Bonus Talk: "Understanding Trauma, OCD, and Scrupulosity – part 2" by Conrad Eby

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Strength to Strength once again. This is a bonus talk. We had a lot of feedback, a lot of interest in the first talk that we had last Saturday by Brother Conrad, and so we decided to have another talk to address some of the questions that we've had come in in regards to this topic.

It's apparent it's something that is related to on a wide scale, and I think most of us can probably relate to some form of this. So this is a part two of the talk on anxiety, OCD, and scrupulosity.

And so Conrad has agreed to join us again to answer the questions. So he's going to share a little bit, and we will discuss the questions that we have had come in, and if there's time at the end, so you can send in questions through the chat, and if there's time at the end, we will try to address those as well, or some of them.

So before we get started here, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Gracious Father in heaven, we praise you for we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works, O Lord. We thank you, Lord, that you are the creator of all things and that we can come to you for strength and for grace. I thank you for this gathering this morning on this personal and sometimes sensitive topic of our emotional and mental well-being.

Thank you for Brother Conrad and his understanding of this and his willingness to share his understanding with us so that we can learn to steward our minds in a wiser fashion. We just pray, Lord, that you would be with the talk this morning so that it can be a blessing to each one of us, so that we can, if we need, can find healing and can find hope for the days ahead. Just pray that your spirit would be with Brother Conrad as he shares and give him clarity of thought. Just be with us, and may your name be praised in all that we say or do, in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right, you can go ahead, Brother Conrad.

Well, good morning, everyone. Good to be back. Good to revisit this subject.

I want to start off with just a few disclaimers.

The questions that come in are pretty difficult questions. And a lot of it segues into spirituality, issues of right and wrong, and so on and so forth. And one thing I try not to do is compete with pastors.

So I'm not doing this presentation from a pastoral viewpoint.

So basically, what that means is that I'm not trying to be an authority on interpretation of scripture, and I'm not trying to give advice as far as whether something is right or wrong.

My approach is more from a biological social science viewpoint. And yeah, I try to keep them a little bit separate because pastors have their role, and I may have a different role. And I'm not trying to

enter into other people's territory, if that makes any sense. But the problem is, with scrupulosity, the disorder of OCD and scrupulosity gets mixed up into spiritual understandings and scripture, and yeah, and it gets really, really difficult to not get into other people's territory. So with that, my concern is that I'm going to say some things that may be offensive to some people, and I didn't want to do that, and I didn't want to—I didn't want to direct somebody in a way that would be contradictory to their spiritual guidance.

However, in saying that, when people come to me that have done one, two, three, they've talked to their pastor, they've talked to their spiritual advisors, they've done all the proper protocol, and this is going on for years, and they're still suffering, some people extremely suffering.

Sometimes I do take a risk and maybe try to plant some seeds that maybe something that is being presented to them in a spiritual way could be possibly relooked at a little bit or considered from a different viewpoint.

Because lots of regular traditional ways of fighting a spiritual battle don't work with scrupulosity.

And actually, oftentimes, they make things worse. So if I say something that is contradictory to what your spiritual leaders are telling you, I'm not trying to be divisive or whatever. I just want to try to be hopeful. And I don't know how to say it any better than that. It's just really, really difficult. So I want to put that out there that I'm aware of that and that I want to be sensitive to that.

And I highly respect our spiritual leaders, and they have their role, and

somehow we'll have to navigate through this.

So that's basically what I have to say to start out. I was pleasantly surprised the last time that I didn't get any hate mail.

And I would like to keep it that way. I want to be a person that's humble and teachable myself. There's so much to learn, and I'm not trying to—yeah, I don't want to cause anybody more difficulty, so.

I'm ready for the first one.

All right. So the first question that we'd like to address, I'll just read it here for you.

I very much enjoyed the part one talk by Conrad. I, too, am familiar with anxiety and depression and have been on a journey to understand more what happens inside my brain and body. How can new brain pathways be built? Is it possible to become completely free in these areas of trauma, or will we always wrestle with them until heaven? What lifestyle changes besides medicine help the brain to function better? How can we be honest about our distress without having a victim mentality?

So you might have to pop that back up and down. I don't know if I'll be able to remember all these questions, but the first one is, how can new brain pathways be built? So this is a really, really good question that if you read in some of the new neuroscience journals, it's really interesting how they're talking about the brain anymore, and that they're referring to the brain to think of the brain more as a garden.

So we used to think about years ago, people talked about the brain being gears. Somebody has a slip cog or something like that. And in more recent years, you hear people saying, "Well, I'm just not wired a certain way." Well, there's no cogs or wires in your brain.

