through prayer, and that spiritual connection to God is super important. If this is something that God has called you to do, then he is going to equip you and enable you to be able to do it. I have to speak that to myself on a regular basis. Keep that in mind. Plan for your challenging days. Maybe that means, if you’re trying to change your diet, that you have some quick, healthy foods in the refrigerator. Maybe it means that you have a list written down of “If you don’t have this food, I can eat this food.” If you eat out a lot, what are some healthy options as you eating out.

When you’re talking about motivation for mental health changes, knowing that you can make positive changes and it’s not always going to look like a straight diagonal line. That’s true of any positive change. I tell my clients all the time, you’re going to have your ups and downs as you’re making progress, so don’t be discouraged when you take a step back. Just know you have made this much progress so far because you take one step back. That doesn’t negate the progress that you have already made. I’ve got to keep going and go to the next thing. Go to the next piece and pick up. Today you totally blew it. That doesn’t mean that has to become a habit. That doesn’t mean you have to go back to square one. You can say, “You know what? I can start again later today. I can start again tomorrow. “

Number five, seek accountability.

I have told everybody, including you, the podcast audience of health changes that I’m trying to make in my life. Actually, I broke it to the podcast audience on our email list where I wrote an email about some changes that I was making and asking some of you about changes and goals that you’re doing in the new year. I’ve told my in laws, I’ve told my friends, I’ve told loved ones because I want that accountability. I want people to ask me, how is this going in your life? I know you’re trying to eat more protein and less carbs. What does that look like? How are you doing with that? I have another friend who’s also making some health changes, and she’s telling me about movement that she’s doing. I can share the movement that I’m getting in. I wanted people to know because it really helps me stay on track. If I don’t let other people in my life know the changes that I’m trying to make, then I can just kind of get away a little bit more with not making them and not feeling bad about not making those changes.

Accountability can be really huge and really beneficial to us. That may look like different things for different people. You may want to get in a support group and it could be something mental health related, could be something physical health related where you’re saying, “Hey, I want to make these positive changes in my life.” It could be a Bible study or a church group where you say, Hey, I want to become the person who God has called me to be. I know that I want to be reading my Bible. Our church is going through one of those read the Bible in a year plans. That’s another thing we’re doing in 2024 and it’s really great. Having that accountability where you can say like, “Hey, how was your reading going? What did you pick up on today? or how did you connect with God as you read his word today?” That accountability is very important for us being able to reach our goals. We can’t get there alone. A lot of times we try and we think we can, but you weren’t made to do this alone, regardless of what it is that you’re dealing with.

Number six, pick a good start date. There just are some times that are not a good time to make the change that you’re trying to make. I had situations where I was going through back pain and that’s part of the reason I got off track. I’m not going to say that that’s 100 percent the reason, but there definitely have been some physical limitations and some rehab that I’ve had to do at various points over the last few years. For me to say, I’m going to go on a complete physical journey transformation and walk five miles that just wasn’t realistic and it wouldn’t have been helpful for me because I had to start where I was at. Starting small is good and we’ll talk about that in the last step, but when they talk with people about quitting smoking, they always say, have a quit date, put it on your calendar, make that determination, have it as a visual so that you know after today you are not doing cigarettes anymore. That does something to our brain, really trains us. You had all this preparation beforehand.,Finding your why, figuring the how, planning for the challenging days, getting your accountability on board so that when you pick your start date, it’s a good time to start. You probably don’t want to start your diet plan on December the 24th.

If you know you’re going to be having Christmas celebrations with family over the next couple of days and eat way too many Christmas cookies like I did. That was what happened to me. Picking a good start date is important because a lot of times we do these things that We’re not trying to set ourselves up for failure, but then when you take a step back and look at it, it’s like we really planned in a way that didn’t set ourselves up for success, and then we turned around and beat ourself up for it.

We’re like, “okay, I have all these major life changes happening in my life, but I need to make this change.” It’s a huge change. We don’t make the huge change that’s unrealistic, and we say, “Well, see. I told you I couldn’t do it” It gets into all this negative thinking and all this beating ourselves up.

Going back to planning for the challenging days, we’ve got to learn to be kind to ourselves. We’ve got to learn that we’re not always going to hit the mark. That’s what grace is for. That’s what the love of God is here for us and knowing that it’s okay. That doesn’t mean we’re a horrible person. It doesn’t mean that we’re not ever going to reach our goals because we can get into all of this negative thought process. “Oh, see, I told you I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that” Wust end up getting stuck and wallowing in a place of shame.

The last step that I want to talk you through is execute. When you are executing your plan and your goals and the step by step process, sometimes you need to ease your way into it. What I’ll find in talking with clients, they’ll say, “I’m going to create a goal where I am walking 30 minutes every day this week.” I’m kind of like, “but you’re not walking at all. That might be a good goal.” Say if you were walking four or five times a week and you want to do every day, or if you said, “Hey, I’m walking every day for 15 and I’d like to walk for 20 every day.” It sounds a little bit more doable, but to go from zero to 100 percent is probably not going to happen and that’s that whole setting yourself up for failure. Maybe if you’re trying to make positive health changes, you just focus on one thing. I’m going to drink X amount of ounces of water a day, whatever is deemed healthily, because that depends on your body weight. I’m going to drink this much water per day, or I’m going to trade one soda for sparkling water, or instead of drinking this soda, I’m going to drink flavored water instead, and making that one small change. When you can stick with that one small change, going to the next small change. Maybe you decide, you know what, instead of pulling through the drive thru and getting a breakfast sandwich, I am going to get the oatmeal or I am going to get a smoothie or make something at home. Whatever you deem is reasonable that you’re going to be able to do, and then you can always change that. Maybe you decide that the oatmeal is healthier than this, but it still has too much sugar or whatever the case is, you can always shift and adjust and change your plan as needed. That’s an important thing to remember.

Let’s talk through small changes that you can make to improve your mental health. Can you reduce alcohol consumption? Can you go to bed at the same time every night? Can you develop a relaxing bedtime routine or a joyful morning routine? What does that look like to wake up and embrace the joy of the Lord? Some of us have a really hard time with that in the morning, but you can do it. Put on a worship song or get up and stretch, move your body, go outside and take a deep breath. Maybe not if it’s super cold, whatever it is that is going to help you like engage in that process. Maybe you decide that your mental health goal is going to be journaling. I’m going to take five minutes before I go to sleep and just write down some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. Maybe going to reach out and ask someone for help this week. That’s huge. That’s something that we have a hard time doing. I’m going to work on saying no more. When what’s being asked of me doesn’t suit me or isn’t healthy, I’m going to set a boundary with a co worker or friend. We have entire episodes on setting boundaries on the podcast that you can go back and look at. Whatever you feel like God has laid on your heart to do in 2024. I just want you to know that you can find the motivation and that you can finish strong. Pray about it. Clarify your why. Sit with the Lord. What failed in the past? What didn’t go well? How can I learn from that? How can I grow? How can I set myself up for positive change? How can I plan for challenging days? Who’s going to be my support, my accountability on this journey? What’s a good day to start and Lord help me execute. I think all of this integrates with our spiritual life so well because self control is a spiritual discipline and we receive that through the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit does his part at work within us and we do our part in doing what we have been called and asked to do in obedience.

Thank you guys for listening to this episode. I hope that you are going to finish strong as we get to the end of January today. As you continue to make changes throughout the year, if there’s anything that we can do to help and support you in that process, please let us know.

I’m always up for episode suggestions. We do have a personal story interview coming your way in a couple weeks of a lady who went from being in a mental health hospital to really thriving and is now a health educator and advocate. She’s going to share some of her story and I know that’s going to be inspiring to you as well.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, Licensed Professional Counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

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

 

105. Joy Comes in the Morning: 3rd Year of Marriage

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Podcast Episode.

In this special episode, Carrie and her husband, Steve, reflect on their three-year marriage journey and the joy of overcoming difficulties. They share insights on the importance of open communication and their experiences as parents to their daughter Faith. They also offer practical tips for maintaining a solid relationship while looking ahead with optimism and gratitude for each day.

Episode Highlights:

  • The significance of finding joy and hope in difficult situations as inspired by Psalm 30:5.
  • The importance of open communication in a marriage, even when addressing challenging topics.
  • How to navigate and adapt to life’s unexpected changes and challenges, such as health issues.
  • The value of adjusting and accepting new norms in life and relationships.
  • Their experiences in parenthood, including insights into their daughter, Faith, and the joys and challenges of raising her.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 105 of Christian Faith and OCD!

In this episode, we dive into our year of challenges and growth, centered around the theme “Joy in the Morning,” inspired by Psalm 30:5. We explore how we’ve navigated trials and found hope and joy through our faith and resilience.

Highlights of This Episode:

  1. Reflecting on Our Journey: Steve and I look back at our dating days, the trials of our first year of marriage, and our growth as a couple. We share how our experiences, including Steve’s diagnosis of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), have shaped our relationship.
  2. Adapting to New Normals: Steve discusses how he’s adjusted to life with SCA, including his memorable Crazy Hair Day at Vacation Bible School (VBS). Despite the challenges, Steve’s involvement in ministry and our lives has been a source of inspiration and joy.
  3. Mission Trip to Guatemala: Steve shares his incredible experience on a mission trip to Guatemala. Despite the obstacles, he found purpose and connection, highlighting how disabilities don’t have to limit our ability to serve others.
  4. Communication and Growth: We delve into how effective communication has been crucial in our relationship, especially when addressing and resolving issues that arise. Steve and I discuss the importance of understanding and patience in our journey together.
  5. Parenting and Faith: With our daughter, Faith, turning 18 months old, we reflect on the joys and challenges of parenting. We explore how our faith has guided us through these experiences and strengthened our bond.

Listen to this episode to gain insight into how faith, communication, and resilience have guided us through our journey. We hope our story inspires you to find joy in your own challenges and embrace the morning light after the night’s trials.

Keep listening with this related episode!

81. On Becoming Parents: Year Two of Marriage with Steve and Carrie Bock

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 105. I am joined here once again by my lovely husband, Steve.

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Carrie: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hey. How are you?

Carrie: Welcome. We’ve been doing this as a tradition almost every year. It started before we got married. We did an episode about our dating experiences, and then, in the first year of marriage, I was pregnant. I remember crying a lot in that episode because we didn’t know what was happening to your eyes other than we knew you had lost vision. It was super scary. Thinking about all the uncertainties there, then you had just been diagnosed with neurological conditions, spinocerebellar ataxia.

We sat down and thought about what we wanted to discuss for our third year of marriage now that we’ve been married for almost three years. This scripture had come to mind: Psalm 30 verse 5 says, Weeping may stay overnight, but there is joy in the morning. And so, we thought about titling this episode Joy in the Morning. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about why we chose that?

Steve: Yes, because I think going through trials, as everyone does, our trials that we have dealt with, there have been tears, and there have been difficult moments, but the joy that comes out of that, being able to look back and say, oh my goodness, I’ve made it through this. And it gives others hope that they may be going through the same thing. That’s the beauty of going through something difficult: when you make it to the other side, to a better place at least, you can share that with someone and help them. We have been through a lot; it has been difficult, but we’ve done it with a smile. As best as we can anyway, so, that’s kind of, it’s a good verse.

Carrie: Yes. Some of the highlights of this year of you adjusting to the SCA diagnosis and realizing that you can still be involved in ministry with which you’d like to be involved. And I wish we had a picture of your crazy hair day at VBS.

Steve: That was so much fun. They’d asked me to, at church, well, they didn’t ask me, but I signed up for VBS, which was a challenge at the time because I’d yet to serve in any way by myself amidst all the chaos of all those wonderful kids who were having fun. And here I am, with my walker, trying to hurry through and make it work but having a blast. They had different themes for each day, whether it be sports, and one of those days was crazy hair day, so I said, why not? So, each night, I participated, but that was probably the best one for me because, as a bald man, I could wear a wig with blue hair. I think it was. Was it blue?

Carrie: No, it was all white.

Steve: All right, there we go.

Carrie: But you had a blue headband.

Steve: That’s what it was. I knew something must have been blue, but A, there’s my memory for you, and B, there’s my eyesight for you. But yes, it was all white hair. I remember that now. And it was crazy. It was out there. And I got so many comments on that. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Carrie: Right. Yes, and then this summer, you took a mission trip to Guatemala, which was the first time that you had been really since COVID and us getting married, having a baby, all these different things happened.

Steve: That was one of those experiences I did not know if I would get to continue with. But the team I went with was so gracious and so giving, so compassionate that they knew where my heart was. They knew they wanted me to go on that team with them and invited me, which was humbling. I never had to ask for help, whether I thought I needed it or not, and more times than not, I did need help.

They were right there, by my side, to grab a bag and help me up and down the stairs, which is funny because I took a walker with me. A smaller walker that would be easier to pack and carry and all that stuff takes up less space. I never got to use that thing, except in the airport once, because flat ground didn’t exist where we were.

There was no way of using that: there were so many stairs and different things. Anyway, the team was so good though to help me. I made sure I got from point A to point B and got to teach with people, and the people in Guatemala were so gracious with their time and compassionate, too, so it was a blessing.

Carrie: Great. And I think you got some positive feedback from people there that your story was just inspirational and that you had sacrificed to go to another country because you could have easily said, I’ve done mission trips for years; my time is over, and I have this disability. It’s time for me to kick back and rest.

Steve: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ll never forget this. Pastor Mark, who led the group, commented when we discussed whether I should go or not that we have people with club feet and different things that come to see us. Why not have someone else come to see them with a problem, whatever, a disability? I hadn’t thought about it that way. I just thought, how will I be able to do this? That’s all I was focused on. That changed the way that I thought about it. When I got there, the people were just so, I don’t know, I think it was a different way of looking at things for them too. Someone who has a disability came to speak with them. It was a cool thing in the end. It was very humbling, though.

Carrie: This year has been about adjusting and accepting our new normal. I guess you could call it our new life situation, and it comes with many changes and challenges in relationships and daily life. What’s been your experience of that?

Steve: I had to adjust and change to, you can sit on a couch or sit in the bed and cry and give in, or you can tweak how you do things. You can change or adjust to the new normal. And that’s what I’ve done, and I still do what I like. I don’t get to go outside as often, and I don’t get to go hiking. However, there are ways that I can do things.

I’m very happy with the life that I’m living, getting to do those things. I still get to meet with my friends occasionally and can’t just get in the car and drive there. But I still get to go, so there are no complaints. It’s still a blessing to play with our child and do all the fun things that I think are important.

Carrie: Faith just turned 18 months old, and she’s a little firecracker sometimes. But it’s been a journey, lots of learning, lots of adjustment, lots of growing as parents. And I think all these things that we’re talking about related to your marriage are, like, these are things that can either bring you closer together or create conflict and drive you farther apart.

Steve: Definitely. I think that for us, you always have to look forward. You have to pick your battles. I constantly tell myself that, not so much with you, but with Faith. Just with our daughter, trying to figure out, okay, she’s upset. Why is she upset? Or, she is, like most children, she gets her mind set on something.

I want to carry that blanket around. And drag it while we walk outside. I want to drag it through the dirt and never want to let it go. She reminds me of Linus with those blankets, but sometimes, you must decide how important it is for me to take this blanket away from her. Or to take whatever this toy or whatever it is.

Is it a deal breaker if she hangs on to it? Am I training her incorrectly if I let her hang on to that? Or, there’s a lot of decision-making there, but sometimes I’ve learned it’s okay to let her hang on for just a minute longer. And then, whenever she forgets about it, take it away and hide it; she’ll never think of it, and you won’t have to deal with the fuss. I don’t know if that always works, but picking your battles is very important.

Carrie: I think that’s true in a relational sense. And what you were talking about before, essentially honoring your limitations, is helpful for all our listeners, just listening to your body. There are some days that you can do more than others and some days you’re very fatigued and have to take it easy, and all you may get done is one load of laundry, and that’s it.

That’s a hard thing to accept. And just in terms of the mental health realm, it’s like, okay, some days I may be prepared to socially interact in a certain way with others, and some days I just may not be able to do that and respecting and honoring, like, my body and where I’m at today.

Steve: You have to decide sometimes if you’re going through fatigue, are you not feeling well, and you need rest, or are you just depressed and pushing away people? Because that’s a big difference. There are days, I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like doing the people thing, but it’s just me being whatever, me being me, or wanting to avoid people. And then there are other days I want to be around people, but my body is too tired, and I need to rest. Those are decisions that you have to think about, I think, for me, in the sense of, is it me, or is my body just really needing the rest? And so more times than not, for me, it’s my body really needs the rest, and so I have to force myself to lay down. I’m not a very good stop-and-rest person. I’m getting better at it, but not by choice, because I have to.

Carrie: Usually, other people tell you to sit down rather than you decide to sit down.

Steve: And anyone who knows me knows I was always a person that just wanted to go. Not that I couldn’t stop, but I didn’t like to sit down. I like to fix things. If something is on my mind, I want to finish it. I’m not a procrastinator, but when you have something like I have, you have to sit down. It’s not procrastinating; it’s resting until you can.

Carrie: I wanted to bring something up, and we can always cut this out if you don’t want us to talk about this, but without going into a lot of details, we had an, like, a communication issue come up in our marriage this year where we were both unhappy with like one aspect of our life. Do you know what I’m talking about? And neither one of us said anything because we’re both conflict-avoiders. And then finally, I got up the courage, and I said, “Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of unhappy in this one area, and then it was surprising for you to say, yeah, me too.” We were able to, like, do something about it. And so, I just wanted to share with our listeners that sometimes it’s hard to bring up those difficult topics in your marriage and talk about hard things that make you feel uncomfortable or your concern that’s going to make your spouse feel uncomfortable or that they might be mad at you.

Steve: That was one of those things when you said it. When you said something to me, I thought, yes, I agree and it wasn’t a bad thing.

Carrie: Right.

Steve: It wasn’t like she was acting this way, and I’m annoyed. No, it wasn’t that. It was literally a communication issue. It’s like mentally sitting at that four-way stop, and neither one of us is going. But we’re both annoyed with the other because we think it’s their turn or we think it’s something not right here, go when you said something “Oh, good, good, yes” and we dealt with it, and everything went well.

Sometimes I think I tend to be the go-with-the-flow type of personality, and something will bother me. I’m like, it’s not that big of a deal. Just suck it up. And really, you don’t want to gripe every time something comes up. And I’ve been that guy, too. I’ll be honest, but you also don’t want to just, no big deal, and keep pushing it away, and pushing it away, and then one day, you’re going to blow up. It’s not pretty, so sometimes it’s better to talk, and the struggle is, how do you bring it up? How do you say it? That always comes up because when I say things, I tend to be a very sarcastic person. I’ve really had to work on that, and nowhere near success in that department. I’ve worked on my sarcasm because I like to be funny and sarcastic, but it doesn’t work when communicating in a profound moment. It’s always taken as a negative, even though I may not mean it that way. For instance, if you say, Steve, I really need to go to the store or the library, and my response is, oh, goody, I can’t wait. I may think nothing of that. I meant simply as humor but when you say that enough, it bleeds out as this jerk doesn’t even want to go, and he doesn’t have the guts to say, I don’t really want to go carry. Is that okay? Instead, it’s, Oh, goody. The sarcasm doesn’t help me and I’ve had to work on that honest moment.

Carrie: Well, I think coming to a place of when you say this, I hear this. In your marriage relationship, men and women communicate things differently, and there are times when you’ll say something, and I’m like, I heard this, and then you’ll say, no, that’s not at all what I said.

Steve: Yes, and I am so caught off guard in those moments but again, it may be how I’m saying it, orr the pattern of how I’ve said it before. I think that really you could set a tone.

Carrie: Yes, it also taps into what I’m learning, like your past relational baggage because it’s like, okay, I hear him talking like my dad or my ex or something like that, and then I’m absorbing it through that lens. I don’t even realize that I’m doing it at that point until maybe later, and I have moments of self-reflection. I think that piece comes up in marriage a lot.

Steve: I think that’s why I’ve always heard the first two years of marriage are the most difficult. I think it could go beyond that. I don’t know, but I think the reason is that you’re getting through communication and likes, dislikes, and all of that stuff. You’re learning about your other half. I hope we can be one of those cute older couples that everybody wants to go to. Oh my gosh, you’re going to make me throw up, or they say they’re so cute. The old couple that’s kissing and holding hands. Anyway, so you hope when you’re older, you don’t even have to say anything. You know what the other person would think.

Carrie: In this process of growing together, I always tell clients that you’re either growing with someone or growing apart from them because you might be growing at different levels. I’ve seen that happen in friendships; I’ve noticed that it occurs to various people in romantic relationships. So always, like, keeping those lines of communication open, being self-aware and knowing what you’re contributing to the relationship, what might be detrimental to your relationship, and how to work on those things. And I think if we can look at it as we were talking about our communication, It’s not always bad, like sometimes we need some enrichment in certain areas. There’s not a problem yet, or there’s not a crisis. If you can catch it before something becomes a problem, or becomes a crisis, or before we feel like we don’t talk about that at all, if you can address it on the front end, it’s a lot easier than waiting for things to, like you said, build up and build up, and then somebody blows up, or somebody withdraws or walks away.

Steve: Absolutely. I think, too, that sometimes we get angry in our head, and that builds up, and to the point where, and you say this about faith all the time, she doesn’t even know why she’s angry. Something triggered you, and then your state, not you, but in general, and I’ve had this to me, and I stop, and I think, why in the world am I even angry? I don’t even know why. And it may simply be I don’t feel well, and I have to stop and say, okay, I cannot take that out on anyone. That is not fair. I just need to shush, not say anything, let it go. Try to remember those techniques of how to calm down or how to relax. And then there were other times when I did have something that bothered me, but I didn’t want to say anything. And I held it in, and then, kaboom, it’s not pretty, all over something really silly.

Carrie: I think timing is vital in terms of bringing up topics. In your marriage, it’s hard to know. You can’t necessarily bring something up when there’s all that heat of the emotion on both sides. You have to take a break, like pause. Okay, let’s talk about this. Let’s go to our separate spaces, reflect on it, pray about it, and then come back together and talk about what in the world just happened with that last interaction. I don’t even know, but we went from a happy couple to all of a sudden. We’re at each other’s throats or something.

Steve: That would be those moments when I have to say, okay, Steve, calm down. Why are you upset or okay? Maybe your reasoning for being upset is justifiable, but there are two of us in this marriage, so what can I do? What can I say to try to calm this down? There’s no hero, no winner, no individual here. How do we do this together? How do we work? That’s hard because we always want to win; we always want to be right. As humans, you always want to be in the right, and we never stop and think; it seems most of us don’t; maybe I’m wrong here. Perhaps I need to change the approach. Maybe I’m not wrong, but my path is wrong, or how I’m saying it. And that’s where it’s difficult because the focus is on you to change. And that’s hard. We always want the other person to change.

Carrie: Right, and I think working with our daughter and trying to help her when she has these completely age-appropriate meltdowns because she’s been teething or refused her nap that day or her stomach hurts, and we don’t even know about it. You know, all these things come up, and at the moment, it seems like it’s, you know, I want the banana over the strawberries; really, it has nothing to do with that. It’s all these other factors and knowing that we can have the opportunity to bring the calm into the situation and like get down on her level and talk to her and like, okay, you know, I can see you’re really upset right now.

Steve: Well, and that isn’t easy in general. And it’s easy for a couple, I think, with children. They have problems because they have a child or children, in our case, a child, who may have been screaming for 20 minutes at the top of their lungs. You’re just at wit’s end to please make it go away, just stop, not the child, the screaming, and then the communication between the two of you can be rather snappy. It’s not personal, just give me the sippy cup, take the child here, do this, and it’s nothing personal, it’s just, oh my gosh, have you checked your diaper lately? There’s always something. And what are those moments you look at later and go, I’m sorry, I may have been a little snappy. It’s hard to focus on how to calm her down, and you’re going off on your spouse—just a tricky thing.

Carrie: I think, too, there’s that element where sometimes we’ll be trying to have a conversation in the car, and then all of a sudden in the backseat is because she can’t talk fully.

Steve: She wants to join in.

Carrie: Yes,

Steve: Those are the moments I kind of smile myself and then begin to insert her name every fourth word, maybe asking you when we go to the store, are we going to buy this, that, or the other, and then I insert her name, which makes no sense in real-time, but when talking with her, she hears her name and is happy to be a part of the conversation, I’m hoping.

Carrie: Despite all the difficult things that have happened this year, in terms of our themes of joy coming in the morning, we will talk about where you see things going.

Steve: Yes, I think there are so many opportunities that have come up already, be it with church or missions or whatever; there’s just so much to look forward to. And I know that there will be, as the song said, mama said, there’d be days like this. There are going to be those days. But I look forward to good things as well, and I think that some elegant stuff is coming up the pike, so I’m excited about that; I’m excited that some of my doctor visits, my annual checkups are already behind me, got my eyes taken care of, and no significant change there, and that’s a blessing. Some of my neurological visits and all that are coming up have already passed. They’ve already passed for a while. So those are good things. I look forward to those. Most people don’t like the doctor’s visits, but I like them because I get the news, and I’m done with it for a while. Get it behind me. I’m looking forward to what’s coming up the pike for sure.

Carrie: When you have this generative disease, stability is a blessing; staying the same and not deteriorating further is always a positive. So, we appreciate that whenever we hear that. Just in general, your health numbers are doing well.

Steve: Those are doing really well. On top of that, knowing that I am doing as well as I am is a blessing in the sense that we didn’t know when we first got this diagnosis, we didn’t know. It almost gave me the feeling like golly, I could die tomorrow. But now I’ve heard some individuals have the same thing. Maybe we don’t necessarily know which type, yes, thank you. Which type that I have? But we know that I have it. And the lifespan, again, I thought, golly, I could die tomorrow. Who couldn’t die tomorrow? I hear about people who have been living to be 80 years old. And I hear about, because of what they’ve discovered through studies for Parkinson’s disease, they’ve been able to say, hey, that’ll work for SCA as well. And now I’m not on this medication, but for certain types of SCA, they can take this medication, which slows it down a little bit, they think. I don’t have all the details on that, but I know that it’s exciting that they found something. Those types of things are exciting to me. That’s definitely something to consider a joy, and I can get up and spend time with my family, enjoy the days I have now, and make the very best of each day. That’s exciting.

Carrie: We got involved in an SCA support group and have just learned so much through the other individuals, things that have worked for them, been helpful, not helpful, and then been able even to take some of that information like to your eye appointment and say, hey, This was recommended to us, or we found out this doesn’t work as well with SCA. That’s been a blessing, I think, for me and just this whole podcast journey and our relationship. I want to impact more people positively for the kingdom, just continuing to spread messages of hope. That people can get the help that they need out there. I know that you have stepped in and been a big support in promoting the podcast, even sometimes talking to people or supporting me in going to the AACC conference when that happened.

There were some long days there, and you had more duties and responsibilities at home or with Faith. I appreciate everything that you’ve done to help support this podcast. It’s been a wild ride, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been about three years. Just all the things that God has done indoors that he’s opened and to be able to launch the course recently, and I hope this next year to work on a book I’m thinking it’s going to be for Christians with anxiety some focus on OCD. They want to do some writing about anxiety, So I’m not exactly sure what direction or bent I’m going to go with that. I want to provide some practical tools to help and support people experiencing that. Still, I’m just excited to see what the Lord is going to do, and we are hopeful to be able to move in 2024 possibly. Praise the Lord. So, we are looking for better accessible housing than we have right now. Not that our accommodation is terrible as far as you’re getting around. It’s just not going to serve us in the future. And we know that. And so, we are trying to get something that’s more one level or flatter yard or something. That’s going to be more,

Steve: Flat is the keyword there, at least as far as the yard goes and fewer steps. Also, I’d like to say that I’m proud of you for how much effort and time and all of that you’ve put into the podcast and your work and what you do, and knowing you as I do, of course, I’m going to brag on you, but you put a lot of heart into what you do. And I think it shows, I definitely think it shows.

It’s exciting that I remember when you hadn’t even started the podcast. And now you’re on number 105 or something crazy like that? That’s wonderful, and there are days, I’ll be honest, I listen and think I will need a dictionary. I don’t know what that means because I’m not in that world. And then I’ll listen and say, “Oh, well, that’s really interesting. I never knew that.” I tell people if I’m talking to someone at the doctor’s office or wherever, and they say I have a problem with anxiety. I have perfect help for you here. I always try to remind them that if they look through the episodes, one may stand out to them. It’s not focused on one little thing, and even when it’s not something you’re necessarily interested in, as you listen, you find, wow, that’s got a lot for me to take away. I had no clue that that also pertained to me or that I would get that much out of it. So, it’s not boring. I’ll give it that. It’s very informative, and I enjoy that—so good job.

Carrie: Well, thank you. I want all of our listeners to know that I made some great connections at the AACC conference. So that means more interesting guests to come next year. And kind of now that we’ve had over a hundred episodes, we’re able to just branch down different rabbit holes.

There are still more things to talk about. It’s kind of surprising that there are always new topics and ways that we can apply what we’re learning to help with anxiety and OCD. Everyone, definitely stay tuned. We have some free resources on our website. I’d love to tell you about it, too. You can go to Hopeforanxietyandocd.com. We have our download from our hundredth episode on A Hundred Ways to Help You Manage Anxiety. We have an OCD resource: five things every Christian with OCD needs to know. We’ve got a few different things going on there and would love to have you check those resources out. Thank you, everyone, so much for listening today.

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

89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

Therapist and author K.J. Ramsey talks to us about her healing journey from spiritual abuse and chronic pain.

-How K.J. realized that she was in a spiritually abusive situation

-Wrestling with questions about why God allowed her suffering

-The importance of emotional safety in a church or community

-Her process of leaving a spiritually toxic environment 

-How connecting to her body helps in her healing

-K.J.’s books, “The Lord is My Courage” and “The Book of Common Courage”

Related links and Resources:

www.kjramsey.com/

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 89. I had the absolute privilege of interviewing KJ Ramsey. This was a situation where I didn’t realize before the interview how much we had in common. We both have a background as trauma therapists with more of a somatic lens. We both graduated from the same seminary.

It was very interesting to see her perspectives based on her own experiences and understanding of scripture. Kj, welcome to the podcast.

K.J.: Hey, thank you for having me.

Carrie: I know that with authors, you guys tend to have a lot of podcast interviews. It’s almost like you’re on a virtual book tour nowadays, right?

K.J.: Basically what it is, it’s an extensive virtual book tour. And an introvert.

Carrie: Oh, no. Well, at least you don’t have to meet as many people face-to-face then.

K.J.: I guess in a way, especially during cold and flu season, and there’s still COVID all around. It’s nice to minimize some of that, but it is good. I get to talk to a lot of really interesting people.

Living with a Chronic Illness and Wrestling with God to Understand Her Suffering

Carrie: So my understanding from scoping out your website is that you talk about your personal story on there, and I imagine that is what you write about as well. You’ve written a few books. Is it an autoimmune condition that you have or some issue that causes chronic pain?

K.J.: I have several autoimmune diseases, but I started with one, which is a way that it typically goes if you have one; it kind of blooms into more. I’ve had ankylosing spondylitis for 14 years, and AS is the shortened version of that, which is better on the tongue. Last year, I got COVID-19, which turned into several more diseases I will have for my life under intense treatment. I have a lot.

Carrie: So you ended up with the long haul COVID symptoms?

K.J.: Yes. Because of it, I had long covid and new diseases, which is hard.

Carrie: I’m curious because you also talked in your story about spiritual abuse, and I’m processing, as well, a lot about healing just in general because my husband was just diagnosed last year with a permanent neurological condition, and there’s no cure for it.

I’m curious if you could share some of your thoughts on healing. I think it helps our audience with anxiety and OCD as well because there’s a lot of struggle in wrestling. Why am I having to deal with this? Why won’t God heal me? Why can’t he take this away from me? He’s all-powerful. He has the ability to do that. Can you tell us about maybe some of your wrestlings with that?

K.J.: I was 20 years old when I suddenly got sick and went from being a fully functional young adult to barely walking and could barely hold a pen or drive myself across campus. I was a college student at the time, and that persisted.

I entered adulthood wrestling with this question of why I have this suffering that doesn’t seem to go away. What is the point? And also, what does God care? What is God going to do about this? And really, my better answers are in the book, my first book, this Too Shall Last. I will say that I’m more a writer than anything else, but I’m a trauma therapist learning how to listen to my body and respond to my own sensations with kindness, compassion, and movement.

I really do believe that there is healing in the way that I would say, the capacity to live as fully as we can, even for some things to be reversed. And that’s with me saying that with a person with a lot that’s wrong on my test results.

And a lot of ongoing pain still in my life that I’ve seen things change, and I’ve seen my capacity to show up in my life grow massively as I’ve learned to listen to my body and what she has to say about how safe I feel on any given day or moment. From both a theological and a trauma perspective, I believe there is possible healing in how we face ourselves with compassion and face one another with compassion. And I caveat that by saying how I define healing might be different than sudden spontaneous removal of all of your symptoms. I think that, actually, pain prompts us to pay attention and bear witness to the pain in our lives.

And when I say pain, I mean all of it. Emotional pain too, struggles, the very inconvenient experience of having intrusive thoughts. That’s painful. Pain prompts us to pay attention and can point us to the places where parts of us still need to be unfolded with the care that needs to be held.

And it’s in that process that we experience more fullness, more joy, that’s healing. There’s a difference between healing and curing. The difference is between good removal of all of your problems and experiencing wholeness, and I think we all can experience wholeness even in a body that continues to have a disease continues to have a mental illness.

Finding Emotional Support and Connection

Carrie: That’s incredible. I don’t think that I could have phrased that better because I think that aligns with some of the process of what I’ve been thinking about with my husband. It’s like we haven’t gotten the healing from, or the cure, like you said, from the diagnosis, but we’ve been healed in the sense that we’ve been healed from isolation.

We have support and other people we’re connected to who are going through this. We have a support system outside of those that are going through it. We’ve been healed from the financial stress of paying for medical bills, and God has provided. That’s something that I want to write about a little bit more.

When we started this journey, it was kind; a lot of people were praying for him, and he was having eye issues, and they were praying for him for healing. That in itself is somewhat of a miracle because even though he has a degenerative condition, his eyes haven’t changed in a year, which we are just really celebrating; that, and so thankful that he hasn’t lost any more of his vision, but it’s been a process of, I think his eye doctor’s probably not a Christian and doesn’t know quite how to make sense of that. I thought when we first started going through this, God would take healing in any form that it comes in.

However you want to do this, if you’re going to heal him physically or if you want to heal him emotionally, and there’s the level where he’ll talk about how, even though he likes to be in the background, he has this walker now that puts him in the spotlight. People speak to him, and he’s able to encourage them. Or even people with mobility issues say, “Oh, tell me about this walker.” It’s just a little bit different from your typical walker. How do I get one of those? Those types of things. It’s been very interesting to see how God’s used him differently with this struggle and suffering because it’s definitely changed him a lot. It changed me a lot and drew us closer to God and each other and those things. I’m really thankful for it.

K.J: I love that you started that off office saying God has healed you of; I don’t know if you put it exactly like this, but your individualism. I think that’s one of the core things that we’re all being invited into, whether it’s with struggling with something like OCD or Ankylos Spondylitis or complex trauma, there’s this invitation to be more fully human, which means to be in relationship to others, to be connected. There’s something about our struggles that invites us in a way that is harder to decline, to be connected, and to be supported, to be seen. The way that my body works, I can’t do life on my own.

I can’t. There are many stretches where I can’t take care of myself fully; beyond that, I need the emotional support of the people around me. I don’t love experiencing that, and I love that my body pulls me into a story where I don’t have to be self-sufficient, and nobody else has to, either. And I think that is the healing in which we’re all being bound.

We’re all being invited into. It’s the space between each other. That’s where Joy is. That’s where wonder is through love; our struggles take us to go there.

How K.J. Discovered that She was in a Spiritual Abusive Situation

Carrie: And we’re entirely too isolated and disconnected from each other in our society. I’m really curious about this. It is kind of totally switching topics, but your story regarding how you discovered that you were in a spiritually abusive conversation just gives us a picture of the warning signs of that or when it starts to click like, “Oh, this isn’t healthy.”

K.J.: In my previous book, the Lord is My Courage, I share a lot of my husband and my story of waking up to the fact that we were in a spiritually abusive faith community in this church and choosing to leave it and trying to heal from it. Dealing with the ongoing effects of religious trauma is so hard about spiritual abuse that it’s often quite subtle.

Of course, there are going to be things that are not subtle. But I think the whole, does the fish know what the water is around them? It’s just, you’re in, you’re swimming in the water, and that’s the water. For us, waking up to the fact that the water we were swimming in was toxic was a slow process of paying attention and sensing our pain.

For us, it was noticing how other people were being harmed. My husband was a pastor at this church, and his coworkers would come to him in tears after being yelled at in the pastor’s office. So hearing other people being belittled or overworked, noticing how people are subtly mocked in staff meetings, and being disturbed by that is part of what woke us up.

At first, we weren’t the people being directly attacked because we were doing the stuff that the pastor didn’t want to do himself. My husband was over pastoral care and counseling, and I ran my counseling practice at the church. This pastor wanted to preach, so we were in good graces because we did something that made the church look good and took stuff off his plate.

That favor you can get with a leader can blind you for a while to how they might be treating other people. But as soon as we started to confront, I don’t love how you yelled at that person; that’s when you become the problem, too. I don’t so much to categorize warning signs or red flags.

The most important thing is that we should know, especially in white evangelicalism, that we have been taught to dismiss our own bodies’ signals about how safe we are in our environment. And call it definitely faithfulness that you should serve no matter what, volunteer, and believe the best of your leaders because of so many things.

The inheritance of Nastheism down to the more recent effects of purity culture. We have internalized and ingested a spirituality that says the body is bad and your emotions are untrustworthy. And I’m here to say that’s not scripturally true, theologically true, or physiologically helpful.

Carrie: Yeah, it drives me bonkers.

The Importance of Emotional Safety in Churches and Communities

K.J.: Yes. It’s terrible. And that in itself is, those are the seeds of religious trauma right there. But your emotions and your sensations about being in church and being around other Christians are actually telling you really important things about how safe you are and how safe everybody is in that community, and learning to listen to your own sense of distress and being disturbed by something is actually what helps you move into more safety.

Sometimes, your body has wise things to point out about whether somebody’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Our bodies helped us over time. Very slowly, our bodies begged us to listen. I know it was listening that got us free.

Carrie: This is something that really bothers me, that when people comment in church, and I’ve heard it repeatedly with pastors, you have to choose faith over your feelings.

Those are interacting with each other all the time. God gave us a body and emotions for a reason, and God has a wide range of emotions. That statement, to me, I feel is very unhealthy, but it’s something that I’ve heard repetitively.

K.J.: You can walk around in public and see people wearing shirts that say faith over fear. It’s so prevalent that we don’t even need to understand how it’s been co-opted by certain political movements. But faith over fear is self-harm because fear is your body’s wise response to show you that you don’t feel safe and help you move into safety and connection. And I know this is bold to say on a podcast, especially about OCD.

Fear is not the enemy. Fear is there to move you somewhere. All emotion is energy meant to move you. Emotion, energy, and motion. It’s intended to prompt you to pay attention to yourself as somebody who deserves safety, connection, fear, and faith. Fear drives you to treat yourself as a friend of God. Fear doesn’t have to be something that we fight.

It can be something that wakes us up. Fear makes you quite alert, and often for those of us with mental illness. It might prompt us to be way more observant than we wish we were all the time. The experience of hypervigilance is not necessarily pleasant, but it is a prompt. It is not the problem; I think it’s the space that goes back to talking about healing.

That’s the space I love seeing people get to make a shift because when you start to treat your fear, which is part of your body’s physiological response to danger and the perception of danger. You start treating your fear as a friend with something important to tell you. Your life changes. There’s room for things not to feel as terrible as they do when you’re fighting part of yourself.

Carrie: It’s so rare that I get to have conversations with somebody that’s this mindful because essentially what you’re talking about is mindfulness. This sense of being curious about our emotional state instead of trying to judge it and say, oh, I shouldn’t be afraid. The Bible says, fear not, so I have to cut that piece off and go with God’s given me love and power to sound mind. And it’s this bizarre Christian CBT, is what I call it, where we try to do some thought replacement, and we’re all going to feel better now, and it just doesn’t work.

Healing Through Embodiment

K.J.: I would say, what I’m saying more than mindfulness is that embodiment is the practice of non-judgmentally paying attention to and responding to our sensations.

I take it one step further because I think that even with mindfulness, we can stay detached from our physical experience. What’s happening? I’m making this little movement you can’t see me. You keep making this movement with my hand, like cutting ourselves off at the neck. Basically, what happens when we feel afraid, or when we feel overwhelmed, we feel ashamed?

Any of these activating big feelings that come up is that the way your body works, you’re temporarily cut off from the regulating power of your prefrontal cortex. So your brainstem is very active, your limbic system and your brain is very active, and your body is quickly mobilizing you to seek safety, and you can’t actually access the part of you that’s, well, God is love, and Christ dwells in me. Therefore, I am actually okay. You can’t access that. So we’re talking about a bottom-up approach to belief, which is that response to the sensation happening in your body; that’s what I mean by bottom. So, the lower half of you, starting with your body, responds to this sensation with curiosity and compassion.

That is what brings your body and mind back together so that you can return to that place of faith, of mentally accepting an ascent and receiving that Christ is with you. Embodiment this non-judgmental, which is easier said than done, paying attention to what’s happening inside your body.

Leaving a Spiritually Toxic Environment

Carrie: When you were leaving the spiritually toxic environment because essentially you both had to leave your jobs, it sounds like that’s a significant shift. How did you recover from that trauma to become more embodied? Was that through your therapy process?

K.J.: The recovery began, I would say, I think something that feels in this moment important to point out is part of why we don’t leave is because we are so afraid of losing our livelihood and our sense of belonging; that’s why we took us so long to leave. Truthfully, the fear of how we will pay our bills and how we will afford insurance. That kept us extended our stay in the land of toxicity for years. And a lot of people don’t talk about the practicality of that. Having money to pay for your groceries and pay for your rent is pretty important. And whether you’re working for a church or maybe realizing maybe my community is unhealthy and you don’t work there.

The fear of losing your belongings is massive. Most of these kinds of churches prompt like they are ordered around the church should be your whole life. This is where you go multiple times a week. Your small group is your community. So what happens when you have to leave? You lose everything. And I no longer think your life should be ordered around an institution, but that’s a separate conversation.

Healing was started by leaving, and that was terrifying. And it was a rescue in many ways that God would lead us out into a broader place. And it was once we were out my body got even more vocal. And I was experiencing a lot of anxiety and tremors in my arms. I was falling. I thought I had had so many mysterious health symptoms over the years with my disease, and I’ve been tested for MS before.

I had a lot of tests done. I had at one point this whole brain and spine MRI done and saw this neurologist, and this was such a moment of grace, of God’s kindness. He showed me the pictures of my brain and spine and said, your brain is beautiful. There is no evidence of disease here. “My wife is a complex trauma survivor, and I think what’s happening is he had asked us questions about what’s been going on in your life.

My wife is a complex trauma survivor.” I think what’s happening here is trauma. The further you escape this situation, the better your body will feel; some of these symptoms will disappear. At that point, I was just a therapist. I hadn’t started to specialize in trauma, but to hear somebody named that for me was incredibly helpful because you feel it’s not; what I’m going through is not that bad.

It’s hard to even get to the point of letting yourself call something spiritual abuse. Because we’re so conditioned to be deferential to pastors, to leaders, and we want to be kind. We think that it’s not gracious to say something or use a word like that, but grace and truth go together. The truth is my body reacted with such violent, intense shows and displays of a lack of safety because I had been so gaslit, demeaned, and pushed out because I had been treated less than human.

My body was responding in kind, saying this is not okay. That was my body’s protest. I started there because I think it was my physical experience of such extreme distress of feeling terrible. That prompted me to seek more help to get into therapy again. I believe that, more than anything, put me on a path of studying somatics and beginning as a therapist myself into great somatics into my practice, and that’s now the foundation of everything I do. But I start there; I just gave you the version of if we would have this conversation for three hours. I always trust that you know what; sometimes, in these conversations, there’s always a reason that what comes to my mind first is what there’s an invitation to say. And so that’s where we went.

Carrie: How wise of that neurologist to be admitting. “Hey, there’s some psychological things going on.” But not make it, “Well, it’s all in your head because you’re kind of crazy.: There’s this balance where some have had either of those extremes.

K.J: Yes, I’ve been told it’s psychosomatic. It’s all in your head dismissively, and blames me like I am too broken. And I’m sure so many people listening have experienced this too, and maybe your husband did far before getting his diagnosis. There’s a vast difference between an acknowledgment of how our brains and bodies are connected that says your symptoms are real and they make sense based on what you’ve experienced.

And this is psychosomatic; if you can fix your mental problems, your body will feel better. That’s the sin right there of individualism. That kind of medical model that blames people’s symptomology on their struggle is why they feel these symptoms when our bodies are begging us to hear the truth about the broader systems that we’re a part of, our family systems, our church systems, our society.

I think the point is that these things we feel are such problems or separate us from those who don’t have struggles as much as we do. I say this as a disabled woman. I think there’s some fierce wisdom in the ways that we struggle that our bodies are trying to tell us. You and those around you deserve more love and support than you have received. All of the symptoms of stress that we experience in how they manifest are shouting to tell us we deserve to be seen, held and helped.

K.J’s Book: “The Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poem to Find Strength in Small Moments

Carrie: Very interesting and definitely brought up some things I haven’t considered. I’m curious for you to tell us about the Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poem to Find Strength in Small Moments. How this book came about and the importance of it. Why does it need to be out in the world?

K.J: Well, we’ve been talking about trauma and part of what happens when we’re experiencing trauma. Also, when we’re feeling overwhelmed, we talked about how your body is strongly mobilizing. Energy to keep you safe, but that is sinking you further away from your being able to access the language centers of your brain, for example.

The point is when life is hard, it’s hard to have words, and the Book of Common Courage is really my offering of words for the moments in our lives and the seasons in our lives when we feel wordless and when we don’t have words to pray, and we wish we did. When we are struggling to make sense of our lives, when we don’t feel strength, and we don’t feel seen. We want to that it’s an offering of presence, as I think that books are portable presence in so many ways that there’s something about a book that can enter into the private place of your home, your bedside, your living room.

And be with you and make you feel less alone in your life and story. I think we all need the reminder that we are not the only ones with questions and confusion about God. And when it comes to whether our stories are excellent. So this is just my offering to bridge that gap between belief and the body, between your hard day and the hope that’s yours.

I wrote it, not meaning to write a book. When I was writing the Lord as my courage when I was processing my own story of religious trauma. I started to write poetry and prayers for myself. Just to process the intensity of the story and really to help myself. There’s poetry is a really distilled form of language, so to help myself distill down, what am I trying to say in this chapter?

What’s the most important thing and what’s just for me and my spouse, and what needs to be out there for thousands and thousands of people to read? Poetry helped me find my way, and then, over time, I just shared it and shared some pieces on social media, mostly because I was tired while writing a manuscript and needed something easy to share.

People felt seen by the poems and the prayers. It was before I called it poetry because I didn’t even feel I could give myself that label. It was through other people’s responses to the words that I was like; I guess maybe this would be encouraging for people, not just for me. And it became a book.

Carrie: I love it. It’s based on Psalm 23.

K.J: Both The Lord is My Courage and the Book of Common Courage walk through the exact breakdown of phrase by phrase through Psalm 23. The book of Common Courage is an exploration. It’s praying through the Psalm, but it’s also praying through getting to receive, being in dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd.

Who is the person who that Psalm was pointing towards? Most of the prayers in the book are a colic, short form of prayer, which is intentional. It’s my trauma-informed way of doing less is more. We don’t need long prayers and lots and lots of words when we’re struggling. We need small, and we need a little bit of containment.

So they’re structured, and they’re a little bit of containment to help you feel held. But they’re mostly appointed at Christ to dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd who still is seeking you.

Carrie: I love less is more. We did an episode not too long back on breath prayers. That’s something that I’ve just been able to incorporate in my life at different times or seasons, and those are very short but very helpful.

If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who is dealing with chronic pain or spiritual abuse?

K.J: I think that I would tell her your body is not bad. Your body is not betraying you by feeling all this pain and struggling so much. Your body has wise things to say, and I dare you to listen. Please listen to her. I think that’s what I would tell her.

Carrie: That’s definitely good. Your body is not bad. The people hear nothing else from this episode. I hope they receive that piece because, as you said, it’s somewhat so ingrained in our Christian culture to almost be scared. To be embodied, something like you’re getting too new age or something like that is not what we’re doing. And it’s not scriptural to be disconnected from ourselves.

K.J: It’s an expression of faith in God who put on flesh to dwell among us. When I treat my body with reverence, I worship Christ, who decided to become human in a body and still reigns in a body. This is worship.

Carrie: Thank you so much for being on the show today. Share your words of wisdom. I think this is going to be relevant and helpful to a lot of people.

K.J: Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I am currently reading KJ’s first book. I went ahead and picked up a copy after I did the interview, and I’m enjoying it. As always, thank you so much for listening.

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

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

Related links and Resources:

K.J. Ramsey

76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet.

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet.

 I’m privileged to be interviewing John Bennet, author and banker.

John shares with us his journey through a cancer diagnosis and treatment.

  • John’s long treatment process to move through the cancer
  • How John responded after finding out he had a terminal cancer
  • How has cancer been a blessing to John’s life
  • John’s prayer life
  • Submitting to God’s sovereignty 

More Personal Stories

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 76. Today on the show, we’re gonna be talking about joy in the midst of trials. And our guest today is gonna be talking about his journey through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. This is John Bennett. He is a banker, author of the book, Build it right for business owners and a cancer survivor. John, welcome to the show. 

John: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Carrie: I also should say, I feel like I inherited you as a friend when I married Steve, is that fair? 

John: Yes. I think that’s very fair. Definitely.

Carrie:  And I just appreciate you and your wife’s friendship and how you encouraged Steve before I even came along that God has somebody for you. And so it’s nice that we have people each in our lives that encouraged us and prayed for our future spouse. So I just think that that’s really sweet. 

John: Definitely. It was an enjoyable part of a friendship, for sure. 

Carrie: This is gonna be really interesting because I don’t know this part of your story. So I’m kind of learning along with the audience a little bit. Tell us about the process of getting diagnosed with cancer. What was that like for you? 

John: Okay. About three and a half years ago, I was totally healthy. Never had any big health issues in my life and started having pain in my lower back. And we thought at first it was maybe. Needed a chiropractic adjustment, different things, check different things out. It kept getting worse. And obviously eventually it was diagnosed as cancer. It’s a blood cancer called multiple myeloma and it’s considered a terminal cancer. Although the treatments have come so far in the last few years that some doctors look at it as potentially a chronic disease and not terminal.

So, it’s still to be determined on that. But I went through a period of time after the diagnosis where I had to go through, started off with chemo. Went through four rounds of that. Actually I started with radiation. They radiated my spine to kill the cancer in my spine. And then I went through chemo and then I had to have three back surgeries because the cancer had gotten into my spine and one of my vertebrae had completely collapsed and another one had partially collapsed. So, they had to go in and fix that. And then I went through a stem cell transplant. And after that I had about 14 more rounds of chemo. So it was a pretty long process there for a while to move through the cancer. 

Carrie: Wow! How long has it been? 

John: It was three and a half years ago. 

Carrie: Wow. 

John: When I was originally diagnosed.

Carrie: That’s a long treatment process.

John: It was long. It built even more tenacity in me. Thankfully, I had a good bit of endurance and tenacity, but it certainly increased that. But yes, it was very much a long process.

Carrie: Going back to thinking about when you were first diagnosed and someone says you have this very serious cancer, we consider it to be a terminal cancer. How did you respond to that emotionally? 

John: You know, I am a Christian and my faith in God is the rock of my life. I knew I had a choice initially with the diagnosis, so I could either surrender that to God and acknowledge that he was totally in control or I could panic. I could do one of two things. And so I chose to embrace it, which is maybe odd, but I chose to embrace it. And I thought for some reason, God has ordained me to have cancer. I didn’t get really depressed or down like a lot of people do. I chose a different route and the way I had to deal with it emotionally and spiritually was to realize that my time might be a lot more limited than I originally thought it would be.

I was planning on living to a ripe old age and had really tried to keep myself in good health. And I had to look at the very real possibility that the timeframe of life might be drastically different. I knew I would have to reprioritize a lot of things in my life. I knew that career aspirations might change dramatically. I knew that my body expectations of what I could do physically would probably have to be adjusted a lot. I would have to really adjust my expectations and accept my limitations. And yet, try to overcome as many of those as I could too. Cause I kind of wanted to look at it from a balance of I’m trusting God a hundred percent. And if he takes me out of this life with this cancer, I wanna be okay with that. 

But it doesn’t mean I’m just gonna sit back and give up either I wanna work. I want to do everything. The doctors are telling me. I want to try to eat as healthy as I can. Exercise, definitely stay on all my medication, stay on top of all the testing, everything possible that could be done. That’s kind of how I looked at it. I guess I’d really just stepped back and looked at it as a challenge that God had put in my life. And I thought somehow he is going to use this in a great way. And I remember sending out an email to all of my coworkers just to let them know what was going on. I thought I would just make it. Really an open situation. So nobody felt weird about asking me or whatever, and I kind of described what was going on. And I remember in the email, I said, “I have no doubt that God is gonna make me a better person and a better leader through this”. And so I’m looking forward to the challenge and I intend to embrace it and, and roll with it.

So that made a huge difference. I think in the way that I was able to walk through the process and did I ever get down? I did have a couple of what I call gut punches in the process. We had a hard time getting me into remission. When I went through the stem cell transplant, I was not in a complete remission. That’s why we went through another 14 rounds of chemo after that, which was probably more than most people have to deal with. That have this cancer. Most people can get into a remission. The first time with less, we got to the point where I was talking to the two specialists I was working with and they were saying, “we may not be able to get you there. You may just be able to get to a partial remission”. And I said, “well, as long as I’m handling the chemo, let’s keep going until we’ve beat this thing as much as we can”. And then determined that I said, “I’m not ready to give up on that yet”. And by the grace of God, we got there, got me into complete stringent remission, which has been fabulous.

I’m glad I kept on, but there was, I would go in and I remember one time I went in and the levels had gone back up. After all this treatment, and that was a gut punch. It was like work so hard and I’m trusting God and I’m moving forward, but it’s going the other way. There were a couple of challenges there where things didn’t go as planned, but overall it was a pretty positive process and God was unbelievably faithful.

Before I forget this part, I’d say the biggest part of my treatment was having. I think, literally hundreds of people praying for me every time somebody would say, “Hey, can I put you on my prayer list for my church or my Sunday school class or life group or Bible study”. I’m like, please do just very, very open about that. And I know I had hundreds of people praying for me on a daily basis and a lot of ’em would text me. Your husband was one of them, Steve. And that I have no doubt. 

God answered so many prayers. And he kept me up. As far as my spirit, my emotions, people ask me, you know, they always have to take you through some questionnaires when you get cancer and you have to meet with a counselor. And they said, “you know, are you down? Are you struggling with depression”? I said, “actually, I’m not. I feel great”. I really feel like this is what God has for me. And so I’m not gonna push back on it. I’m just gonna embrace it. I mean, it’s not what I would’ve chosen, obviously, but if this is his plan, I’m gonna trust him. I haven’t always trusted him. I wish I would have, but I thought this time I’m going to, I just said, “God, whatever you got, if you take me out early with this, or if I make it through, just let me be a witness and use me every way you can”. 

Carrie: I wanna talk about that acceptance piece because even though you’re talking about a physical struggle, this is so vivid.

To our listeners who are struggling with anxiety and OCD. And I talk to people every day who say, “I don’t want the OCD label, or even, I don’t wanna have to be dealing with anxiety because I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to get out of this”. This may be somewhat of a lifelong struggle that I deal with.

Sometimes these can be chronic conditions. Sometimes they can wax and wane and get better, but sometimes people have to deal with them for a long time and they have a hard time. I think, accepting you use the words, God ordained me to have cancer. And I think a lot of our listeners would have a hard time saying, like, God ordained me to struggle with OCD or God ordained me to struggle with anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about like that acceptance piece, just in terms of God’s sovereignty and will over our lives.

John: Sure. I guess with anxiety and OCD it’s somewhat similar to cancer and you don’t always work toward getting that and you may try to stay away from that, but sometimes things in your life can happen and cause that some things that are out of our control, I’m sure there’s people that grew up in situations where it cause anxiety. And they’ve had a hard time shaking that. I don’t know what caused my cancer. I was a guy who exercised, kept my weight down, tried to eat healthy, tried to get enough sleep. I mean, all the things you would want to do. And I was laughing one day and I told my wife, I said, “well, I guess I need to start eating cheeseburgers with bacon all over it and smoking and whatever else I wanna do, because it doesn’t matter. Now I got cancer”.  

Anyway, I guess what it showed me was I was definitely not in control. And I know we say that, but cancer kind of really. Puts the mirror up to your face and shows you you’re not in control and no matter what you do, God still is sovereign. And he may allow somebody to have cancer that did everything they could do to be healthy.

Just like I’m sure some people that may be listening. Think why do I have to struggle with anxiety? I’m a Christian, I’m got a prayer life. I’m trying to grow with God. I’m trying to do the right things. Some of those things are just unexplainable. I think, I knew that I couldn’t do anything to change it. 

I remember talking to one of my oncologists and he said, “you know, I definitely want you to eat healthy. I want you to exercise and all that, but be assured that’s not gonna beat cancer”. That’s gonna help you to endure the treatments, but that’s not gonna fix what you’ve got. Just showed me how much I was reliant on guide through this whole process. And I guess when you realize you’re out of control, it’s maybe sometimes easier to relinquish that, what you think is control? Because it, I used to think I had certain control over certain things, I guess, in my life. And cancer just kind of wakes you up to showing you how vulnerable you are. 

Carrie: You talked too, about accepting your limitations while also trying to overcome some of those. Was it hard for you? I imagine in the beginning, when you had to accept maybe that you couldn’t be as active as you were before, or as social as you were before, because you had to not be around people. Talk to us a little bit about what that is like striking that balance between accepting your limitations and trying to overcome ’em.

John: That’s a work in progress process. It’s something that I still work through each day. I, for instance, I like to exercise. I’ve always been the type of person that likes to get better at things. So I want to try to get a little bit in a little bit better shape or do a little bit more exercise. Well, I’ve had to learn that there is a kind of a point of no return for me with exercise. I can do it only so many days a week. I can do it only so many minutes. Or it’s not gonna really help me to get stronger or have more endurance. It’s gonna work the other way and pull me down. Fatigue is something that I have to deal with on a pretty regular basis, because I’m still on a low dose chemo treatment to try to keep the cancer at bay. 

So I take that three weeks a month. And so that causes fatigue. So I have to really balance exercise with rest and I have to do, really moderation, which is not the easiest thing for me. I like to go full steam ahead. I’ve had to realize that less is more in that situation. I do need to be exercising. It’s very important. It helps me to deal with the treatments. It helps me with everything in my battle against cancer in my life. But if I push it too much, it will reverse. And then I’ll have several days to take to recover because it wears me down so much. So accepting that has been hard for me. But as I work through it more, if it gets easier every day, the social part is difficult with COVID. I’ve had to be very protected from being in large group from, with COVID the uptick right now in Nashville, where I live having to be extra cautious with wearing a mask and just really being careful because of my immune system, my weakened immune system, even though I’ve been vaccinated, the doctors don’t know how well I would handle COVID at this point, I’m a person who likes to go to events and be around a lot of people interact with a lot of people. 

I’ve had to be a lot more choosy, with what I do. And just, I’ve had to say no to just countless opportunities for things like a, a big event or a concert or a ball game or things that I would love to go to.  But I just have to say “no” and go to the things that I can. So I’m much more limited than I was. But when you, for a while, after you do a stem cell transplant, you can’t be around anybody. And so when you look at that, and this may be a key too, to the whole process, When you get to that stage, you learn to praise God for the times you can get out. I focus on that. I think this is awesome. I can actually go to an early lunch and sit in a corner booth and things that I can do that I couldn’t do there for a while. I get excited about that rather than get down about. I can’t go to a concert or whatever. 

Carrie: How has cancer been a blessing in your life? I think the joy piece of finding joy in the midst of your trial.

John: I tell you the joy has been overwhelming with it. That’s cancer has been a gift to me. It has helped me to see even closer the finality of my life, that I finite time on this earth. It’s made every interaction, a little more sweet, a little more important. Every friendship, every family relationship, it has helped to focus me even more on growing with the Lord, because I see that when I pass away, it’s gonna be my relationship with God. And those that I love, that’s really gonna matter. Things like career and success and money and pursuit of fame or affirmation, all those kind of things are a lot less important to me now because I see how fleeting they are at this point. And I think I’ve grown a lot wiser. 

People have told me that cancer ages you about 20 years and they were talking about physically. And I think it does sometimes age you physically that much, but I think it also ages you in, or it can age you in wisdom. That much too. And not that I’ve grown 20 years in wisdom, but I’ve definitely grown some because it just really puts things in a different perspective. And I think there have been times when I’ve tried to overdo or do too many things because I wanted to hit check all the boxes and hit all the options. And it’s really helped me to dial down and prioritize. And it’s so much easier for me to say no to good opportunities now, because I’ll say, “that’d be great. I’d love that. 

But you know what? I would rather do this, or this is more important than the other”. And it really has been a blessing in that way too, to prioritize life more. And when you have limited energy and you have limited possibly time on earth and all those kind of things. It really dials it down so that you prioritize. And I think in so many ways, it’s such a blessing that I got cancer because I could have gotten killed in a car wreck, driving home from work three years ago, if that had happened. And that was God’s will, then that would’ve been what was best. But if that had happened, I would not have had the opportunity to work through learning these priorities and having this time to realize that my life may every away quicker than I wanted it. But I’ve got time to make some adjustments, which to me is a great gift.

Carrie: I’m curious, was there anybody, like in your reflection about your life, was there anybody that you really recognize? I need to forgive this person or I need to seek forgiveness from this person. 

John: I have tried to always stay on top of forgiveness cause I knew that could make me better and all I’ll tell you what it has really accentuated is to, let go of any conflict or things that were trivial that may have caused some challenges. I have a blended family, so I have some interactions with some family members that I think, it wasn’t everything I wish it had been. There was some, I guess friction is probably the best way to describe it there. And I think I have embraced them more than I did. And I’ve just realized. Those differences don’t really matter. And I’ve been able to, reach out and love them more because God has given me that strength to do that and maybe judge them less and love them more and to let any friction in the past go. 

So it is for forgiveness in that way, just forgiving on a regular basis and seeing that, I guess this acceptance too, is seeing that everybody that’s in your life. Is there for a reason, even if they, you have some challenges with them, if you have some challenges with family members or friends or people at church they’re in your life for a reason that too, I think is part of submission to God’s sovereignty and saying, “I don’t really understand why these challenges are here or why”. It’s so difficult sometimes to deal with that person, but there’s something you’re teaching me or there’s something you’ve got for me to be some way a blessing to these people. And so I’m gonna embrace that. And I tell you this, embracing this kind of, it gives you such a positive force to go forward with. Whereas resistance can really eat your energy up. And when you have limited energy, it does train you to say let’s don’t cause a lot of extra resistance to see how much we can embrace this. So we can go further with energy that we do have. I think that’s been a real growth point for me.

Carrie: That resistance is something that I see a lot for people in therapy that are dealing, they’re trying to resist. What’s actually going on instead of grieving it. I think sometimes we have to grieve losses of whether it’s losses of time or opportunities or things that we’re not able to do anymore that we used to be able to, but then getting to that place of acceptance of, okay, God, this is where I’m at right now. This is what I’m dealing with in this season. And so how can you use me? How do you wanna use me in this season of my life? Talk with us about your prayer life.

John: Okay. That has been probably the best thing of this whole process. I always wanna have a better and better prayer life. I wanted to spend more time with God every morning before I started my day.

And I would do that to some extent before, but now it is set in stone and it’s nothing happens for me before I spend my time with God. He is, I really believe in that Matthew 6: 33 seek ye first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. So I made a commitment. That I’m gonna get up every morning. And before I do anything else before I speak to anybody or do anything, I’m gonna go and spend a good bit of time and prayer with the Lord. And just in his word that has helped me, has steadied me through this whole process. And what has grown out of this is a I really fairly early on, I moved from a point of praying and asking God to help me with this struggle.

To where he gave me a passion to start praying for other people that were struggling, whether it was with a terminal illness or it was with a health issue or a loss of job or whatever the challenge may be. And I feel like he’s developed me into somewhat of a prayer warrior for other people. And I love to find out about people’s struggles in my church or in my sphere of influence so that I can pray for them specifically on a very regular basis and keep up with them and encourage them. And I’ve certainly become just a magnet drawn to people that are diagnosed with cancer for obvious reasons. Because I know a lot of what they’re dealing with and I wanna pray for them on a regular basis, pray for their health, pray for their walk with the Lord, or if they don’t know God that they would come to know him and also be an encourager.

I try to call and check up on them on a regular basis. You know, I know they’re having a test coming up or they’re having chemo for three weeks or whatever. I’ll put that on my calendar and then I’ll follow up with them and just check on ’em because I know how important that is and how much that means. Having gone through it. God’s given me a ministry that I never had before. And I, I don’t know anybody that’s listening that probably would wanna say, “gosh, I wanna go sign up for a cancer ministry. I wanna get cancer so I can help other people with it”. But when you’re chosen, you roll with it. And I do believe that God knows what’s best.

I know. It’s really ironic, but I’ve got more joy in my life right now than I have ever had in my life. And I attribute so much of that to what God has done through giving me cancer. And my cancer is very up in the air. It’s still considered a terminal cancer. There’s not a quote cure for it at this point, but there’s a lot of good treatments. And I might have a few years left or I might live to be 85. They don’t really know. It normally comes back in about 80 to 90% of the cases. So there’s a really high chance that I’ll have to fight it again and again, and that eventually it’ll probably take me out. We don’t know when that is. So I think in a way maybe God gave me that type of cancer so that I don’t think, well I’m curative cancer. And I can just forget all these things that I’ve learned. 

I think he knows that I need probably that encouragement. And that accountability of knowing that this battle is far from over so that I can continue to keep my focus on him. And I think he allows certain things to happen in our lives, because he knows that we need it. I mean, I didn’t have the discipline to spend the time in prayer with him that I spend now. I didn’t have the focus I needed. And I think really cancer may have been the only way he could get me there. And I’m still growing up. I’m not there yet, but he knows what we specifically need. So I would encourage people if you’ve got a struggle, try to embrace that. And again, not make excuses for it. You still try to overcome it as best you can, but you also realize you’re limitations as a human being and you embrace that. Maybe God could use my anxiety because there is a ton of people out there struggling with that. 

Carrie: Wow.

John: So if I can be real about it, maybe that helps somebody else. And that’s kind of what cancer has been for me. And a lot of people have said, “is it okay if I ask you about your cancer or is it okay if I tell so”? And so I’m like, “yes, I’m not, I don’t have the least bit of hesitation about it”. I, for some reason, this is a ministry God’s call me to, so, I don’t want to cover it up. I want to allow him use it any way he wants to. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I mean, I think that’s really great. I would imagine that many people in your situation might feel very anxious when you go back and have scans or tests or things done, just knowing that that’s kind of looming in the background and could come back. Is that just something that you’ve. Another piece of the acceptance for you. 

John: Probably with any type of cancer and in particular with the cancer, I have you kind of do you have to look over your shoulder on a regular basis cause you know, it might be coming back and I have to get blood work every single month to see am I still clear and clean there? And so it’s always a celebration when I get that, but you just can’t focus too much on that either. And I, one thing I decided was cancer. Although this is a ministry God’s given me. It’s only a part of my life. There’s a lot of other parts and I refuse to let cancer be who John Bennett is. God’s put that in my life, but so many other, I’m a father, I’m a husband. I’m Christian, I’m a banker. I got hobbies. So many things that I’ve. That are part of me. I think when you have cancer or if you’ve got anxiety or whatever it is that you’re working with, and you’re challenged with, you gotta be careful not to let that become everything to. You know that it’s a part of life.

I don’t sit around and talk about cancer all the time. I don’t bring that up in conversations with people if they know about it, or if I can share an encouragement, encouraging word, because of that, I’ll do it. But there’s a lot of people that know me that don’t even know I have cancer because it’s not everything.

It’s a part of me. And it comes out when it needs to, but I’m more than just a sick person with cancer. And thank God. My health is good right now. I think you have to be careful there. You have to realize that yes, it can. Cancer can come back and take you out pretty quickly. But at the same time, you don’t wanna focus on that or you don’t really have a life, focus so much on your limitations. Then the time that you do have, will be wasted instead of used for the glory of God and for blessing other people. 

Carrie: I think that’s so huge just in terms of not identifying solely with your diagnosis, but really identifying yourself as a whole person and spiritually as a child of God, that is, should be our main identity.

That’s huge too. 

John: Right. And it is all relative too. I mean, when you look at the age you are, or whatever happens to you. I’ve had a couple of friends, one that got killed in his twenties. And so if I die early of cancer, compared to my friend, I’ve had a really long life, I think too, it’s learning to praise God for your blessings. And I remember going to in, when I first started getting chemo and I had really prayed a lot about this, and I was talking to one of the nurses and I said, “I’m gonna be the most excited cancer patient you’ve ever had”. I said, “I’m coming in here and I’m glad to get this chemo.  And I appreciate you guys doing this”. And she said, “Okay, you gotta be joking”. I said, “actually, I’m really not”. I said, “you’re helping to kill my cancer. And so I’m excited about that”. And she said, “well, you’re the first person that’s ever thanked me for giving chemo”. And I said, “well, I’m gonna enjoy this process”. And I said, “that may sound stupid or crazy, but I am not gonna come in here with my head down”. Gosh, I’ve gotta get chemo again. I’m worried about, gosh, what’s gonna happen to me. I wanna come in here and live. And I’m gonna have fun and I’m gonna enjoy it and I’m gonna make the most of it. And not that it’s all pleasant, cause  going through some of those things I can tell you, there was a lot of pain.

I got cut on so many times. It’s not funny. I’ve got so many drugs that have gone into my body to try to kill this cancer. It’s overwhelming. I don’t mean to make light of it. But, I was determined. I was gonna find the good in it and praise God for it. And I’ll tell you, that’s made a huge difference. And I was just, I’d seen other cancer patients in particular that got so down and they were discouraging it themselves and everybody else. And I thought, I’m not doing that by the grace of God. I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna come in here and I’m gonna make the most of this. And whether my time is long or short, I wanna live it to the fullest.

I think that’s what God wants us to do. And we all have struggles. I remember when my Sunday school class or some people call it life group, when they first found out, I told ’em about the cancer diagnosis and it was pretty grim in there. And people were really upset and they prayed for me as a group, which was awesome. And I said, “well, let me just say this”. I said, “everybody in here has got struggles. Some of you have a wayward child. Some of you are having struggles in your marriage. Some of you just lost a job. Some of you got financial difficulties, some of you have other health issues. Some of you are depressed. I’m not the only one in here that has a challenge. So don’t worry about me and don’t focus just on me”. That’s all realize that we’ve all got these things that are challenging. And my cancer is not any more important than your problem in your marriage. 

Whatever it is that you’re challenged with.

I don’t wanna be singled out and people to feel sorry for me either. Cause I mean, some other struggles that people have are a lot worse than what I have. I think it’s important too, with whatever you’re dealing with to not get on the pity party and not think that, gosh, I’ve just got it so hard. I mean, I think I’m so blessed honestly. And I think we all have to just really focus on that. That to me, that seems, like the antidote for depression is praising God. And thanking God for what you do have. And if you look hard enough, you can find a lot of blessings. I don’t care what’s going on in your life. I have certainly seen that. Just what I’ve been through in the last three and a half years.

Carrie: Absolutely. There’s a verse in James about every good and perfect gift is from the father. And that helped me so much through my divorce that it, it caused me really to look at the good things that were in my life and recognize that they were there, cause God put ’em there. And that like you were saying, I could be thankful. And that helped me through that process become a more thankful person, I think, instead of just focusing on the negative and the hurt and the pain that I was going through at that time, that helped a lot. But if you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who was just getting diagnosed? Which I guess you do this, because you talk to people who have just been diagnosed with cancer. What do you tell them? 

John: Real good question. The number one thing is focus on your relationship with God. Trust him and move toward, trusting him more and find out how does he want to use this in your life and ask him for the strength every day to go through?

Because he certainly gave me that cancer is not easy and there’s some suffering that goes on and there is. I guess some uncertainty for sure about what your life’s gonna look like and how long it’s gonna last, what all are you gonna have to go through and all of that kind of things, but really it’s just, it’s putting your focus on Christ. I think that is the key. If somebody’s not a Christian, that’s my first suggestion to them is that they seriously consider a relationship with Jesus Christ. If they are that work to grow closer with him and spend more time with him. Let him use this process. And I guess be flexible. We were talking about, being willing to embrace what he’s brought.

I remember when I, after I had my stem cell transplant, it was a time where, as somebody told me before I had this, they said, “you’re gonna get what we call death bed sick”. And I understand what that means now because they take your  immune system, literally down to zero for a few days. It’s very difficult. When I went through that, I was actually nauseous 24 hours a day for 30 days in a row. And I didn’t want anything to eat. Anytime. Every time we had meal time, I just hated it. I didn’t want anybody to bring anything in, but obviously I had to get food to continue to live through this. The funny thing in, in the hospital, I got to where the one thing I could eat was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And that was the only thing I could eat that I even halfway enjoyed. And so they laughed because they would just fix me a peanut butter jelly sandwich for every meal. 

Once I was in there for a while, because the other stuff was just so disgusting to me. And not that peanut butter jelly was amazing, but I could eat it. And I could said halfway enjoy it. And I guess that maybe goes back to, as a kid, I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

So, I ate those and went through that process. But when I got through all the treatment, I was in the treatment room as we called it or treatment lab for my last time with the stem cell transplant. And then I would be moved out of that and go back to my reg oncologist. I remember looking back and I looked at the people that were laying there on the beds, that where I had been a lot of them, where I was, where I was down to nothing almost as far as strength and energy and, and immune system and, and everything.

I remember, it just felt like God was telling me. Don’t you ever forget where you were and don’t ever forget to praise me and don’t ever forget what I took you through and how I want to use you to encourage other people. Because now that you’ve come through that, remember how low you were. I mean, physically I was as low as you can get without dying. I remember just getting up to go to the bathroom in my hospital room, which was obviously right there beside the bed. It was exhausting. I mean, I was literally exhausted after I got up and walked to the bathroom, which was like, I don’t know, four or five steps going through that. I just felt like God was turn around and look one more time and look at those people and don’t ever forget it, whatever challenges I may have in life. 

If I look back at that, everything looks pretty good. And I think if you can look back at what God has brought you through and not forget about that, it helps you to see. How blessed you are now, even with the challenges that you may have, how much better off you are and how good he has been to you. And you know, at that point, when I was walking through all that, I never knew I would get to the point I’m at now where, I mean, I’m feeling great. I just have to deal with fatigue. I’ve been able by the grace of God, I’ve been able to continue to work full time, which a lot of people have not been able to do that with this cancer. I’ve just been really, really blessed, but I look back and I know what it’s like though, to be knocked all the way down on the ground, where you are laid out flat.

I think looking back at those times and realizing that God was with me every single day that I was going through that there was a time when I really wondered, am I ever gonna get to where I can eat food again? I mean, after 20 something days of being nauseous, you know, I didn’t know that it was gonna end after 30 days, but I really thought, I don’t know if this is ever gonna change. And the doctors couldn’t tell me when or what was gonna happen. Cause I took an enormous amount of chemo to go through the stem cell transplant. And it just really upended my whole body. 

That was one of those things where I didn’t know how it was gonna turn out or if it was gonna turn in a good way anytime soon.

But through that though, I see that God was there every day. I can look back at people that prayed for me. I can look back at people that encourage me. I can look back at things that I read, just so many things. Every day he gave me just what I needed to get through that day. He’s been so incredibly faithful. And I guess those 30 days were times when he carried me as the footprints and the sandpoint talks about. I can look back and see that. He carried me through that, cause I had absolutely nothing to give at that point yet he brought me through that. So he can do that for everybody else’s listening today.

Carrie: This has really been a great interview and I think so, relevant to people and encouraging, not just for people with cancer, but people who are going through any struggle really in their life right now. Thank you for sharing your story.

John: Thank you. What’s been an honor. And I hope that something, I said, blesses somebody and encourages somebody because I definitely know if you have God in your life, there is no reason to give up.

He is too strong and he’s too powerful. He’s too faithful. And he loves us too much. Whatever is knocked somebody down. Our God is a resurrecting God. He can resurrect the dead. He can sure resurrect our lives. And he’s done that with me, with my cancer. And he can do that for somebody emotionally or physically or whatever they’re going through. I just give him all the glory because he deserves it. And it’s been a real honor to be on the program.

Carrie: As I was coming back from maternity leave, I really needed to get some interviews done. And one day, Steve and I were just kind of going back and forth about different episode topics and things. And he said, “well, you know, you should interview John”. I’m really glad that he made that recommendation because I love how this interview turned out. If you ever want to support our show, you can do so. By going to Patreon, we’re also on by me a coffee for one time donations as always, you can find us anytime on Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com. Thank you so much for listening.

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

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 63. Trauma, Forgiveness, and Emotional Eating Recovery with Coach Jon McLernon

Joining the show today is Jon McLernon, a fitness coach and emotional eating expert. Jon shares with us his traumatic experience that changed his life and shaped him to be the person he is now. 

  •  What happened to Jon while he was on a humanitarian mission in South Africa 
  • Impact of the traumatic incident on Jon’s mental health
  • Using food as a coping mechanism
  • Making the decision to forgive
  • How did Jon forgive and move into a place of compassion? 
  • How Jon started to become a weight loss coach 
  • How Jon helps his clients create life-changing transformations. 


Links and Resources:

Jon McLernon

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 63. Today on the show, I have a special interview for you with coach Jon Mclernon. I’ve been holding onto this episode for a little while and honestly thought about not publishing it due to some background noise interference that comes up at different points. However, when I went back and listened to the interview recently, I felt like coach Jon’s story of how he got to a place of forgiveness was so powerful that I wanted you guys to hear it because he went through something that, no one should ever have to go through and it was traumatic and he talks about how he coped with that in a negative way. And then how he came to forgiveness, how he got back on track. It’s just a really great personal story. 

The reality is, is that if you’ve been living and breathing for any amount of time on this earth, there’s been someone that’s hurt you, that you’ve needed to forgive. And hopefully, this episode will help you with that process. Jon, you had a traumatic experience and that really changed the trajectory of your life. Told us about that. 

Jon: My wife and I sort of embarked on a global cold trotting adventure, I guess you could say. And we spent about three years of our life just traveling around the world. And one of the places that we landed in was, so with Africa, we, we’d met some South Africans in our travels and they invited us to come down to South Africa to help them work on a particular, it was a government program. It was an NGO or a government-funded but privately run. It was called Hospitality Youth Internship. And so what we were doing is we were working with underprivileged, young people, kind of teaching them life skills and helping them to be more employable and then placing them in internships before basically with potential employers to give them a chance to grow themselves.

At that time we were living on a nature reserve. Eastern Cape and South Africa, and one night I had went back to our cabin, kind of the layer of the reserve was the buildings were kind of lined up in a bit of an L shape. So you had, like a dining hall on one end and there was the dormitories for the students. And then there was, like the washroom facilities and tucked into the woods. A little bit was off to the side. Was the instructor’s cabin.  And so I’d been walking back there. Everyone else was in the dining hall, you know, enjoying dinner and whatnot. It should have clicked, but it didn’t, because when I was out there everything’s peaceful and quiet that something that was missed by the door was ajar the cabinet. And when I opened it, there was three men in there, that were actually sitting down and eating food or table and, and it didn’t really register with me that some of it was a mess. There was a fourth guy outside of the cabinet, and see who hit me over the head with a rock and it stunned me and so on.

So essentially their intention was to try to beat me to death, basically. That was quite a really traumatic thing to go through and kind of skipping over some of the details probably for the sake of brevity as well, but in an incident like that, like, I don’t think anything in life really properly prepares you to experience something like that. Some of the things that stick out in my mind were like they were smiling and laughing and that, you know, while they’re inflicting this on me.

Carrie: And these were people that you didn’t know and they didn’t know you and all of a sudden they’re trying to kill you basically. 

Jon: I sort of stumbled across some, I believe they were bid ransacked or cabin and whatnot, but it turns out the night before they’d they had to actually be in your death, a farmer that they’d robbed.

And so they were kind of on this spree of doing this. And so it was nothing personal, but me and the individual, it just so happened to be where they were. Then there’s also kind of a reason why they do things the way they do, in trustingly in a sense. And that is that they could’ve just said, “shop me or stab me or something like that”. But in a sense, being that I was white, I am a representation of something that they feel that historically oppressed them. And so in an interesting twist, it’s kind of like they’re trying to take back something they feel is taken from them. 

They want to inflict, a kind of punishment and demonstrate their power over you and really like, make you suffer in the experience. It kind of speaks to sort of the place that they might be at psychologically that made that, that worked to my advantage because I, I was able to sort of, I was stunned in concussed and widen, bruise and so on, but I was able to kind of fight my way to my feet. And at least escape to where the others were. The aftermath of that was nothing that I was really prepared for. You know, I come from Canada, we have our ups and downs and our issues, but we’re pretty open, friendly country. 

I had a lot of things, a lot of, kind of intrusive thoughts, like entering my mind, a lot of unprovoked or unexpected emotions that would come on very, very strongly thoughts of doing harm or violence, other people. And so on, that’s not who I am as a human being. That in itself was incredibly troubling and difficult for me to deal with. Because the part of the logical part of my brain says, “this is not who I am”. And yet here, these thoughts are coming into my head. I’m being triggered by things that would never have in the past triggered me. And so it really felt quite unequipped to deal with that. And one of my ways of coping was actually to use food to kind of, I would say, I call it, change the channel in my head. I shouldn’t say kind of, I became a binge-eating food addict essentially. And that was one of my coping mechanisms.

Carrie: Okay. So there was just a lot of intense anger after this trauma. And part of that was just your mind, like trying to make sense of everything that happened to you. It was like this double whammy of, here I am essentially sacrificing some time and energy to help people in this humanitarian organization. And then I’m seen as, like this, racial enemy that gets beating. And, you’re not a racist person. 

Jon: So it felt like a huge injustice. Everything about the situation felt unfair. It was four on one, it was a surprise attack. I was jumped at night, you know, I was by myself, that kind of thing. I was in flip-flops and sweatpants and a t-shirt just in a very good mood because we’d had wonderful interactions with our students. And to be clear, none of our students were involved in these. They were victims of this, but then none of them were involved in this. 

This was separate to what they were doing. And so just a lot of it felt incredibly unjust. And I think I have a strong sense of fairness and justice. And so having this happen to me, really angered me in the sense that, you know, it wasn’t fair. In a nutshell, it really went against my sense of fairness. And of course they knew nothing about me, but the fact that yes, we were essentially volunteers with a stipend working for this organization in a sense, the goodness of our heart, because we felt inspired by the mission that they were trying to do. Maybe it happened only two weeks after we’d arrived in South Africa as well. Just a lot, everything about it felt like, very frustrating.

Carrie: All right, that makes a lot of sense. Just not knowing how to deal with all those emotions that came up, all those thoughts that would come up, you know, as intrusions. And you were like, I don’t like this. I don’t know what to do with it. And so then this avoidance, which is really, really common and trauma took over and you filled that space with food? 

Jon: It’s, I’m ex-military as well, but I spent six years in the Canadian military and the navy. And as an engineer. But we’re also obviously trained as soldiers too. We’re soldiers, you know, first sailor, second or trade was third. I only share that because I am trained in terms of, of combat and things like that. And so there were definitely thoughts in my head about even things like setting traps. Because kind of what happens down there is also like, clearly we stand out because we are a visible minority, but like, you know, we were broken into many times as well and it just compounds it, it feels like you’re constantly under attack or under assault when you’re living down there for nothing that you’ve ever done. And so, you know, I had thoughts of, like setting traps and really trying to even, like encourage people to break into our hosts so that I could inflict harm on them and try and exact, maybe revenge or vengeance for what had happened to me. 

But there always be this voice in my head that goes, this isn’t who you are. This is not who you are. This is not what you would do. So I really felt this tension between like the sense of identity and who I am as a human being and these things, these thoughts and ideas that were coming into my head. But looking back, I believe they were an attempt to try and reconcile something that was taken from me. You know, they really took away my power. They took away, you know, they victimized me and so on. It was almost like my attempt to take back what was taken from me. 

Carrie: When did you recognize, okay, this way of coping with this trauma is not working for me anymore?

Jon: Truthfully, it was probably a couple of years after the fact. Because some of the other, what would I say, mitigating factors? I had a sense of an idea of what masculinity was and what it meant to be a man and so on. So that also came into play really in influencing how it felt about everything, including how I felt about myself, looking back. I realized like my whole life I’ve actually been an empath. I have a very big heart for people, a very big heart of caring and love, but for most of my life that actually kind of hidden and suppressed these things because I felt like, if people saw, these aspects of my nature, my identity, that they would see me as a weak man, not realizing that. Of course, that’s, that’s a completely flawed idea about it. 

So that came into it as well. So again, this idea, these huge emotions coming up, and I was seeing myself as an emotionally irrational person. When, you know, prior to this, I’d kind of been, my wife used to tease me and even call me the 10 men a little bit. And so to have all of this and have it outside of my control felt very, very disempowering as well. It was probably and why is in the backstories because it didn’t really have any idea of touch she even recognized that I was traumatized in a sense, like it’s, after the minutes, like I’m strong, I can move past this.

They’re not going to win. And so on, because of that, I didn’t necessarily seek out specific help for this. I just kind of used my own coping skills, but I would say it was probably six or seven months after the fact that I first realized that my weight had ballooned up to 328 lbs. So we go back to Australia where my wife is from and realized I can’t, like I can’t keep living like this. At that time, I was 30 years old. This is if I keep on this path. This is gonna be a short life for me, that’s not what I want. So I have to try to make some changes, but I didn’t know what to do to even make changes. And so I started with trying to lose the weight. And prior to that, I’d been an athlete.

I’ve been pretty good shape. Most of my life had never really struggled that much with my weight. And so now that was another compounding factor. Here I was, I had this sense of identity as an athlete who was in pretty good shape. We went to the gym regularly, that kind of thing to now being this obese person who struggled to move. So there was that as well. And along with that came like the self-loathing and the self hatred and, and feelings of unworthiness and being unlovable and so on, all of that sort of came into play as well. And so I started to turn my attention to trying to lose weight, feeling like that would correct some of this stuff that was going on.

Carrie: How did that go? How did the weight loss journey go for you? Did you try a lot of different diets?

Jon: I did. I would say name a diet and I probably tried it now. I imagine like, since that time, cause there’s a period of time where I’ve lost weight and kept it off now for a number of years, I would say that. I tried, like paleo keto. I was even raw vegan for a period of time, low carb, low fat, just a lot of different eating protocols. Flexitarian, Mediterranean and so on. And none really could stick and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m, I’m pretty, well-educated, pretty good handle on this. And it was a struggle to try and understand, why could I know all this stuff?, but I couldn’t seem to make it stick on my own life. 

I can even help other people. I was good at helping other people. I’m a natural coach, but I couldn’t help myself. I went on for a few years of, like yo-yo dieting, losing some weight, regaining it, losing it, regaining it. And even that sort of struggle itself. Again, compounding everything I felt about myself, of being a failure about really just again, being sort of this unlovable loser. Thankfully, my wife is just an amazing human being who was with me and by my side through all of this and never once like, lost hope or faith in me. Which is a real testament to her character. 

Carrie: I think so many people go through that shame cycle that you’re talking about there with, okay, I’m gonna do this diet gung ho and I’m gonna get the food and I’m gonna plan the meals. And then next thing you know, they, we’re working really hard at it. And either they don’t see the results that they were expecting to see or they’re not able to stick with it. And then it creates this, oh gosh, I’m a failure. I’m never gonna lose this weight. I’m just gonna be heavy forever. And they just end up in this spiral of negativity just makes you wanna eat more really.

Jon: Well see the brain had learned the pattern. That when I feel stressed or uncomfortable in anything that I don’t wanna feel. I can just eat food and change that. A lot of people, myself included when we embark on the journey of losing weight and we decide we’re gonna make this change. And transformation is very exciting in the beginning because we’re starting to picture how we’re gonna look, how we’re gonna feel, how life is going to be different.

But I think there’s this idea that somehow, because we’re a virtuous or a good person or something that the universe is gonna conspire to create the perfect conditions for us to lose the weight, because we’re a good person who wants to do a good thing. And the reality is a lot colder than that life doesn’t stop throwing you curveballs and punching your junk when you try to make a change like that.

So you actually have to, and I actually had to navigate this attempted transformation in real life while still sort of carrying around the emotional burdens of these beliefs, the trauma and so on. And then the yo-yo cycle just really perpetuates the cycle of shame, guilt, regret, a sense of failure and so on. I amassed a lot of that with the persona of the jolly fat guy, as well. You know, I was even at one point nicknamed the Garber eater, that’s quite, quite a handle to have.

Carrie: The garber eater?

Jon: Because I can eat a lot of food. I took a sense of pride in my appetite, but also, you know, if there was some good leftovers that somebody had, that they were just to scrape in the garbage, you know, say like a half eaten steak, I’d just cut off the parts where, you know, maybe their fork and knife and touched and be like, why are you throwing away this good food? If it’s gonna waste and miles to go to my waste, that was actually my thinking. And I think it would physically cause, like a pain at my core when I watched food being thrown away, that was like perfectly edible and good.  And maybe some of that was connected to the fact that for me, food really represented a poor solution to dealing with my emotional struggles.

Carrie: How did you find some more positive ways to handle your emotions? What was that process like?

Jon: I go back to a coach who asked me a really impactful question that I see it legitimately changed my life. And it’s interesting to think that one question, when you follow that back, one question can actually change your life. And it started with, he said, if you make a list of all the things you love and value, how far down the list we have to go before I see your name and that one stopped me dead in my tracks. 

Carrie: Wow!

Jon: Because it’s like, I’m not on the list. It wasn’t even that it was near the bottom. That was not on the list. I think I remember, like, I haven’t cried very often in my life pride, you know, when I send my wedding balance, that’s like, that’s the only time in my adult life that I really remember, like for most of my life ever, ever shedding tears, not because I’m ashamed to it just really hadn’t. And that moment, I just like when I was by myself, I just started crying because I couldn’t understand, like it had never entered my conscious that I was allowed to be in the list of things I love and value. Let alone near the top of that list. 

So it really spoke to how I felt about myself. If I look back, I had this historical pattern of like basically setting myself on fire to keep others warm, just giving and giving and giving and constantly giving them myself. And I think it really stemmed from a real core of my being the sense of identity that said, I’m not good enough. And I have to do this. Otherwise people will just in my life will just abandon me. That was yet again, another contributing factor that made like the weight loss such as troubles. That question was like a really, it at least started the wheels turning that I need to find my weight onto this list. And I didn’t even know how to do that because it wasn’t something that ever I had ever thought about before. And maybe even I would have felt, I would have felt like a sense of shame around like being given a compliment.

Carrie: Ok.

Jon: Or being told I was good at something I’d often just want to like brush that off. Even though, like I’m quite capable of quite intelligent, you know, if I could say, like, I’m a good man, a good husband, a good father, a loyal friend, all these things. But if anyone had told me that I would try to brush it off. I didn’t want to receive the compliment graciously because of how I felt about myself. I didn’t feel I was worthy or deserved that.

Carrie: Just make you really uncomfortable.

Jon: I then squirmed in my seat and just really wanted the light to be sort of turned away from me again. One of the things that I, and then my coach had me do was to try to pay myself a genuine compliment, like look at myself in the mirror as the president was and pay myself a genuine heartfelt compliment that was grounded in reality, because in the persona state of the jolly fat guy, for example, it would be something that everything was a little bit exaggerated. You know, it was a larger than life kind of character, both physically. And in my sort of presence, I was loud.

I was vocal that kind of thing. 

It couldn’t be this exaggerated compliment because a lot of that is just rooted in insecurity. It had to be a very genuine one. And that process of saying the compliment and then sitting with all the feelings that came up, not trying to push them away, not trying to shoot them away, but just sitting with them almost like observing them. And so maybe another piece of that puzzle would be when I started practicing meditation. I think it’s now shifted, but you go back like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years ago. 

The idea is around meditation, where it’s something for like monks, you know, maybe Buddhist monks in a monastery in the Himalayas or something like that or you have to burn or hippies or you have to burn incense and hum and things like that.

Really, it was just about trying to quiet my mind and have a singular focus. And for me, it was actually just the breathing rhythm box, reading four in four out four, hold, sorry, four and four hold for, out for hold. That was the first one, you know, just something really, really simple to calm the nervous system down, even learning that practice helped me to start to become more mindful of the thoughts that enter my head. And that was one of the ways that I started to deal with the intrusive thoughts actually.

Carrie: I like that so good.

Jon: Just as a side note, as a kid, I didn’t know what I was doing at that time. Let’s see I was laying in bed at night, maybe five, six years old and had sort of scary thoughts of monsters under my bed or whatever. I would actually visualize the hedgehog driving a bulldozer and he would push those thoughts outside of my head. It’s kind of like off the edge of a cliff. So it was funny that was sort of visual tool that I developed as a little child to deal with sort of uncomfortable thoughts in my head. 

Carrie: Okay. That’s interesting. So, how are you able to forgive the people that hurt you?

Jon: That was a process as well, that I made the decision to forgive because I wanted to be free from the experience. Ultimately, I realized that if I was to forgive them, that it was not about absolving them for what they had done. But I was really about setting myself free from what I had experienced. And I got tired of being angry. Rage is exhausting.

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Jon: And it’s not fun. It’s misery so it’s exhausting misery. And I was just so weary because again, it was not who I am as a person. I realized that, okay, I have to forgive them. It was in Istanbul, living with my brother at the time we were, we went back to Turkey for a period of time. My brothers lived over there for more than 12 years and I couldn’t sleep one night and I just got off and I said, “okay, I have to start the process of forgiveness, I didn’t know what it was gonna look like again, but I realized I wanted to forgive them because I want it to be free”.

I think what helped me is, I had to ask the question, “what must have happened in their life or their experience that led them to the place where not only did they think it was appropriate to do what they did”? It was actually there they’re almost like they were doing a good thing. I was the bad guy, because I don’t think first of all, I don’t think that human beings are born racist. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily born like with this idea that they wanna be a violent criminal.

Carrie: Right. 

Jon: And so what happened to them in their life, in their experience that led them to this point in time in their life? I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t good. 

Carrie: It makes sense.

Jon: So I started to develop a sense of compassion for them, which went against my sense of justice at the time. But I realized that again, I had to humanize them. If I was going to forgive them, they couldn’t just be like monsters. They had to be humans if I was gonna forgive them. And so I really started to reflect from their human experience and what would have brought them to this place. And the other thing I had to realize is I’m a Christian and I couldn’t say forgive them, but kind of secretly hold them at heart. And I wish that God would smack them. I have to be absolute forgiveness where I actually asked God to forgive them as well. 

Carrie: Yes.

Jon: And to let go of all thoughts and desires for vengeance. It was one I got to that place and it was probably an there’s a number of months, really getting to that place of one of the steps I would say in terms of healing and moving past it. And I can say we’re actually only a couple of days off the ten-year anniversary of this happening to me. And I’m deeply grateful that I had that experience because of how it has changed me. How I’ve become a more caring, compassionate, empathetic person. So it didn’t turn me into a bitter person. I went through many years of struggles, but because of those struggles, I now have a much deeper understanding of really a people’s humanity and in their experience. And again, it’s not to really, to absolve people of harmful or unhelpful behavior, but it’s to understand why that behavior occurs and understanding that to potentially be an agent for change. Could we see in other people’s lives as well?

Carrie: I’m glad that you talked about that being a process of forgiveness, because I think a lot of times people look at it as it should be some kind of like one and done thing, but really it’s a matter of when that anger comes up, you know, dealing with it in that way of saying, okay, let me get over to the space of compassion for others and for understanding that I’m not the one responsible for justice in the sense that’s God’s department. And it does, it takes time, especially when you have big things happen to you. Sometimes that forgiveness is a process.

Jon: And you’re right about like, I couldn’t just sort of make the decision to forgive and then be free. It’s every time my brain wanted to revisit what happened to me too. You highlighted exactly, really to move into that space of compassion to say, like, I don’t want this anger, you know, and really asking God to help me to let go of it. And also like not feeling necessarily a sense of guilt for the thoughts entered my head. Because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them there, but there was this period of time where I felt really conflicted, even at least thoughts entering my head because I thought, well, these are, these are sinful thoughts. These are harmful thoughts. They’re not thoughts that a Christian should have entering their head thoughts of carrying out violence and harming other people, even letting go of the guilt that I felt for that realizing that this was kind of my brain’s response to trying to reconcile what had happened to me. And that like in this experience, God, God was taking me through this experience. 

There’s no shortcut. I think sometimes maybe there’s this desire that we try to be a Christian and try to serve God. But there’s this desire that somehow this will allow us to short circuit or shortcut the experience. But if we, if I was to take a shortcut around the experience, I would miss a lot of the value of that experience. And that’s not to say that I wanna go through something like that again, I don’t. But it was because I went through the painful experience. It’s like, almost like we have to get to like the lowest of lows to realize like how deep God’s love for us is. And we can’t really know it or feel it until we get to that place.

Carrie: Wow. That’s a good point. So tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of the nutrition coaching and your work with client.

Jon: So that originally started out about six or seven years ago, one ahead of nutrition and supplement store. So a physical bricks and mortar store. And so people would come in looking for a particular supplement to help them with a particular issue. I said that I started to become a bartender without local. And so people would come into the store and they would just start sharing their struggles. I would ask questions, “hey, you’re looking for this supplement help what’s going on”? Let’s try to understand this a little bit more. And very often that I’m saying, you know what, actually, you’re welcome to buy that if you want to. But like, I just want you to know that that’s probably not gonna help you with what it is you’re trying to get help it. And maybe I pointed direction or there’s something to help them, but ultimately I ended up coaching people. 

So I started, you know, maybe I started out giving people calorie recommendations and meal plans and things, because that is what I thought people need it. But as time went on, I realized that those were really just like band-aid approaches. But really now I do what I call like brain driven, weight loss. And I’d almost like to call it, say like the side effect might include weight loss. In other words, the process that we’re really working on is a one of transformation and it actually needs a permanent shift in identity.

The idea behind a diet is a temporary change to create permanent results. And that’s never gonna be the case. If we’re going to create lasting change, we have to be transformed really it’s about walking people through that process because it’s incredibly the human beings. We don’t really create change on our own. It’s really difficult because we feel lonely and isolated, but why don’t we feel connected to another safe human being? If I could put it that way. But then it’s safe for us because the process of change is vulnerable. It’s moving out of our comfort zone. It’s moving into the discomfort zone. It involves growing. Think about like when a snake goes to shadow skin as an animal kingdom example, it goes to a place where it will be safe and secure because in that time that it’s going through that process, it’s insane so to speak. 

So we can understand that a little bit like, when we go to transform, we’re moving into a vulnerable state and biologically our brain doesn’t like that because we have this hardwired sort of primal survival mechanisms. And so what needs to happen is we need to be in a safe space, so to speak where it feels like it’s safe to transform because we’re connecting to another secure human being. And so really there’s a relational aspect of the coaching that I’m doing is essentially holding space for somebody and then guiding them through that process. Yes, we’re essentially going to reverse engineer. 

So we understand that fundamental principles of a healthy lifestyle. It really hasn’t changed because our biology really hasn’t changed that part of it is relatively simple as the human part that makes it complex. And so we walk people through the process of building out the foundation steps or building out the foundation pieces. And then learning how to implement these skills into their lives. So they actually become a habit or a routine behavior. So in the process of doing so, one of the things we need to do is bring a lot of unconscious habits and behaviors into our conscious awareness, because it’s the place of awareness that we can create change. And I like to add to that and say, it’s, it’s really the place of compassionate awareness. It helps us to create change. 

We almost do two things. We take the unconscious habits that are unhelpful, bring them into our conscious awareness, refine them. And then we transfer them back into sort of our unconscious mind by basically by practicing these behaviors until ultimately we’ve done is we’ve crafted a lifestyle that suits the individual so that not only do they lose their weight. But because it’s become their way of living. And there’s also been a transformation in their identity. They can keep doing this because ultimately that’s what’s required to truly create change.

Carrie: I like that concept of changing from the inside out one and two to make major changes, having to change your identity, how you view yourself. And so many people are looking at themselves in the mirror saying, well, maybe like you like, okay, well I’m the jolly happy fat guy. And that really was your identity. And until you could see yourself differently, your subconscious essentially was like, we have to hold onto this weight. I mean, because we’re the jolly fat guy, like that’s who we are. And so until we, you start to see yourself differently, your body isn’t gonna fall in line with those changes that you’re trying to make that makes so much sense. 

Jon: Well, it’s really interesting because there’s like this, could we say a dynamic tension? So our primal nervous system is really hardwired to seek out comfort and familiarity because that’s where safety lies.

But our soul, the essence of who we are as a human yearns for growth and development and bettering ourselves. There’s just this urge or drive. And so there’s this tension between these kinds of these two forces that are kind of pulling back and forth. Probably heard the phrase that we don’t really change until the discomfort of remaining the same outweighs the discomfort of creating change.

Carrie: Right. Just kind of as a closing question. If you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self? 

Jon: You can get through this. Human beings are immensely resilient. But we have to believe and have faith in the fact that we are, it is incredible what we can endure and move forward in. But the other thing is like, there is an end to this. There is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a difficult and painful experience, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Thing I would say is there is no shame in seeking help.

Carrie: Right. That’s a good one. 

Jon: It’s the most beneficial thing I ever did was to open up and ask others for help. And it’s incredible that kindness that human beings will show you when you open yourself up to receiving help.

Carrie: Coach Jon, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking about your personal story. I think that the really powerful and something probably a lot of people can relate to. Maybe they didn’t go through the exact trauma that you went through, but they went through something difficult and used food to cope or are emotional eating even currently. And maybe they can kind of pick up some tips from things that you shared of how to start making heading in a new direction. So that’s awesome. 

Jon: Thank you so much for having me into, just to encourage anybody who might be struggling with things it’s okay. That your brain is doing what it’s kind of designed to do. We just need to, to, to work with your brain, the brain is wonderfully plastic. It’s called neuroplasticity. We can essentially rewire our brain. And so even if you feel stuck in these patterns, that can be changed. There is hope for you. 

Carrie: Yes for sure. I wanted to take a moment to give a couple of shout-outs. One is to Betty. Thank you for being our first patron on Patreon. If you like, Betty would like to support the show. You can click on the link in our show notes. I also wanna say a thank you to Emily for writing us an encouraging note and letting us know what the podcast has meant to her. She said that she found the podcast during a difficult time in her life. And now considers us to be one of her top three favorite podcasts. So that’s awesome. It’s so encouraging to hear from our listeners. So thank you for everybody out there who’s listening. 

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

60. The Benefits of Fitness and Spirituality Combined with Jen Roland

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 60. The Benefits of Fitness and Spirituality Combined with Jen Roland

Jen Roland, a certified mental health coach through the American Association of Christian Counselors, Christian writer and speaker is joining me on the show today to talk about fitness, mental health, and Christianity.

  • Jen’s personal fitness journey 
  • Her initial motivation to lose weight and get fit.
  • Jen’s unhealthy obsession with fitness and how it caused stress and anxiety
  • Inviting God to her health journey. What did God show her that changed her perspective about health and fitness?
  • How exercise and movement can help with chronic pain
  • Christian view of health and fitness
  • Practical tips on how to start exercising when you feel overwhelmed.

Links and Resources

Jen Roland

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: This is Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 60. Just want to say happy new year to everyone out there. I know that our last episode at the end of December was about, making a new year’s resolutions and goals and why goal setting is important. And I know that some of you out there who are listening, probably have some goals surrounding. Getting in better shape or starting an exercise routine. And we know that those things can be really helpful for anxiety. 

So today on the show I have with me, Jen Roland, who’s a Christian writer speaker. She’s also a certified mental health coach through the American Association of Christian Counselors and a personal trainer. Jen has her own experiences with anxiety that she’s gonna talk with us a little bit about as well. So thank you for coming on the show, Jen.

Jen: Thank you, Carrie.

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about your story and how you got so interested in these different connections between fitness, mental health, and Christianity.

Jen: Sure. Well, I’ve always been interested in fitness. So growing up, I was always very much involved in team sports. I played team sports throughout middle school and high school and even in college. I joined the club teams and played softball and volleyball. And even after getting my first job as a high school, actually middle school. And then I was a high school science teacher. I was able to maintain a modified level of physical activity.

But once I had kids, I found that a lot of that really fell by the wayside. Team sports were the first to go cause it was just too difficult to drag our kids to softball games and things like that. And then quickly after that, any consistent exercise routine that I have. Also came kind of to an abrupt halt. And so what kind of came along with having little ones that I ended up having three kids each two years apart, there were lots of sleepless nights that led to poor food choices. I gained some weight and I really struggled to lose the baby weight from my second child.

So adding in not getting enough sleep and not eating well, I definitely had increased stress. And I didn’t have a way to release that stress through physical activity. You know, I didn’t have those natural endorphins that stimulate those positive feelings. Initially, my motivation for starting back with a Fitbit is her chain was actually kind of self-centered, but I’m gonna talk about how that evolved over time. As I kind of invited God into my health journey, but initially, it was because my sister-in-law asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding and I had to wear a bridesmaid dress. 

So, I was determined to lose the baby weight from my second daughter, who was one at the time. And I wanted to get in shape, you know, and I wanted to look good in this bridesmaid dress so that I was gonna do this workout program. I made up a calendar. I wrote my workouts every day and what I was gonna do. And even though it took me, you know, it was a three-month program. It took me five months to do it, but I still did it because I just tried to commit to, you know, looking at that calendar crossing each day off as I went along and on the days, I didn’t feel like doing anything.

I just told myself to do something, even if it was like five minutes just to do something, put your workout shoes on, you know, do a couple minutes. And most of the time it would turn out to be a decent workout. And so I did finish it and I felt like I was in great shape and other women that I was friends with at the time that had little ones started noticing that, you know, I had lost the weight that I was looking stronger and more fit. And so they started asking me what I was doing. Well at that time I wasn’t teaching anymore. So I ended up using my background in science and nutrition and human physiology. And I went into health coaching. I became a health coach and personal trainer, and I started helping other women. Develop these fitness routines and hold them accountable to following through. Even if it took them like me, you know, a lot longer than they expected it to. And they were seeing results. 

But what happened over time was that the pendulum kind of swung to the opposite extreme. And I started becoming a little bit obsessive about those habits to the point where I was measuring out all my food and I was measuring the success of my day on whether or not I had gotten my entire workout in. And so it actually became a source of stress and anxiety for me, there really was a struggle for quite a few years for me to find this balance. Between caring for myself, like in a healthy way, while also caring for others in between like self-discipline, while also giving myself grace by didn’t get the workout in. And it really wasn’t until I invited God into my health journey that He began to show me that I needed to do things a lot differently.

My faith had grown a lot over that time from when I had had the children. And as I started to grow up, as I started kind of inviting God into my health journey, He really did show me that health was about so much more than physical health, but that included my mental. And my social and my spiritual being and it, they were all very much interconnected. And I wholeheartedly believe that. He showed me that my priorities were kind of out of whack and that the spiritual training really needed to be prioritized over the physical training and that self-care and fitness. 

We’re not merely a means to achieve this, you know, ideal body, but rather a way that I could honor God. And my body is a gift that He had given me for the purpose that He had created me for which a lot of that at that time was parenting, but has developed into much more than that. And so he really began to weigh the shift the way I looked at it. And I really contribute that change in perspective to inviting my God into that and bringing my spirituality into my journey with physical health. And then about three years ago, I was so very much into health and fitness.

I started experiencing chronic pain. That doctors thought was a back issue and I found out two years later, was actually a chronic condition called, Small fiber peripheral neuropathy, which is uncurable without a cause. They don’t know the cause of it. So I’ve been dealing with chronic burning pain in my legs and my feet for the past three years. And I have found the most other than my faith. And I do take medication for pain as well. I have found that movement and exercise, especially aerobic exercise is absolutely essential for my physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing and to minimize. Really the pain that I’m having, because it really does stimulate those endorphins, which are painkillers. 

So my passion is really like whole person wellness because I really don’t think you can address anxiety without looking at the physical person and what’s going on socially, spiritually and physically, and then mentally as well. So that’s really become my passion. And I think inviting God in, he has directed me toward now this ministry that I have and, and helping other women, you know, move towards health and wholeness.

Carrie: I think that you make, you know, a couple of good points there that I just wanted to capitalize on. One was that 

you started out with something that was healthy and it went to an extreme and it became unhealthy. And that’s, I think, important for our listeners to know that, that can happen in any area of our lives really is to just gonna pay attention to that. Especially if people are prone to obsessions or anxiety, is to start to evaluate and realize, like how much space is this taking up in my mind and in my life.

And is it gone too far at some level?

I really interested a lot in what you said about just the chronic pain and how you’ve noticed that movement has been helpful for that. Because I think that a lot of people, when they experience pain in their bodies. Her first thought is, I shouldn’t move. I should go lay down or I should rest. How do we know if it’s a situation or is that something maybe a medical professional or a trainer can help us with, like in this pain, do we move or do we rest?

Jen: That’s a really good question. I mean, it reminds me of like the chronic pain cycle. I mean, a lot of times with pain, we avoid activity and we avoid movement, but what that does, this actually perpetuates the anxiety because now we’re isolated or sedentary. And as our muscles tense up and we’re getting isolated from other people, that only further exacerbate the anxiety that we’re feeling. I think it does make sense first to evaluate what the problem is. For example, when they thought that I had a herniated disc and that was the source of the pain, they told me I should rest because in that case, resting and keeping the pressure off of my back was what I would have needed to do.

But once I realized that it was actually a nerve issue and that exercise was not. Making it worse, but actually exercise was providing the circulation and the nutrients that my nerves needed to be able to heal and to be able to continue to function. I knew that while my body hurt, moving was good for me. I would say there are some times where rest is needed first and that’s where the medical professional would come in. But if you have, there’s a difference between. Chronic pain and acute pain, acute pain, you know, which is like less than three months, which is usually from like a traumatic injury and things like that. Oftentimes rest is needed first. 

However, with chronic pain, most of the time movement is not making it worse because at this point it is extended beyond, you know, the normal amount of time that someone would expect for that to heal. And your body is sending these pain signals and it could be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there’s no tissue damage at all other times there is. But in my case, once it kind of crossed over into chronic pain and they knew this was not a back issue, there was no harm in me moving. I do have to be smart about it. 

So if I exercise and I am absolutely wiped out, like within two hours afterwards, the point that I just, you know, I’m exhausted on the couch, I’ve done too much. And that’s a good general rule of thumb. If you two hours later, just can’t go on with your day because you’re so wiped out, then you’ve over done it. So that’s why later, when we talk about starting a routine, it’s important to kind of ease in and go about things gradually. But the other thing is in addition to starting small and kind of easing in, this I was gonna  say about getting into it wasn’t about gradual. With chronic pain the movement is oftentimes what we need to, to get over that anxiety, that fear further harming ourselves and the movement is actually improving our mental health and our physical health. 

Carrie: So I know we’re always being told to exercise and move more. Especially in America a lot of times we have more sedentary lifestyles. What are some benefits of exercise? 

Jen: There are so many benefits. I know most of us know the physical benefits of exercise. Things like increased strength of our muscles, of our bones. It lowers our blood pressure. It’s improved cardiovascular, endurance and health, but some of the other big benefits of exercise include that it’s a stress reliever who is a great way for us to relieve stress. It releases endorphins, which are those  the body’s natural painkillers that also stimulate those feelings of pleasure. So they actually do reduce feelings of pain and stimulate feelings of pleasure. We have an increase in energy. So contrary to what most people think. If we feel kind of tired, a lot of times getting, especially getting outside. In the fresh air 0and doing a first go off will actually increase our energy levels, not decrease them.

I remember what I was, the other thing I was gonna say before about overdoing. It is that if it increases our pain level, that’s something to look out for. If I, when I do impact activities, it makes my nerve pain worse. So I do shy away from doing those. And I stick to activities that when I do them, I do. I may not feel great doing them. And that sometimes true is exercised, but I feel a relief. I feel good afterwards. And so that’s a good way of knowing that as well as people are kind of easing back into a routine, you know, am I exhausted to really move or am I experience increase in my pain, but if it’s the same or even a little bit better for a period of time, then that’s a good sign that movement is actually helping them. Move it again, can produce anxiety. It can help us sleep better with anxiety.

I remember when I was really struggling with anxiety back in like 2016, and I had such difficulty falling asleep at night and movement. Again, especially that aerobic exercise. We’re getting your heart rate up, whether it’s walking or jogging or cycling or swimming, which has become a favorite of mine now on with chronic pain. I sleep so much better when I exercise is, and it’s a way where, you know, when your body is tired, it’s just so much easier to fall asleep. That’s another great benefit of exercise as well. But I know as I mentioned before, you know, my story about wanting to get fit to get into that bridesmaids dress.

I think a lot of us think about benefits to ourselves. Naturally we think, okay, well, these are all the benefits to my health, but where it really changed for me was where I started looking beyond my own health and looking at the people around me. And then even to, how does it benefit or how does it bore a fire God.Right? And so I started thinking about, well, gosh, like if I’m healthy than I am, or as healthy as I possibly can be, right? I’ve got a chronic illness. I have chronic pain.

There are some things that I can’t do with my kids. I can’t run around in the backyard for 45 minutes and play tag because I will be in a lot of pain, but there are still things I can do. And by exercising and taking care of my health. I am able to be more present for my kids, I’m able to help them have good health. Does that example for them, even though mommy can’t do everything, mommy is still making an effort to make the, her health a priority. I think it makes me a better spouse because I’m in a better mood when I’m able to have that release of whatever stress or tension that I’ve just been carrying around. And I know, you know, not only does it help me physically be more comfortable because it lowers my pain, but, you know, I think we’re just more comfortable with our bodies when we know that we’re taking care of them. And we know that that affects, you know, how we interact with others, our intimacy with our spouse, like all of those things are impacted by exercise, but, you know, we even take it even bigger than that.

Our bodies God’s word says that our bodies are temples of the holy spirit and that’s 1 Corinthian 6:19- 20, it says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God. You are not your own. You are bought at a price, therefore honor God with your body so we can honor God with our body”. Through physical fitness. It’s actually a way that we worship God by showing you, we care enough about the body He’s given us to take care of it. And there’s also a verse in Ephesians that talks about caring for your body as well, to care and nourish your body as Christ cares for the church. 

So they want, you know and want us to care for our bodies, even though they are temporary, they’re not eternal.

Our souls, they’re important because they’re the only house that our souls have to live in here on this earth. And so if we’re gonna be a reflection of Christ out to the world, well, then we need to be nurturing and caring and fueling our bodies and our minds. Right? And our souls with the right things. So whether that’s good food or good company or God’s word, you know, what we fuel ourselves with is ultimately what’s going to come out is what we’re gonna pour out to everybody else. And so we wanna make sure that it, that it’s good. And then it’s wholesome that it’s nurturing and that it’s caring for ourselves.

Carrie: That’s really good. That’s really awesome. I think so many times, unfortunately. What I’ve seen in church is that people want to talk about our minds or our spirit, and they neglect the physical body. And that’s what our mind is in. That’s what our spirit is. God’s spirit is housed in. And so if we don’t pay attention to our physical bodies, we’re missing just such a crucial piece there in terms of spirituality.

So let’s say maybe somebody is listening to this episode, because they don’t currently have an exercise routine and they wanna get started or they want, they know they need to take more care of their physical health. What would you suggest to them? Maybe they don’t know where to start feel overwhelmed.

Jen: The first thing I would say is to kind of, to evaluate where you’re starting from. So I mentioned before, just if we try to just jump right back in to where we were, that’s where we do find a lot of times that we are prone to injury. I mean, it can be very humbling. I mean, I know after quite a long time of not doing any exercise at all. And because I was on bedrest thinking, it was my back and it didn’t get better and they extended it. And so I had no physical activity for at least the better part of a year after being very active. And I did notice that it was affecting my mental health and I knew that I needed to do something. And I tried to, I joined a gym,and to start swimming, which has been great for me and anyone that deals with chronic pain.

I mean, I asked for that like as a Christmas gift to have money for that, because I knew, you know, that there was a cost involved, but it’s been very worth it for me. 

So starting off in the pool for me was really good. There’s water aerobics classes. And, you know, there’s, Y there’s a lot of local lifewise and things like that. I have a low cost, you know, to join the pool or aquatics class, but think about where you’re starting from. Because if you try to just jump in and go to the first, you know, hit class at the gym, then you’re likely to feel discouraged or to get injured or to be in so much pain afterwards that you have zero desire to go back. So think about were you starting from, and then gradually increase it. So like, if you’re doing absolutely nothing right now, that’s okay. Right? There’s no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, like just, okay. Where can we start? And I highly suggest just doing a walking program. 

I mean, the new year’s a great time to start because the spring is when there’s a lot of,like, five Ks or like the color run or things like that. That can be very social and fun while also encouraging physical fitness. And so that’s, I remember doing that years back, whether you walk or run, it doesn’t matter if you sign up for something like that, it gives you a date that you there it’s April or May, and that you’re working toward, that you can put on the calendar and you might do like a couch to 5K program. Or we might just start walking like 10 minutes a day.

 As a personal trainer, I do highly suggest that you focus on like consistency over performance. So rather than say, well, I’m gonna walk three times a week for 30 minutes, I would say, well, can you just walk 15 minutes? Every day or six days a week? Because when you build that habit, even if you have one rest day, but when you do three times a week, what happens is, well, it’s only Monday I have the whole week I’m gonna start. I’m gonna do it tomorrow. And then Tuesday rolls along and it just gets put off. 

But if you can make it a habit, it really does your body comes to expect it to eventually crave it. That movement and walking is a great place to start. I would say, try to choose something you enjoy. And there’s some people out there to be like, well, I don’t enjoy anything, but you know, it could be gardening. It could be, again, walking with a friend or a neighbor, they could be cycling, whether it’s stationary cycling or running a bike. I said, I did, I ended up doing swimming. I didn’t love it at first, but I got underwater headphones and it became like the new running for me because I used to run. So I put my earbuds in and I listened to music and I swim and I came to love it because once I got over the hump of this is miserable because I’m so out of shape this, it became enjoyable for me. It really becomes something I look forward to doing. 

Carrie: Tell us about when you were a busy mom and you were getting into a fitness routine, like how did you schedule that in? What did that look like for you? 

Jen: When I was the busy mom and I had the little ones. I found ways to exercise a Chrome. And I actually do have some really short, simple and workouts that I’ve put on my website, which is www.JenRoland.com and under resources there’s exercises. So I have like 10 to 15 minute exercises and that’s what I would do. So I literally just got free weights and I had an exercise mat. There are a ton of free exercise videos that you can look up like on YouTube or online. You can find, you know, a beginner yoga, you can find a beginner, a cardio class, you can play it.

Sometimes I bring my like exercise mat upstairs and I would like lay it on the floor by the playroom. And I would do, you know, and it was frustrating sometimes. Stop, but except even on a, such a good day, I might get 10 or 15 minutes in, in the morning. And then I try to finish it up later in the day. And I learned to be okay with like splitting up a workout that was 25 minutes into two or three parts and being like, I still did it, right? Free weights and a map basically is what I used for the longest time. That’s all I had and that’s all I needed, but I was able to do strength core. And then for cardio, I’d either put the kids in the double stroller, which was a great workout and push them around. Or, you know, eventually we later did get a treadmill, but I’ve had a bike I’ve had to look to goal. So throughout the years I found some way to get some kind of aerobic exercise in. So I think any, whether they’re working in or outside the home, I think there are ways  to make it work on a budget of even nothing right now. 

Carrie: Sure.

Jen: You know, even if you were to invest $50 in some free weights, like you could do a lot of workouts with that. And I do have some strength and some, some cardio workouts and one of them, I just use a stairwell and that’s it. And it’s a short little cardio exercise to get your heart rate up when you can’t get outside or can’t leave the house. There’s a lot of really good I’m free resources out there that people can use. And then there’s others that you can pay for if you have the money and you want a subscription to them. 

Carrie: Sure. I think that we over-complicate things sometimes, or we make excuses. I don’t have that 25 minutes in my day, but what you were just saying was like, well, what if I did, you know, 10 minutes in the morning and then 15 after the kids went to bed or something like that, what if I took part of my lunch break, if I have an hour lunch break and what if I took 15 minutes of that or 30 minutes of that to walk? Those are doable things that I think a lot of times we don’t think about, or we just, we make some kind of excuse for why we aren’t able to do something. 

I know since COVID, I have been exercising at home, I had a gym membership and I was doing the classes and everything else like that. And then with COVID of course, all of that changed. And I bought a streaming service and ended up streaming workouts into the house. And that’s been just really great for me to be able to physically and mentally to have those workouts in, on a regular basis. And I do miss it when, when I don’t have it now I’m pregnant. So now I’m doing the prenatal yoga and the, those type of workout. It’s very different than what I was doing before, for sure. I mean, you know, changing body, you have to change your, your movement and your activity level. And there’s definitely some pain in there as well that I’m trying to deal with and work around and stretch out. But Hey, they say exercise is good for labor, so I’m rolling with it.

Jen: And you bring, you bring up a really good point too, is that like pull that warmup and that cools down, you know, like that’s just even just like the stretching, we forget about things like that, but that’s really important as well. You mentioned streaming, I streamed workouts all the time. And my husband was able to set it up so that you can just, pass through laptop like screen onto the television. Right? 

Carrie: Right. 

Jen: So we put a TV in a room where I do my workouts. And so rather than having to like do it off this little screen on my computer, I had it on the TV screen. And that’s how I would do a lot of my workouts as well. But having that warmup and that full down is really important as well.

And I loved having that calendar if you buy, if you string a program and you buy like a program, they usually come with workout calendars, and there’s something satisfying about like, just crossing off each day as you go along and seeing, I did one more cam on one day closer, really just focusing on the process of getting in the habit of making physical activity a habit.

So there’s eventually, like you said, Carrie something that you look forward to do, and then you actually missed it. If you don’t get to do it and just,  rewarding yourself to along the way with a healthy reward, like maybe it’s, you know, at the end, I’m gonna go get a pedicure or something like that. Something that’s not gonna derail your progress that you’ve made,

Carrie: Right.

Jen: But that’s going to reward you in a way that just also helps you relax and things I did, is things you’re struggling with. I think pedicure or massage or just meeting a friend, you know, for coffee, all can be just great ways of rewarding ourselves for disciplining our body, which is a good thing. You know, also biblical as well, too, that we’re disciplining our bodies. 

Carrie: How do you incorporate spiritual practices into movement? 

Jen: That’s a really good question. One thing that I wanted to mention, you had mentioned at the beginning, that I have a certification as a mental health coach through the American association of Christian counselors. Well, before that I did a behavior change certification through ACE, which is not Christian-based and it was very different in talking about behavior change versus mental health and sustainable long-term change. And here’s one point that I feel like is just really worth emphasizing is that without the holy spirit in our lives, without God and invited into our health trinny, the best that we can hope to achieve is to change our outward behavior.

We are disciplining ourselves to change an outward behavior without truly having that deep heart level change as to why we’re doing it and why it’s really important that it’s deeper and bigger than ourselves, but that it really involves God and it’s honoring glorifying him. So when we invite God into our health journey and we have the holy spirit in us, that’s when we can achieve like true heart level, sustainable change.

Okay. And that’s only through the power of the holy spirit in us. And so as we are engaging in physical fitness and we are inviting the holy spirit to give us the strength to endure. 

To the push through what might be a difficult workout to overcome the, the will of just being lazy and staying in bed. He is giving us the power to do more than change our behavior, but to actually change our hearts so that we begin to see it as a way of worship. And so some ways that I have done that. One of the It gets ways. I was like, cause I mentioned music and like I used to run to, to certain playlist and when I couldn’t run anymore. And that was hard. Just like you said, it’s so hard doing like your prenatal workouts when you’re used to doing other things. And I used to be doing insanity and these, you know, pull ups and chin ups and it was very difficult to not be able to engage with those things. 

But one thing that I found helpful was like to take the music with me that I found swimming and that was a robotic for me, but I will listen to worship music when I swim. And so bringing, you know, music and it doesn’t have to be Christian, but like music therapy is a real thing. It is therapeutic and I have playlist depending on what I’m even feeling. I’m sure other people probably do too, whether it’s just like, let’s go get them playlist, or I just need to relax. I’m in a spa kind of playlist and you might play one when you’re walking and a different one when you’re doing, you know more intense workout, but I actually have ones for how I’m feeling. So I have a let go and trust God playlist. I have a finding comfort in God’s presence playlist. I have a song to overcome hopelessness playlist, and those are all actually my freebies library. 

So if you go to my website and subscribe you’ll have access to all of them they’re on Spotify. But worship was, is a huge way for me to bring spirituality into fitness. Another one is walking wholeheartedly, admit that I’m guilty of like 99% of the time walking with earbuds in because I like to listen to podcasts. I’ve been listening to a bunch of yours recently carried. I was listening to one on nutrition and I was listening to one on mindfulness. And, and so I’ve been, I listened to podcasts. I listened to my Bible app. I listened to music and I realized that in doing that, there were times I would complete my walk and I really didn’t even notice like what was going on around me, because I would be like constantly looking at my phone or just, you know, my mind would be elsewhere. I got a really good tip from someone else that I’ve tried to incorporate into my life. And that is to go on a walk without your earbuds, without your phone and do one of two things. The first would be just to be like mindful and notice what’s around you.

Carrie: That’s good.

Jen: You notice the beauty of the leaves changing color right now. This morning, it was, there was a bird sitting on the tippy top branch of the tree. And like, it was, it was just really kind of comical looking. And I, I noticed that. Just noticing, I mean the littlest things, we had a bunny in our backyard this morning. That was super cute. But just being able to notice that being mindful, that lowers anxiety, that mindfulness is, is also needed for emotional regulation and to notice what we’re feeling and to be able to go to God and say, God, you know, I’m feeling this right now, you know, and maybe identified as whether it’s loneliness or boredom or anxiousness or fear. Just practicing that mindfulness is key. 

So try going for a walk and just noticing what’s around you and not having those ear buds in. And the other thing would be to take an index card with you with a, a positive affirmation of this could be a scripture verse, or it could just be inspiring quote, but it coming up. Some kind of fear or a lie that you’re struggling with. Okay. So for me, my thoughts would oftentimes, especially with my health, they would just I worry. I would worry and it didn’t help that other people with my condition would say things like, well, aren’t you worried? You’re gonna end up paralysed. Well, aren’t you worried that you’re not gonna be able to like drive your kids around anymore? Aren’t you concerned? And I would get an earful of, plus I would get an ear full of things I should try. Will have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? And it was very anxiety provoking for me.

Carrie: Sure.

Jen: And so my verse was Philippians 4-8, which I’ve also now framed. I have that on my wall. But whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right. Whatever is your, whatever is lovely. Whatever is admirable. If anything is excellent and praiseworthy, think about such things. And for me, that was the changing my thought taps. And it was like, there I go again, I’m thinking about the future. And I realized that like anxious people,of eyelid, let’s say. When I’m showing with anxieties, because I’m living ahead, I’m thinking ahead. I’m grieving losses that haven’t even happened. Whether I’m gonna be paralyzed or whether it’s just gonna get worse. And I’m not on my retirement, I’m gonna be just stuck at home because I can’t travel. And rather than worrying about these things. But haven’t happened to just, I think of like a fishing rod, reel it in. Where are you right now? Be here, there are joys. And there are things to be experienced right here.

Let me focus on those things that are true, that I know that are true, that I know that are praiseworthy. That’s where I need to be thinking about. So that’s a big verse for me. So just walking and every, maybe five minutes, just reading that verse out loud. And while your neighbors might look at you a little funny because you’re, you know, doing that, there is something about the movement and the auditory and putting it all together where I really think that can be very, a very powerful tool to renew our mind.

So if you can say it out loud, just like sometimes we’ll do positive affirmations in front of the mirror. And speak it aloud to themselves. There’s power in that versus reading it and just reading it internally and not saying it out loud. So when you combine that with movement, I think there’s just, it just adds a whole nother level of depth to it, to help it really sink in. 

Carrie: Sure. Towards the end of every podcast. I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person. 

Jen: Well, I thought a lot about that and the things that came to me if I thought back to when I was struggling with it most, which is when I was going through some marital issues back in 2016, through 2018.

And my husband and I were in counseling. And I just remember feeling like I shouldn’t be struggling with it.

So I just wanted to speak some words of encouragement and then share a little bit about how God used that period of my life. I wanted to say that we can walk with the Lord and still struggle with anxiety. It is very possible to be walking closely with God and still have these difficulties. All of us have difficulties and limitations, and they’re there for a reason.

Carrie: Sure.

Jen: God is using them. Anxiety, It’s, it’s not your identity. It’s not who you are. It’s just a result of living in a fallen world. That is plagued with sin and disease and illness and very difficult circumstances, especially with what we’ve all gone through the past year and a half, never for a moment. Do I want anyone to think that having anxiety that is shallow with anxiety makes them any less of a Christian. Being on medication doesn’t make you any less of a Christian? I knew there were some people that led me to question how I could take an antidepressant for pain and also be a strong believer and that, you know. I used to be praying more and that’s just not true.

There are definitely cases where people just have lower levels of serotonin and exercise does help that as well. I don’t want to get too off track, but if you do have a lower level of serotonin, which definitely can happen, people that have depression, anxiety. Exercise also helps that, and there are foods that have tryptophan that you can also eat that your body uses that tryptophan, to produce serotonin. So things like turkey and bananas and salmon, and you can Google like foods with tryptophan and that can help raise your serotonin to a normal level, which may help your mood. 

But, you know, in some people they need that medication and that, that can actually help balance their brain chemistry to what it’s supposed to be. So God gives us Jesus, you know, for hope, but he gives us doctors and nurses and counselors and coaches for help. And he wants us to reach out to those people. Just like, it’s not a weakness to reach out to Carrie for counseling, if you need counseling, right? If you live in the same state and you wanna connect with her for counseling. God gives us counselors to help us through hard things. And he gives us doctors to also help us where our biochemical environment may not be exactly what it should be. And it, that doesn’t mean it’s a long-term thing, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of that. 

So I know what it’s like to struggle with anxiety. I know what it’s like to be on medication as well. And I’ve come to see, you know, over the past five years that God has really used it in such a way that I can now see it as like a gift. And here’s why I say that because we were like, there’s no way. There’s just no way. Okay. The reason I would say that it’s a gift is because it has drawn me closer to God. It has, you know, it’s what encouraged me to seek counseling, my husband and I to get into counseling. Us to both seek the Lord. 

We’ve both been transformed. 

Our marriage is stronger. I have grown tremendously, both spiritually and personally. Okay. And it’s really showed me that I have to let go of the things I can’t control and focus on the things I have agency over. And in doing that in letting go of control, I feel like I’ve really been able to receive what God has planned for me, which right now is turned into a ministry of serving other women. 

When we try to grasp tightly and control everything near actually, like clenching our fist in a way that we’re unable to really receive what God wants to teach us through our struggles. And that’s why Bernay Brown. She wrote that book, you know, the gift of imperfection. It’s our imperfections that draw us closer to God. And in drawing closer to God that we really discover who we really are and how he wants to use our anxiety for our growth. So I would just encourage everyone that’s going through that today, that God is going to use it just to keep seeking him with your hands open for what he has to give you. Remember that He is gonna use it for your good, He really as for your growth and scientification, and just to, to just seal that relationship, that union with him even more so.

Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on, and talking with us about these things. I really appreciate it.

Jen: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I really appreciated Jen’s perspective in the Christian Integration into this episode. I want you all to know in a transparent node, that I’ve really been struggling to keep up with everything that’s going on with the Podcast a last couple of months. It’s been a riff time with my pregnancy and you hear me talk about that this, a little bit of  our upcoming episodes. About back pain that I don’t with. And  It’s been a journey. And I hope to actually do a Podcast. Sometime in the future to talk about mental health and chronic pain, anxiety.

How those things interact with each other? Because there’s so much linkage that I don’t feel like people talk about these things. What is like to go through a chronic health struggle and not know when the end day of that is going to be. So, there’s so much that I want to do. I want to really get our website fully up to date where it needs to be. And I want to be pouring more efforts and to make sure that our newsletter goes out every week. I just want be able to do such of those things. So, I’m sitting on the acceptance that I am not where I want to be with this Podcast. I  assure that, because it’s a lesson to all of us. That sometimes we go through things and we have to take a step back. And we have to acknowledge our limitations and we really have to dig in and take care of ourselves. 

Fortunately, my recording season is over. I am now focused on just getting everything out to you guys over the next several weeks. For I’m going on maternity leave. How much I get out there and remain to be seen? But, we’re gonna do the best that we can. I would love to hear from you and you can reach us anytime on our website. Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com. We have a contact form on there. And we love to hear from real live actual people who’s listening the show. Because a lot of at we get, you know, junks bin, on there. So, leave us a little note and let us know which you like about the Podcast. What do you like to see different and anxious suggestions? Thank you so much for listening.

51. Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 51. Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page

Today on the show, I’m privileged to be interviewing Dr. Charles Page, a surgeon, author and speaker.  Dr. Charles shares with us how he surrendered his sleep problems to God.

  • Why did Dr. Charles write a book about insomnia?
  • Christian worldview about sleep
  • Dr. Charles’s tips and strategies to beat insomnia and sleep better.
  • Scripture verses related to sleep
  • How do we surrender to God?
  • Dr. Charles’s book: Surrendered Sleep

Scripture verses discussed: Psalms 121:4-5, Psalm 4:8, Ephesians 4:27, Psalm 148

Links and Resources

Dr. Charles PageBook: Surrendered Sleep

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hopeforanxiety)

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 51

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 51. I’m your host Carrie Bach, and we are covering all types of topics on the show related to anxiety. I have wanted to have someone come on and talk about sleep for quite some time. Because as we know, many people who struggle with anxiety deal with insomnia, and this topic is especially timely for me because I was up in the middle of the night, just last night, having a hard time going to sleep.

Carrie: So I am so glad that Dr. Chuck Page, a surgeon, and author of Surrendered Sleep is here to talk with us today. Thank you for coming. 

Dr. Chuck: Well, great to be here with you, Carrie and I got up about three o’clock this morning, too. So are I share your pain. 

Carrie: How did a surgeon come to write a book on insomnia?

Dr. Chuck: Well, that’s kind of a convoluted story. Let me make it short. My whole adult life I’ve suffered from sleep issues. Just the regular things that people face every day, the things that raise through our minds, our to-do list and all the woulda shoulda kudos of the day And then all the things that we are anticipating or worrying about it the next day.

So all of those things, but on another level, my whole adult life I’ve been an insomniac because I’m a surgeon. I’m on call all the time. I get called in the middle of the night, even when I’m not on call. Yeah, people call me at three o’clock in the morning to say, hey doc, what you’re doing? We just want to know that. Just want to see what you’re up to at three o’clock in the morning. So it’s been really challenging for me from that standpoint. Then on another level, I have sleep apnea, I didn’t even know it and I’m kind of one of those who do, as I say, not as I do doctors, I’ve kind of gone through this process of learning myself about sleep disorder.

So it kinda hits me in a lot of different ways. I think that’s kind of one of the take-home messages that I want your audience to really think about is that a lot of times its not just one thing. It’s multiple things that are hitting us as we lay our heads on our pillow. 

Carrie:  Yes. Physical and mental health things can be coming up at night.

Dr. Chuck: Yep. 

Carrie: Yeah. So what scriptures have you found that speak to sleep specifically? 

Dr. Chuck: Oh, my goodness. So there’s a lot. There’s a lot of scriptures that talk about it. So it’s interesting as I began to kind of deal with this, I began to realize how much the Bible has to say about sleep. It’s kind of funny. Most people don’t think about going to the scripture with their sleep issues, but you think about it, sleep was God’s idea. One of the interesting things, you being a psychologist, I know you face this, as a medical doctor, I face this. There are different worldviews out there.

Do you think about it? No one can explain sleep. I mean from a natural secular worldview thinking as it from an evolutionist, they don’t have an explanation for sleep or they have some very brilliantly stupid ideas that somehow, but from that worldview, they don’t have an explanation for why we go to sleep.

You think about it. Humans are unique because we sleep about eight hours in a 24-hour cycle, as opposed to elephants or giraffes, or dear me, nicely of about two hours. From an evolutionary standpoint, if you think about it from that worldview, you snooze, you lose. So it’s, it’s really hard to explain.

Now we know from a Christian worldview that sleep was God’s idea. So the scriptures have a lot to say about sleep. Yeah, can look at the Bible and say, okay, here are the 11th commandment. You shall sleep eight hours. I’ve read some books that people say, you know what God’s promised you and a good night’s sleep. There are not really any passages that say that. There’s no turn to the fourth book of sleep and we’re going to study this. I mean you have to kind of look at the Bible on a kind of a bigger picture to really understand what it says. The main thing is there’s a lot of attitudes that emerge for the circumstances that we’re facing.

So yeah, there’s a ton and I can just kind of go through all those, but just beginning with the first kind of a concept, sleep was God’s idea. We were created to sleep and I think one of the big ideas that the scriptures tell us and kind of fits in with the rest of our lives. One of the reasons I think that we were to sleep is because God really wants us to turn off. When you think about the creation story, starting in Genesis one. It’s a funny phrase, it says in the evening and the morning was the first day. And so it’s funny, we get it the other way around. We think, well, those day starts when the sun comes up.

When I get up in the morning, that’s when the day starts. No, from the Hebrew standpoint of the day, the day started when the sun went down and so they began their day with rest. That’s an interesting, different, very different perspective than the way we live in our modern culture. We can say, hey, we turn the lights off, and hey, goodnight God, I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning. But actually, the scriptures talk about how God never slumbers or sleeps 120 seconds song. God never slumbers or sleeps that He is just as active and working in our lives as we put our heads on our pillow. That’s one of the great things I think to bring in that, that the Christian can bring into to rest is that, hey, whatever circumstances we’re going through, God’s got this.

So just kind of keeping that big idea that God is just as active as He does. He doesn’t go to sleep when we do. So he’s still working in our lives and I think that’s one of the first things to kind of understand about who got it. 

Carrie: Okay. I always like to say God’s bigger than any problem that you’re going to face today, so we don’t feel like we can handle it, but it’s easy for God. He can handle anything. I know that we talked about this a little bit earlier, but worrying thoughts about our present life, sometimes just thoughts about the state of the world. It can keep us up at night and we’re taught in the Bible or pray about these things in order to receive peace from God. Have you found specific prayer practices or strategies helpful when you’re awake, either having trouble falling asleep or waking up in the middle of the night? 

Dr. Chuck: Yes. I think we need to make whatever routine. I mean, once again, we’re personal beings and we each have a unique relationship with God for the Christian. But I think beginning your day in scripture and prayer, and just a time of just journaling or whatever you do, do that before you go to bed and do that in the morning and kind of sandwich your laugh into sleep.

And so one of the interesting things, so often the things that race through our mind and rob us asleep, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. But sometimes like, I’ll be thinking about a situation may be. Oh my goodness, I face things every day, all kinds of things and that theme begins to pop into my mind and I pray about it as I don’t even read scripture.

It seems like prayer and I give it to God and then five minutes later, it’s pop base boomerang back into my consciousness. It really plagues my slave. So one of the things I think that we often forget is the art of meditation. Meditation is so powerful. You guys talk about, cognitive behavioral therapy, think about the good things but it’s even from a scriptural standpoint. It’s a lot deeper than that. I mean, it’s not an Eastern meditation where we’re emptying our mind, actually, meditation is filling our mind. It’s kind of the law of replacing. So often when a competing thought or we’re worrying thought enters our mind, we can’t just take it out of our mind because it’ll boomerang back into our thinking.

We have to replace it and that’s where meditation comes in. For example, Philippians, everybody knows Philippians chapter four, it talks about, in everything, give prayer and in that verse, it talks about there’s anything good, anything noble, anything, think about these things. It’s talking about the art of meditation and I think that’s so key for us because as you show me your focus, I’ll show you your future, and as we begin to focus on the scriptures and begins to fill our minds with the good stuff. So that’s part and you can even go back to the songs.

For example, if you think about David, one of the songs is the fourth song. It was in the evening Psalm that David prayed when he was going through the toughest time of his life. This was when Absalom Salaam had usurped the throne and he was running for his laugh crossing, the Jordan river and people were and fingers at aim. It was just multiple stuff that was robbing  his sleep. As he goes through this process, and it says in Psalm 4:8, I will lay me down in peace and sleep for you, Lord. Let me dwell in safety and so this process of prayer and meditation, I think is huge.

So, hey, have you ever heard of the hippocampus part of the brain? So it was interesting. No, it’s not an exhibited Azu okay. The hippocampus is a part of the brain for the audience. What the hippocampus does is the hippocampus take short-term memory and embed it into long-term memory. And so at the end of the day, our hippocampus goes to work. So as we’re sleeping, the hippocampus is constantly taking all of those memories of the day and it begins to embed them in our long-term memory and that’s why it’s so important. But back to your question that we stop and we begin to process those events that have happened during the day. I mean, it’s just so simple because if we don’t, instead of getting better, we’re going to get better, those bad experiences, we all have this stuff.

I mean, think about all the COVID stuff that everybody’s dealing with now and just these experiences and so being able to filter them through the scriptures and be able to process them, I think is very healthy. It talks about in Ephesians four, I think 26, it talks about, not to give the devil a foothold, but to deal with your anger before you go to bed. So I’m paraphrasing that, but so often we have these emotions that just, man, you probably never have those Carrie being a counselor, but people mad at me all the time, you killed a grandma, you didn’t do this. You didn’t or something didn’t turn out the way that I expected them.

When I have a bad day, I really have a bad day. So being able to filter those things in and deal with those emotions is huge. We have to let the natural processes of the way we were designed work for us. And so we don’t have to do much. I mean, the devil doesn’t have to do much when we’re not meditating and praying the scripture. So I guess that was a long answer to your question, but that’s what I do. I try to meditate. I try to read, I try to pray, do all those things.  I think that’s what most people deal with. It’s called primary insomnia. Most people have trouble going to sleep. 

Carrie: Okay. So what do we do for those of us that wake up in the middle of the night? Because that’s my problem. I normally do not have problems going to sleep. I can just ask out, but then when it comes to, I wake up with thoughts in the middle of the night.

Dr. Chuck: Well, good for you. That’s great and I don’t either, because usually, I’m so exhausted by the time I get to bed. It’s funny. They say those who sleep like a baby probably don’t have one, and I haven’t been my wife and I have such different sleep habits. So, I tell people I’m the best, get the best guy to see on the worst day of your life. My wife is the best person to see any day of your life. But for me, when I’m woken up in the middle of the night, one thing that I’ve learned to do many times when I’m kind of tossing and turning in my bed is take a step back and listen to God sometimes.

Those are opportunities that God is trying to get our attention. I think most of us and the culture that we lay, I remember going so fast during the day that we don’t have time to really stop and listen, and God wants to speak to us. And sometimes He has to, He has to wake us up and not to get our attention. And so you don’t think about that. You go back to study in first Samuel, the story of Samuel. He has a little boy and they’re at the table with Eli and he’s going to sleep, and God’s saying Eli, he gets up and goes. Samuel gets up and goes to Eli and back and forth all the time, and God’s trying to get his attention to give him a message and he doesn’t catch it.

I wonder how many times I’ve done and it’s actually an opportunity, to meet with God and think about what Samuel would have missed out on. He would have never stopped and heard the wind. That was the beginning of a series of steps that set the same direction. And so often when I’m waking up in the middle of night, just kind of keeping them in mind, God, are you saying something to me? And sometimes He’s not. I always try to keep a journal at the bedside because sometimes it’s something a thought will come into my mind and it may be just a random thought or it may be something that’s really something that God has woken us up to tell us. And so just to write it down and in the morning, you can look at it.

Now, the verse Psalm 7 talks about how God ministers to us, how the spirit ministers to us at night. And so looking at that and thinking about the fact that hey, this may be just something that God just write it down. How many times they’ll say him let’s sleep on it. Now I want to sleep on this message, maybe something very simple, simple about either or a person can pop into our mind. Somebody that we haven’t thought about a year. So the first thing, if you get up at night, get up and pray. Just like Samuel said, speak Lord for your servant is hearing. That’s in first Samuel three. A good rule of thumb, hey, got it. This may not be you, but it may bespeak for your servant is listening.

You’d be surprised and something, and even if we don’t have an answer, I think those times of fellowship become very precious to us, in the sense where we’re not losing anything by having those times of fellowship with God at night, when no one’s there, you can go through the Psalm 1:48. I think it talks about how God keeps me up at a meditated night upon God. And so just kind of thinking about that, it’s a very different perspective of sleep than we get. So it may be a divine appointment. You’re correct. 

Carrie: It’s a good time to be quiet. The house is quiet. There’s not much going on. There aren’t really a whole lot of distractions, maybe that can, we can’t do too much. We don’t want to wake up other family members. So it is a good time to sit down, maybe in reading or praying. Sometimes I will get up and write and I’ll just type whatever’s on my mind and it’s kind of a brain dump in the middle of the night.

And I wonder if you know, I’m not, it’s some of those things that may be that I didn’t take the time or have the chance to process. Sometimes things happen, in the evening, like right before you go to bed, and sometimes that can really throw me off. Sometimes on Tuesday nights, we’ll have church director meetings via zoom and I’ll be thinking about what our pastor was talking with us about or upcoming church things that we have going on. I don’t always have a lot of time to process that before I go to sleep. I think I ended up waking up in the middle of the night. 

Dr. Chuck: I think everybody who listened to this is going, yep, I get it. But one of the things you brought up Carrie, that I think is very important is journaling. I didn’t really realize this, but this book that I wrote about sleep was I really thought I was writing it for other people, but really in a sense, I was writing it for myself as my own way of dealing with the spiritual component of sleep. And I’m realizing that too, with the rest of the books that I’m writing, I mean, really. Journaling is a way that helps us process the events in our lives that I think is so productive. And if you know, if anybody in your audience has never tried journaling, get up and write, and you’d be surprised, you’d be surprised what just a little bit of introspection and thinking will do.

Carrie: You would be surprised at what comes out. A lot of times, one time I realized, oh, well, I’m worrying about something that’s the way in the future that I don’t have any control over. I was like, well, that’s not even close to where I’m at today. That’s really an opportunity for me to let go. You have lots of worries about the future. So how can, because your book is called Surrender to Sleep. So for people that, I mean, we have a hard time sometimes letting go of control. Let’s be honest. We want to try to control things that we don’t have any control over. That obviously creates a lot of anxiety. How do we surrender that over to God and not pick it up five minutes later?

Dr. Chuck: Wow. That is one of those million-dollar questions that, I think we all struggle with Carrie. I think surrender is a process, pass or disease go or just surrender, but it’s us thinking about that, it really is a process. It’s a stepwise process. It is an attitude. I think that we have to embrace this concept of surrender, control even as a Sergeant because I’m a control freak because even, in the operating room or patient, just the smallest thing can make a huge difference. And so, and it’s really hard to realize that control is just an illusion from an earthly standpoint.

And so realizing that if we do yield to God, God’s grace begins to empower us to be able to work more according to His plans and just release the outcome into what God wants. So surrender is huge and it’s I think a lifelong process that we go through. But once again, I think we were created, I think it’s just a reminder every day. If we were, God created us to surrender, that’s what sleep is about. It’s just, it really is. We have to let go and let God do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. What a picture of grace. It’s not saying not to minimize our responses, but yet to understand that we let go, God’s going to do some great things and so that’s what I’ve learned. That’s what my book is about. It’s just really changing focus. You show me your focus, I’ll show you your future.

And so if we focus so often we think about sleep, we think about, oh man, it’s 11 o’clock or three o’clock in the morning. I can’t sleep and I’ve got all this stuff to do tomorrow. And man, the male in our mind just starts working and we begin to worry and we began to meditate. We meditate on our fears and stuff. But if we change focus and we focus on our relationship with God, it doesn’t mean that God’s going to promise a good night’s sleep, but He will give us, we have to trust His sovereignty that even if we’re wake up and we’re tired, we’re exhausted, God’s still got that. I mean, God’s still going to give us the energy that we need to do the things that He wants us to do the next day. It is just a kind of bigger picture understanding of God’s grace in His work. 

Carrie: I think you do bring up a good point there because we get stressed out after we’ve been awake for a little while in the middle of the night or after we can’t go to sleep, then we’re stressed about before now we’re stressed about not sleeping. Oh, I’m only going to get five hours, I’m only going to get four hours. I’m going to just try to go back to sleep this last hour before the alarm clock goes off and you get real trippy about it. So that definitely happens to a lot of people.

Dr. Chuck: But I’ll tell you something and that’s the thing about surrender. Sometimes it means that we sacrifice our sleep to help other people. And I have to do that a lot. I have to get myself up out of bed and go and go to the hospital or answer a phone call or whatever. And just having that attitude that, hey Lord, whatever tomorrow brings Your grace is going to be sufficient. They helped me through that and just keeping that perspective has really helped me a lot. 

Carrie: Good. Well, we’ll definitely put links in the show notes to your website and your books and where people can find out more information. If they want to get the book. So at the end of every podcast, I ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person.

Dr. Chuck: And thinking about this, Carrie, I just want to just leave you with a personal story. So, I’ve been practicing surgery for 26 years. I’m 54 years old and I’ve seen a lot of changes in medicine. It’s kind of funny, I’m becoming one of those old dinosaurs. So anyway, as health care has really changed in the past 10 years, I can’t say that I’ve always responded in the most positive ways.

A lot of bitterness, a lot of things, just a lot of stuff because there’s the way things should be and the way things are. And I think we all live with those kinds of attention. In our laws and once again, that’s something that keeps us up at not sometimes, but what’s interesting over the past several years, just realize it is that I’m going through a different season of life, that I had to make some decisions about my lifestyle.

And the biggest breakthrough I’ve had in the past couple of years is changing my lifestyle. I had to stop taking calls at the hostel. And as a surgeon, a lot of the ways you value yourself is how much work you do in the hospital. But it was a real step of faith for me is that I had to say, okay, good. I’m just not a 30-year-old guy anymore that can stay up three days and deal with stress and pressure. So as I began to say no to a lot of things, to stop being a doormat to the hospitals, and I know that sounds crazy, but as in my job, as a rural surgeon, I mean, they call me for everything. And so in taking a step back and letting go of some things, my sleep has gotten so much better.

Because like I said, it is multidimensional, as I’m getting fewer calls from the hospital in that I’m sleeping better. And then I’m able to focus on my mental health and my diet and I’m losing weight and I’m feeling better. I come home and not in my wife says, who are you married? So thinking about this, we live in this crazy nanosecond culture that’s constantly barraging us. And so getting back to the way that we were designed and created and getting along with God and cooperating with God. It’s not anything big. It’s not like a laser beam of holy spirit power helps me in, but just me and making some decisions to say, hey, this is just unhealthy.

And at this season of life, I just need, what’s funny is that God has provided for my family. I mean, I’m busier now and I’m not going into the hospital doing outpatient surgeries. And man, I just, I handle stress better. I have. People better and problems better, it’s just, my whole life has just changed.

I feel like I have a new lease on life and I’m a better doctor now than I was two years ago because I was so overwhelmed. And so what I want to encourage your audience today is to think about those things in their lives that they really need to change because so often sleep is just a symptom of a deeper problem in a deeper issue that’s going on in our lives. We didn’t even touch about medicine, but the medical problem, medical aspect of this,  but go get, go get checked. I mean, you may have a med, you may have a sleep disorder, but just keep in mind that sometimes we focus on the little, the symptoms and not on the deep root causes.

And so for me, it’s been a big, just a change of my lifestyle, which has a real spiritual component has made a world of difference and I’m sleeping better now than I ever have. And I wrote the book in that crazy, do as I say, not as I do, but I wrote the book and I didn’t realize that it was just something so simple in my life that I needed to change. And it was an aspect of luck. We’ve been talking about it as an aspect of surrender said, okay, God, you’ve got this, I’ve gotta let go of this. I can’t do this. Like I did 20 years and so I think for me, that has been the biggest thing. And I want to encourage people to just take time and reflect and think about those things that maybe that God doesn’t want them to do.

And we just pile so much on our plate. We have no margin and I think so many of our problems are self-induced that’s what I’m learning is that I can let go. They all say in a clean conscious makes us off the pill, as you make those decisions. And this is one of our attitudes, have a wise heart and make those decisions in your daily life, you set yourself up for better sleep.

Carrie: I think that that’s excellent, really evaluating what we have on our plate. And do we need to have everything on here and ask God, okay, I feel like I’m doing too much, which of these things can I let go of, or take off my plate. And that is a step of faith for us because we’re so used to doing so much often. I think that that’s great advice for people to evaluate. So I know that you told me before we hopped on here, that you have some videos on YouTube and that people can learn more about these practices. And so we’ll put some links in there in the show notes as well. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us your wisdom in between procedures.

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

45. Improving Nutrition to Help Anxiety with Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken, ND

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 45. Improving Nutrition to Help Anxiety with Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken, ND

We are privileged to have our first ever Canadian guest on the podcast, Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken.  Dr. Katie is a licensed naturopathic doctor who enjoys helping people with all kinds of health goals achieve positive changes in their health and in their life.  She also has a passion for mental health, the management of stress and anxiety, and helping individuals connect with their higher purpose.

  • What are the benefits of seeing a naturopathic doctor?
  • Is naturopathy an alternative medicine?
  • Can naturopathy be used alongside other medical and therapeutic techniques? 
  • The 5 Pillars of Mental Wellness
  • The role of neurotransmitters in anxiety
  • Nutrition-related concerns of patients with anxiety and steps to take to help improve nutrition. 
  • Dr. Katie’s book: Create Calm.

Resources and Links

 Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken, ND
Book: Create Calm

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Transcript of Episode 45

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 45. If you’ve been following the show, we talk about all kinds of things related to not just the mental health aspects of anxiety but also our physical health. When our physical health is working good, it combines well and helps our mental health and both of those things need to be functioning properly in order for us to get to a better state of overall health.

Carrie: So today on the show we are talking with Dr. Katie Thompson Aiken, who is a naturopathic doctor. This is going to be an interesting episode for me as well since I don’t know that much about naturopathy and that pathway. I’m probably going to ask some questions that some of you might have as well, and we’ll both be learning along together. So thank you so much for being here. 

Dr. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk about anxiety and the mind-body connection.

Carrie: And a random fact, I think you are the first Canadian that I’ve had on the podcast. And I know that we have listeners from all over the world, so it’s good to have people outside of America on every once in a while. I think this adds to our diversity. 

Dr. Katie: That’s wonderful. It’s my absolute pleasure to be here. 

Carrie: Let’s talk a little bit about how seeing a naturopathic doctor benefits people in a little bit different way than seeing a doctor that follows traditional Western medicine. 

Dr. Katie: That’s a great question. I think we will start talking about naturopathic medicine. A lot of people think of it as an alternative medicine, but I like to use the word complimentary. So what I do works alongside some of the traditional care choices that someone might have when they’re looking for support with their health concerns, whether that’s anxiety or for something. In a traditional model.

If you’re experiencing anxiety, you might be offered medication. You might be offered therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, or group therapy and sometimes that’s it. But we know that there are a lot of things, lifestyle wise, that can be supportive of anxiety. There’s also a lot of conditions in the body: hormonal imbalances and nutritional deficiencies that can contribute to anxiety. When you see a naturopathic doctor, one of the big differences is that naturopathic medicine treats the whole person rather than looking at just one piece of someone’s health, say the anxiety.

When I see a patient and when my colleagues that are naturopathic doctors treat someone, we are asking questions about all systems of the body and what’s going on with your hormonal health. How is your digestion? Do you have cardiovascular risk factors like high blood pressure? And piecing those all together to come up with a comprehensive care plan. We’re also asking about lifestyle. How are you living? How are you eating and moving and sleeping? How is your connection with their friends and family? Because all of those pieces then support or can get in the way of optimal health and including optimal mental. 

Carrie: Dr. Akin. I think that you make a great point there that anxiety is a complex issue. It’s not just a physical health issue. It’s not just a mental health issue. It’s not just a social or spiritual health issue. This is an issue that affects many different domains of our lives and so it’s important that we’re able to look at all of those different domains and evaluate them. So I like that, that’s something that you bring to the table for people that you work with. 

Dr. Katie: Thank you. Yes. I think it’s very important that we acknowledge that no one we’re talking about any house condition. There are physical, mental, and spiritual causes and solutions for health concerns. And my approach is to look at each of those, look at the resources that people have available through that, and really work to find solutions that support people through their physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. I know sometimes maybe a rut that certain doctors can fall into is having a one size fits all approach.

Carrie: And sometimes the one size fits you and sometimes it just doesn’t seem to fit. And so I imagine you probably have patients come to you who have been to other doctors before, or have tried other courses of medication maybe, and haven’t achieved the results that they were hoping for. 

Dr. Katie: Absolutely. I see a lot of patients that have resistance or like what’s considered treatment resistant depression or treatment resistant anxiety. We know that the standard medications for anxiety work for about 80% of people, which is great, but that leaves a whole 20% of people who do not respond to first-line medication. Some folks go through a lot of trial and error and they don’t find something that works for them and it’s the same with natural therapies. Right? 

We have things that work very well for a lot of people, but not everything works for everyone. I have patients that certainly have tried many things before coming to see me are quite frustrated and it’s always very rewarding. We can try new tools like lifestyle supplements, acupuncture, and be able to get a different result for those patients, as well as patients who are, for whatever reason, just not interested in pursuing other avenues of care.

Perhaps they had a family member that had a bad experience with medication and they’re a little more hesitant to try it. So being able to open up more options for whatever someone’s reason is for choosing naturopathic care. I will say I also have patients that do naturopathic care alongside conventional medicine. I have a lot of patients that take medications and we work on supporting their lifestyle so that their medication doses are effective so that they can stay at the lowest effective dose that they’re reclaiming their health and their life in terms of how they want to be living and their choices.

Carrie: That’s an awesome option to like, so it doesn’t have to be completely one or the other. You can really combine both together. I like that.

Dr. Katie: I think it’s really important to know that you have lots of choices and it doesn’t have to be one or the other, we can work together so that you feel supported in your mental wellness.

Carrie: Talk with us about what you consider to be the pillars of mental wellness. 

Dr. Katie: In my practice, I mentioned that we’re talking about how things come up looking for other screens, then also assessing lifestyle factors. I call those the pillars of performance. We go through five of those: nutrition, exercise, sleep, prayer or mindfulness and connection. Those are the pieces that we talk about in terms of what are your current habits right now. Then they’re also the pillars moving through my tranquil minds program, where we really work on building up healthy habits in each of those categories. 

Carrie: Okay. So we want to dive in and talk a little bit more about nutrition today. We do have some other guests that are going to be talking about sleep. We have had an episode on mindfulness, which was really great. I encourage people to go back and listen to that. We’ve had an early episode of prayer. Tell me about some nutrition concerns that you’ve seen in your patients with anxiety.

Dr. Katie: Often when I start working with patients who have anxiety, we end up in one of two situations, nutritionally. One is people who are eating very, what they would call clean. They’re very concerned about what they’re eating. They want to eat in a way that’s going to optimize their mental wellness and they actually are often overthinking.

Then on the other side, we have people who are overwhelmed in general, or maybe not educated around nutrition. People who have symptoms of anxiety that manifest through the digestive system. Maybe they have IBS nausea, low appetite associated with their anxiety. Often these folks are not eating regularly and don’t really know even where to start.

When it comes to managing their nutrition. We always start with understanding. Where someone’s starting from. If it’s safe for them to record their food for a week, we often will do that. We’ll do a diet recording. That’s not the right first step for everyone. Some people find that upsetting and we don’t want to trigger any disordered eating habits. So always be cautious around starting recording, but once we know what someone’s feeding, then I like to look at first of all, for regular. Is someone eating often enough and I think this gets overlooked a lot when it comes to mental wellness, we think of, are you eating the right things? Are you eating quote-unquote healthy foods? We miss the main piece, which is that if you’re not nourishing yourself, then your brain isn’t getting everything that it needs in order to feel well. So people that are on a weight loss protocol or a restricted diet, they may be experiencing anxiety simply because they’re under fueled, like their body doesn’t have what it needs to feel well, and I see that more often than I do.

Carrie: I think that that’s huge and I want to circle back around to a couple of things that you said. One was, the people that are very focused on eating clean or eating a certain way, but it’s to an extreme level. There is actually something called orthorexia where it’s kind of a subset of anorexia where people will only eat very specific, limited foods that they believe to be clean or healthy for them. 

Sometimes those people can actually be nutritionally deficient because they’re not getting enough, maybe fat, for example, or enough protein in their diet. I’m sure that that’s something that you’ve probably encountered at some point or another. 

Dr. Katie: Certainly yes. I think that’s something we have to be very careful of orthorexia . Definitely in the field of naturopathic medicine there is a lot of nutritional advice that gets presented through natural healthcare and nutritionists. I think it’s something to be mindful of that each person is different and the most important thing is being fueled first. So sometimes the work is actually including more food in the diet. In fact, that’s always where I start, regardless of someone’s level of nutrition, we always start with, what can we add before we ever look at what could we maybe reduce. 

Carrie: That’s a good point. So like, if people are saying, well, I don’t really eat enough vegetables instead of focusing on cutting something out first saying, okay, well, can you add one more vegetable maybe per day, then you’re already eating. That sounds better than, oh gosh, I’ve got to stop eating junk food. Right. 

Dr. Katie: A hundred percent and that’s actually stage two of my nutritional approach, which is adding in produce and protein when it comes to managing blood sugar and helping with anxiety. It’s making sure that you have all the pieces that your brain needs to make all the neurotransmitters that can encourage people to look at what they’re eating and say, do I have a piece of fruit or vegetable in this new snack? Does this meal or snack have any sources of protein in it? For a lot of my patients, that’s a good starting point of starting to add it in by saying, oh, typically my breakfast is a piece of toast. Okay, well maybe we can add a piece of fruit to that. Or maybe you can have a toast and a fruit smoothie. That’s got some protein powder in it. Maybe you want to start with adding a piece of bacon to that toast and getting some meat in the morning. We’re not demonizing food. We’re just looking for options to increase both the protein and the produce pieces in the nutrition.

Carrie: I liked that a lot. I think that that’s a great starting point for people to help improve their nutritional intake. One of the things that you talked about was people not eating enough or not eating on a regular basis, which can also happen with anxiety. And one thing I’ve found or noticed with some of my clients is they’re not tuned in really to their body because tuning into their body means I’m noticing the anxiety symptoms. Sometimes that means that they’re tuning out the hunger signals as well. Like I’m not really paying attention to that. I’ve got to work or I’ve got to stay focused on something else and just plow forward. And next thing you know, it’s two o’clock and they haven’t eaten all day. That means they haven’t had any fuel for that day. 

Dr. Katie: Absolutely. I see that as well. I also sometimes see a confusion of hunger cues and anxiety cues. Not feeling well in the stomach, having some nausea and going I must be anxious rather than reflecting and saying, well, when was the last time I ate?

I’ve worked with many people where we’ve been able to separate those cues out and try eating. I give my patients a guideline of four to six hours. So when you’re looking at your day, especially if you’re not used to eating regularly and say, are there times where I’m going more than six hours without eating and then, or more than four hours.

And when you have anxiety, feelings of anxiety, thoughts come up and it’s been that long since you ate, just questioning, am I really worried about this, or should I have a snack? And sometimes having something to eat really alleviates some of that anxiety feeling because your brain is more fueled, you’re in a calmer place. It also takes away some of those physical symptoms that are actually hunger. 

Carrie: I think that there have been times where I’ve felt nauseous or light-headed, and I knew I needed to eat something right now. Like it’s been a while or I’ve been busy or I’ve been out doing things and you can definitely have some symptoms from that. That totally makes complete sense to me. Sometimes you just need a snack. 

Dr. Katie: Sometimes you just need a snack. I know for myself. I had an experience like this. I was picking up my daughter from daycare and had a busy day. We were walking home. So I was getting lots of exercise that day and as I was approaching home, I just noticed all of these worried thoughts were coming up for me. I was like, oh, I think my husband was traveling that day. I started wondering, is he going to get home safe? How’s this going to go? And I just was like, When was the last time you ate? Why are you worrying about this? Like there’s no reason for me to think that my husband wouldn’t come home safely that night and sure enough, it had been about six hours, so I got an after-school snack. And with my daughter, I didn’t have an anxious evening. I just had an anxious thought. So from my personal experience and from working with my patients, it’s definitely something that can be helpful for a lot of people. 

Carrie: Yeah. Can you elaborate on that point that you made about neurotransmitters and protein because neuro-transmitters are like the things that are targeted essentially in medications for anxiety, like, SSRI, those types of things are affecting serotonin. So talk with us a little bit about that protein connection. 

Dr. Katie: Protein is the building blocks of your neuro-transmitters without getting overly technical about amino acid breakdowns, and which ones become, which neuro-transmitters I always invite my patients to just consider. Do you want your body to have just enough protein to make it your neuro-transmitters or do you want to have abundant protein so that it’s easy for your body to find the building blocks? It needs to make these neurotransmitters. 

I don’t do a lot of precision medicine or genetic testing in my practice. That’s just not how I focus. I focus more on basic principles, like eating protein because I find that’s more accessible for most people who are really struggling, but we’re looking at some of those more precision pieces we get into this idea that, what if you have a genetic polymorphism or a change in your own genome that makes it harder for you to make a certain neurotransmitter or piece of mechanics in your body.

That’s important for your nervous system. One of the ways nutritionally that we look to support that is just making sure that there’s an abundance of everything that you need in order to make those systems run. But really there is no need in most people, I would say to do that precision piece as a starting point, most people are not having tons of protein throughout their day.

And so just looking at that, especially if you’re feeling anxious and your stomach’s upset, it doesn’t feel good when you eat certain foods, looking at how to get in just regular sources of protein, eggs, chicken, fish, like just food can really make a difference in making sure that you have the pieces that you need.

The other reason that I really love focusing on protein for my patients with anxiety is it’s very stabilizing to blood sugar. One of the things we’re learning about anxiety and blood sugar is that folks who have anxiety seem to be sensitive to hypoglycemia. So when they eat something that’s high in sugar, their body is very good at removing it from the bloodstream. And actually their blood sugar can go too low and cause that like, shakiness and nausea. 

You were describing earlier as like, oh, I’m hungry and I need to eat. Including protein when you eat for a lot of people with anxiety causes that to be more modulated. So less of those crashes and spikes and more of that, even blood sugar, which facilitates an even mood sugar is the fuel that our brain is using to make decisions and feed our nervous system throughout the day. So when we can eat in a way that keeps it stable, we can keep our thinking more stable. 

Carrie: That’s good. I know that it’s very easy to eat a lot of carbs and sugar, especially in the American diet and the processed foods that we have in different things. And so focusing on those stabilizing factors of protein, that sounds really helpful, and I’ve never heard anyone break it down quite like that. So I appreciate that explanation with neuro-transmitters and anxiety. We talked a little bit about eating more protein, focusing on adding things that we need to add, like produce. Are there any other small steps that you encourage people to take to help improve their nutrition?

Dr. Katie: There’s two more steps that I look at the third and know we can refer back to your earlier episode on mindfulness, but is to eat mindfully. When we pay attention to what we’re eating, we’re more likely to get those hunger cues that we were talking about earlier. Understand our fullness. We’re less likely to have emotional eating when we’re paying attention to our food and we’re less distracted and it also involves our brains. And eating and really, that’s a great tool that a lot of us forget about when we’re paying attention to our food and we’re taking time to taste and savor it.

Our brain tells our digestive system, hey, food’s coming. And that creates an opportunity for our digestion to be optimal, which we want. So we can then absorb all of those wonderful nutrients that we’ve taken all the effort to include in our diet. If you’ve taken time to chop up a salad or open a bagged salad, instead of opening something that was a little bit easier grabbing some of those like chips or fries, or even doing both, including some salad and some French fries with your food rather than one or the other. 

You want your body to be eating those and you want to enjoy them, especially when you are eating foods that you’re eating for pleasure, not just for nutritional value. You want to save for that. And those moments of joy beyond their helpfulness nutritionally, it’s soul food. It’s good for our spirits to say, this is delicious and I’m enjoying it with my friends and family. This tastes really good. Having those moments of pleasure when eating and paying attention, I think is really important. You feel like that helps our digestive system. A hundred percent when we’re tasting our food, the digestion, we always forget.

We think it starts like in our stomach, but the digestion starts in our mouth and it’s not just the chewing. We have this wonderful sensory organ of our tongue and our nose, and that’s sending information to our brain saying, hey, this is what’s coming. When we taste foods like vegetables that have bitter notes that cause our digestive system to increase its gastric juices, to say,  here’s some stomach acid, here’s some enzymes. You’re going to need this to absorb this food properly in order to break it down. 

When we really pay attention to that sensory experience, we maximize digestion. I feel like you’ve just given us all permission to enjoy our food because so many times people feel like, well, if I’m going to eat healthy, it’s like, here I am with the bran flakes, like choking it down, like, I don’t even want to be eating this, but I think that you can find good foods and eat healthily and enjoy your food.

I hope so. I think that that is really where the joy comes in. When you look at how I can increase my vegetables, how can I enjoy things like that. It’s a lot easier to do when you actually enjoy eating the vegetables. I love to cook and I’ve been on this journey of discovering my favorite way to eat all of the different vegetables. So for example, my favorite way to eat cauliflower is roasted with Kumon and lots of olive oil and salt. Yes. It has salt and it has known fat on it, but that doesn’t make it a bad food. In fact, it makes it delicious and then I eat more of it. 

Carrie: Yes. I like cauliflower roasted like that in the oven. I don’t usually eat it any other way, which is kind of interesting. I don’t necessarily like it raw and anyway, that’s a whole nother issue. But I think finding the ways that you enjoy the vegetables is important. If you’re going to be eating more of them, if you just think, oh, I’ve got to eat it this way and I can’t. I have to make myself enjoy it. That’s just going to be torture. Find some good recipes, experiment, enjoy the process and get more vegetables in your day. Tell us about your book. Create Calm. 

Dr. Katie: My book Create Calm was really brought out of my wish to share the tranquil minds method that I work with my one-on-one patients on with more people. Like I said, I practice in Ontario, Canada. So I really can only help people who are in Ontario, Canada. I was feeling really limited by that. I took my clinical methodology where we go through the five pillars of performance that we talked about earlier and put them in this book in order to educate how to go about increasing the pillars.

There’s a whole section on nutrition, which goes into depth about how to do the things we talked about today. Like including protein and produce and focusing on eating regularly and mindful eating. But there’s also sections on the rest of the pillars that we didn’t get to today: how to maximize your sleep hormones, how melatonin comes in, how you can make your own melatonin, how to think about bringing in mindfulness and how to evaluate your exercise. So that again, like we talked about enjoying your vegetables, you’re actually finding joy in movement rather than that obligatory. Well, I better go for a run because otherwise I’ll have more anxiety. 

Carrie: Good and the tranquil minds program, you actually have an online program as well.

Is that right? 

Dr. Katie: I do. So the tranquil mind was born out of my clinical work and some folks learn better from a book, but some people learn better from an online course. The training program is available through online modules where you can listen to me talk and you get access to a workbook that walks you through over six weeks kind of like a bootcamp style of revamping these health habits, where each week we’re working on a different piece of each pillar. 

So we start with eating regularly and looking at your boundaries. Then we move into protein and produce and exercise. Then we really grow from there till we reach the last week, which is our connections module. We talk about getting to know yourself, your relationship with yourself, looking at your community relationships and how to develop closer friendships. And then also your spiritual health, finding that connection to God or to however you connect with something bigger beyond our day-to-day self.

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

Dr. Katie: I love this question. I love this segment on your other episodes, because I think it’s so important to just reflect back and be grateful for the times where you have experienced that. I know when I look back at my life, there were a few times that I was trying to pick from, but I wanted to talk about my clinical work and seeing my patients. Sometimes I meet people and I feel like I’m looking at them almost through a cloud. If you’re trying to see what’s really going on, I always experienced so much hope and gratitude. When I feel like I can see a peak behind who this person is behind their anxiety and when I get to hear things like I don’t have anxiety anymore, or I really love myself now, I feel like I finally understand self love, that gives me more hope than anything else in my life. I’m just so grateful for the opportunities to witness that. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really beautiful. Seeing the true person that’s underneath those like layers of symptoms is great. So thank you so much for being on the show today. I think that this has been informative. I know that I’ve learned some things about nutrition and anxiety, and I hope that other people have as well.

Dr. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been my absolute pleasure. 

If you love the show in general or found this episode particularly helpful, please share with a friend. Word of mouth is always the best advertising. Just a reminder that our webinar is coming up this Saturday and it is not too late to sign up.

So go on our website: hopeforanxietyandocd.com/webinar and hope to see you.

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

44. How Can Improving Gut Health Help Your Mood? with Maggie Roney, MS, NCC, LPC

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 44. How Can Improving Gut Health Help Your Mood? with Maggie Roney, MS, NCC, LPC

Today, we are privileged to have Maggie  Roney on the show. Maggie is a Licensed Counselor and Functional Medicine Practitioner.  She helps those who wish to get to the true root cause of their illnesses 

Maggie shares with us her knowledge on functional medicine and how we can improve our gut health. 

  • How does functional medicine work? What are its benefits? 
  • Is functional medicine better than conventional medicine?
  • Types of toxins we put in our body that we are not aware of.
  • The link between anxiety, stress and gut health
  • Small steps to take to achieve better gut health

Resources and Links

Maggie Roney,  MS, NCC, LPC

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Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. One thing that we often see with anxiety is that individuals who struggle, who commonly have issues with their digestive system. They may have gone to doctor after doctor or gastroenterologist has tests run only to find out that they can’t necessarily find anything specific and it may be tied back to stress and anxiety.

Today on the show I have with me, Maggie Roney, who’s a licensed professional counselor and certified functional medicine provider. So we’re going to be talking about the connection between anxiety and gut health, too. 

Carrie: Maggie, how did you become interested in additional training? So you started out as a licensed professional counselor and then chose to become certified in functional medicine. How did you get to that?

Maggie:  I specialize also with trauma and EMDR consultants. I would see many clients that even as we, for the trauma, we worked on lifestyle choices and even lowering the stress they would still be on medications after medications. But the medications and our wants to make a, just a side thing hereof. I am not against medication. It has its place and it’s time to use it but I don’t have to go through so many and they’re not working. Then I thought there has to be a different way.

There has to be something that can be added or something that can be done. People would want to come off of their medications due to side effects that they did not particularly care for. It worked at first, but now it’s not working. So that was one reason. Another is my own health journey. I was 35 and they said, you’re completely healthy. But yet I’m on five medications that do not make any sense to me. None of them were things like pencil lines and as I learned more and I went on my own health journey, I thought I can really integrate these two and help someone out and that’s whenever I sought out and printed, the certification.

Carrie: Okay. I know a lot of people who have experienced trauma. We talked about how trauma is stored in the body. This is just one way it can manifest in terms of digestive issues, but it can also manifest in terms of muscle tension, sexual dysfunction issues and a whole host of other things. A lot of times people don’t necessarily connect that back to the traumatic experience.

You and I had talked off-air about auto-immune issues that people have. Oftentimes that’s very common with trauma, like fibromyalgia.

Maggie: Yes and it’s not even okay. It’s a traumatic event that caused that. Lifestyle choices and stressors that keep on working through and someone may get a virus and that’s what kicks the body into an auto-immune condition.

Carrie: Gotcha. It’s interesting to me how much overlap there is in our emotional health, mental health and our physical health. Unfortunately, a lot of times, those seeking help are very polarized. Perhaps the counselor may not be talking with the primary care physician and vice versa to really figure out and get to the bottom of what’s going on.

Have you seen that with your practice as well? That those areas tend to be silenced and people aren’t communicating as much. 

Maggie: I have. I do believe that more often than not counselors do try to reach out. It’s kind of split under the rug — “Okay, good. You’re taking care of your mental health. That’s fine. But you leave everything to me.” Sometimes you have to find positions that are receptive to different ideas. Even as a therapist, you can say, “I have this insight, can you help me understand this part of it?” That can be difficult, but I do see where there is just not enough communication.

Carrie: I think it can be hard for clients too if they’re honest with their medical practitioner to say, “I have anxiety.” They’re afraid a lot of times that their symptoms will be dismissed. That’s automatically your anxiety versus fully looking into the different aspects of it. Right? How can functional medicine benefit people in a different way than traditional Western models of medicine?

Maggie: Unfortunately with Western medicine and many advancements that we have made, it is not a one size fits all. If you have anxiety, here’s your protocol. Here’s what you do. Here’s your perspective. We see you in a month to three months with functional medicine.

We look at you as an individual. What is it that you are needing or could be doing differently? You could have the most summary of chronic stress, the cause may not be considered something big like divorce or death or something of that nature. It could be a high stress job. It could be insomnia and then we look out for the underlying reasons. Do you have a mammal or a vitamin deficiency? Do you have a genetic capability or a genetic condition that causes it? Or you may need a little bit more supplementation in one area versus another. Is it that you have food sensitivities exacerbating symptoms that you are experiencing? It is really getting down to the root causes for that individual which unfortunately is a lot of just toxins practice. 

Carrie: If you’re able to eliminate those things, then you’re able to feel a lot better physically is what you’re saying. 

Maggie: Yes. 

Carrie: Talk with us about toxins, like what kind of toxins do you see that the people are dealing with or consuming? Maybe it’s something that we aren’t fully aware of.

Maggie: No, of course the die die, obviously for ADHD, The anxiety process is a lot of this. We have things that we can’t even connect and those have difficulties with the body to break down and utilize some nutrients and it can create and test on permeability, which we can get into just a little bit. Other toxins can be our personal care products. For some reason here in the United States, they allow so many more ingredients that are banned in Europe and they have severe fines and can shut down your business. The Roundup weed killer, it is FDA approved, even though yet the FDA says, okay, it causes difficulties, but the FDA approves it to be utilized for weed killer. We then ingest that and that has a tremendous effect on our bodies.

Another thing as great as technology is, we all love it especially over this last year. It’s safe but all of the Bluetooth and the WIFI and all of that, has EMS electromagnetic fields that can be very damaging to our health. It causes ourselves to oxidize or cross the free radicals which are very damaging to us and our bodies can’t keep up and work on getting those out. It can be heavy metal toxicity. Not just lad, but mercury and that billings that you had 20 and 30 years ago that can still be in the body needing to detox. If our body doesn’t do a job detoxing, what it does is it stores it in the body but then that doesn’t function that makes us healthier. 

Carrie: Why is gut health so important to our mental health? 

Maggie: It used to be known that serotonin and dopamine are just made in the brain. However, scientists have discovered that in our gut, we actually have a third nervous system called the Enteric Nervous System. When we eat food, when the digestive process begins, and even whenever you smell the food, it releases enzymes to tell the stomach to get ready. It tells the stomach to make acid to break down the proteins that are coming and get everything that needs to go to the small intestine, the large intestine, and we will utilize what is needed in our gut.

We make 95% of our serotonin then it comes up with a nerve called the Vagus Nerve that goes from 60 to 70% of a person’s dopamine which is for motivation. If our gut is trashed, but if you are in your thirties to forties, we came from the age of using antibiotics for sore throat, stuffy nose, and headache.

Our guts are trashed because we have bacteria that live in our gut that help break down the food, help take the nutrients, utilize those nutrients and get them to where they need to go to be used. Those nutrients are needed to make the serotonin and to make the dopamine. That’s pretty much why the gut is so important. 

Carrie: That’s so interesting to me because I don’t hear psychiatrists talking about this with their patients when they’re prescribing medication for SSRI or others for depression. They’re not saying, “Hey, what is it that you’re actually eating from a holistic view? Are you eating a lot of processed food? Or eating a lot of fast food?”  And we get into this negative cycle where we don’t feel good. Then we don’t really feel like doing the good things for ourselves to take care of ourselves and then we’re putting that stuff in our body. And then we’re back to not feeling good again because of what we ate or how we treated ourselves.

It’s a hard cycle I think sometimes for people to get out of. I mean, would you agree with what you’ve seen?

Maggie: Absolutely. You talked about psychiatrists not talking with their patients and some of them just don’t know, and it’s not because they’re not good psychiatrists. But in medical schools, they take one semester on nutrition. They take two years on pharmacology and again, are highly respected, but unless they go out and they seek further education on that, then they won’t know and I’m sure they don’t have time, the way it is. But I wish that they would, and I wish that as needed as antidepressants are or anti-anxiety or anxiety medication, something that we certainly never learned in school or I did — the longer you take the SSRI, your body just stops making serotonin because it figures why we don’t need it.

It kind of stops and then, when people decide, “Hey, I’m going to get off my medication”, their body isn’t used to making serotonin and that takes a little while.

Carrie: Sure but they can. It can rejuvenate and relearn to do that. 

Maggie: Yes. 

Carrie: Okay. Good. That’s really interesting because those medications are often prescribed for OCD as well and in certain higher doses. I think that this topic is very important. What kind of toll does stress have? Cause you talked about stress a little bit earlier and anxiety takes on the body specifically related to gut health. How does that stress affect our gut? 

Maggie: Whenever something major happens, your adrenal system goes into overdrive.

That’s when your sympathetic nervous system says, it’s fight or flight. We’ve got to go, go, go, go, go, go and do, do, do, do do. Unfortunately, the brain can’t tell us or it doesn’t decide. They’re just doing normal everyday life. They’re just really busy and they don’t sleep long. So no, it just goes simply off of the nerves that are kind of firing in the brain, we need to enact this.

So that can be one thing, just a very high-stress life and you ask people today, “Are you stressed?” No. “Okay. Well, how much do you work?” 70 hours a week. That’s anywhere from 50 to 70. I’m finding it to be a pretty normal number. Then I have kids’ activities and can’t sleep, and then I’m taking care of my mom.

So all of those are stressful factors. Even though for us, we have kind of gotten it ingrained in our brains. We go more, we do more, we get more done and we’re better. We’re more successful, although we’re feeling awful. So it can be something very simmering as a toxic situation at work, a very unhealthy marriage just kind of day in, day out and large event rate for death or trauma of abuse. 

Carrie: We’re definitely living in a day and age where more and more people are experiencing chronic stress and I think you’re right. They’ve just kind of normalized it like, well, isn’t this what everybody does, you climb the corporate ladder and you have a family and you have a social life.

I mean, I don’t have time to exercise three times a week or prepare meals. And it’s in a lot of our priorities in what we’re choosing to spend our time on. 

Maggie: Right. 

Carrie: So is that something that you do as part of the functional medicine approach is help people figure out how to make the dietary changes and the lifestyle changes that they need in order to feel better and take better care of themselves.

Maggie: Yes and it’s not just, I see this on your paper so you need to do this, this and this. We talk about what is the motivating factor for them to keep this behavior in and then also explain down to the science of this is what it’s truly doing to your body and this is how it’s affecting your nervous system. If you are in constant sympathetic nervous system mode, you’re not digesting your food, you’re not replenishing, you’re not sleeping and truly sleeping to where your body restores itself. You’re not getting to the place where your body can utilize the food you even eat. It won’t even recognize it. Therefore, you’re not making serotonin, you’re not making Gabba. You’re not making dopamine.

Carrie: Being in that fight or flight state really arrests the digestive system because that has to come from the other part of our nervous system, kind of like being more relaxed. 

Maggie: Yes.

Carrie: Yeah. I think so many people don’t know that or they don’t realize that what are some small steps you would say that people can take to achieve better gut health?

Maggie: I would think the first thing is to really look at your schedule and kind of prioritize what is important for you and what do you want to accomplish. Whether it’s in the day or the week and beginning to really have the activities that are self-care, whether it’s exercise, spending time with others and being social.

It is very important to have those deep relationships with others. Another thing would be to look at what you are eating. This doesn’t mean you have to eat salads all the time and never enjoy anything. Trust me. I love some pizza and if you put peanut M and M’s in front of me, it’s going to be really hard and starting to fail, even though I know I’m going to feel awful the next day.

And sorry that I love a good margarita at the same time. I may have to watch when I eat those things, but watch for the amount of sugar that you are eating. Sugar is terrible for our bodies. It causes such an inflammatory response, even though it may not when you are in your teens and twenties, but it will add up and kind of begin to look at different areas that you would like to detoxify.

Whether that’s in cleaning, there are chemicals in there that are neurotoxic. There are chemicals in there that affect our Endocrine System, which makes our hormones. There are things that affect our adrenals which then affect everything in our body. So really look at all of your products that you have. 

Another thing would be, when your doctor says your laboratory work looks great and you are in good health. Actually ask some questions and look at it. Well, it’s within range, but is that the best range for me? Those are some basic areas.

Carrie: Do you have people that come to you that their labs look great? But they kind of don’t feel good or they don’t feel like themselves, or they feel like they could be at a better place of health.

Maggie: Yes, everything is completely within range. The standard range of here’s what the lowest person is normal. Here’s the highest person that is normal. They’re all within range, but it’s not at its optimal for that person. Looking at the relationships with these different results, we can tell that you have benefited from digestive enzymes for whenever the stomach breaks down proteins or it kind of indicates you’re low and the basics for being nine. Those types of things, which are B6 is probably one of the most prevalent BS that is needed to create neurotransmitters and to create energy in the cell site.

Carrie: Okay. Awesome. It sounds like there’s a lot of different options that people have, whether that’s diet changes, supplement reducing stress in order to get to a better place. And trusting that inner intuition of your own body when you feel most optimal. When you don’t start really paying attention to those cues like, when I eat these certain things, I notice I feel this way the next day. Or if I eat those things, I have more energy or I feel a little bit better. It can make a huge difference by making small changes, just in tune with where we’re at with our own bodies. 

Maggie: Right and that is difficult because I think that we are taught or at least it seems that way to just ignore your own body and just keep going. Well, they said everything was normal, so I don’t know, maybe I’m making this stuff in my head. Then excuse that it is normal and don’t even pay attention to it until then we have other things. I’ve talked to several clients and they will say I was fine until this year and then all of a sudden I have type two diabetes and hyperthyroid and it didn’t happen all of a sudden. We kind of delve into what happened, the root cause and work on reversing those issues. 

Carrie: This has been, I think, very informative. So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Maggie: The first thing that came to my mind would kind of in a way, be my testimony. I believed as a child and then through my twenties, just some things happened and I thought, nope, nope, no, God, no, God. Well with my son, when he was in the third grade, he became suicidal and he was just kind of out of nowhere and it didn’t seem right.

Something wasn’t adding up and I got him to a different place and different school. We ended up switching schools, he wasn’t bullied or anything. We couldn’t figure it out and then we decided on medication. Things got a little bit better, the following year he became suicidal again, and then a break in the next year, the third year, and then suicidal again.

Well, we eventually found out and I know this is extremely controversial, but this is my story and my experience. We found out it was a vaccine injury. Every time he received this vaccine, it was 11 to 13 days later, he would become suicidal. It didn’t click until that third time I thought something was different. He had been on medication for years and years. 

Through that experience, whenever your child is suicidal, I just said, “Okay. I don’t know what is up there but just help.” I didn’t bargain or anything. When the first time I saw him happy and running into school and the sunlight was shining down on him, I took a picture of it and I sent it to his teacher and I said, “This is hope for me” and this secures my faith.

It was the most peaceful feeling I had knowing things were going to be okay now. Yes. We still had a rough few years and we had to detoxify him of the heavy metals. Now he is off all of his medications and doing great.

Carrie: Does he still struggle with anxiety? Certain things happen, changes and all of that? 

Maggie: Yes, but that’s why he has tools that he’s learned from other counselors. But that honestly was the greatest moment of hope I’ve ever had in my life. 

Carrie: That’s good. I think it was very perceptive for you to be able to put those things, those dots together, and be able to advocate for him to get what he needed at that time. Trying to look at it from a holistic point of view, I think that’s really important. 

Well, thank you so much, Maggie for coming on and talking with us about functional medicine and gut health. I think it’s been very interesting and informative and hopefully it will help some people kind of think through their life and how they can make further positive lifestyle changes.

Maggie: Thank you so much for having me. 

Carrie: Just a reminder that in two short weeks on Saturday, September 11th, we are going to have a webinar on dealing with difficult thought processes. This is a great opportunity for me to be able to connect with some of my listeners and I absolutely love that. So if you can join us, we would love to have you there.

You can find out more information and sign up by going to:

www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com/webinars. Thank you so much for listening. Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.