And now they're thinking of it more as using the analogy of a garden. So we used to think our brain was fairly static. If you have brain injury and brain cells are destroyed, that they never regrow and things like that. And we're finding out that that's not totally true, especially not in relation to the extra neuro cells.

So the interesting thing is the language they're using is very similar to biblical language, like the idea of pruning, the idea of new growth. So when a baby is one year old or in that vicinity, they have the most neuro cells that they'll ever have. Okay. And what happens is, as we learn to walk and talk, a lot of our cells actually quit being used, and other cells become more organized as we develop. So, for instance, language of infant makes every noise of every language that exists in the world.

As they learn to talk, they learn to not make some sounds, and they learn to group other sounds together. So there's neuro cells that quit being used. And when that happens, they become apathetic, and eventually, they become inactive and die.

And as we go through life, as we expose ourselves to new ideas and new thoughts and new experiences, we actually grow new and more neuro cells in that area. So you need a certain amount of stress to stimulate brain growth, but you don't want too much stress. So too much stress can actually hinder brain growth. But if you think of it as a garden, you have to put that garden through some stress to prepare it for seeds and for growth. And then as things grow, the weeds are pruned, and the good stuff comes forward. So try to think of your brain as more of a living, changing organism than something that's just static and fixed.

So stimulated by exposure, that would be a good way to think about it.

Is it possible to come completely free in these areas of trauma, or will we always wrestle with them and have them? So we don't use the word cured.

We talk about you can become well or very functional, or you can become—life is a battle. So it's like the idea of getting to a point where it's not a part of your existence isn't going to happen. But we can't help people get to the point where they love life and they enjoy the battle, and they actually thrive. So the term human doesn't depict something that's perfect.

What lifestyle changes besides medicine help the brain to function better? Well, therapy would be a big one.

Confessing your faults one to another, you may be healed. So a lot of healing takes place in the context between two people interacting. So many times, I believe God comes to us through other people. And you can pray about it personally. You can do all these things, and they're very good and proper. But until you get to the point where you can actually enter into a relationship with another person and communicate these things and share these things, it's hard to experience healing.

How can we be honest about our distress without having a victim mentality? This is a fine line to walk. But to me, one of the biggest differences is if you use your difficulties as an excuse not to fight, then you're becoming a victim. Like, "I can't do that because my back hurts," or, "I can't do that because I have OCD," or—what I want to see is people owning their difficulties and saying, "You know what?

I have this difficulty, but if I use this tool, it enables me to get this job done. And there's help out there. There's tools that you can use." And yeah, just don't whine about it. Just don't whine about it. I mean, life is hard. Life is suffering.

There's a lot of tragedy in life. And I think just embracing our suffering, I think, just changes the picture. Suffering is good. There's nothing wrong with suffering, and we need to embrace it.

Running away from suffering is just a bad idea.

And you get the feeling when you relate to some people that they feel like they've been jolted by life ever since they were a kid. Maybe their mom didn't have enough time to give them attention and this and that.

And it seems like they develop a personality that is just needy and fretful and whiny. And

I just don't think that thing—it just doesn't make things better.

As difficult as it seems, bitterness and resentment only make things worse, so.

All right. Thank you for those answers. Moving on to the second question here. Anxiety and OCD is something I've dealt with pretty much my whole life, but only in recent years has it gotten markedly worse to the point of forcing me to seek help for it. Some of the reason I didn't earlier is because of the stigma associated with going for counseling or therapy and/or medication.

How can I help others struggling with mental illness? And are there any support groups in Mennonite community?

So this is a really tough question.

And

I don't want to—so the question is, how can I help? This person's suffering from their own maladies, and they're asking the question of how they can help other people.

And this is—I just want to take a little bit of liberty here and say that this tends to be a thing among us conservative people that

if a person has a problem, it's because they're not thinking of others enough, and they're thinking too much about themselves and their own issues.

And we sing this—teach our children this little song: Jesus first, others second, yourself last. Well, you can't help other people very long unless you take care of yourself first. So typically, a person with OCD has a very low sense of their own personal value.

And

there's such a thing as self-care that's appropriate. And lots of times, people with OCD and scrupulosity, when you actually get inside of them, they have a very

low sense of their value as a person. So

one of our favorite verses is if Jesus quoted the verse, it says, "Any man who wants to follow me needs to deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." And we make a pretty big deal about self-denial.

And this is a pretty complex thing because the self that we need to deny is actually an imposter. And I'd like to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, Adam and Eve were created perfect, and there was no self about them that they had to deny.

Now, they took on sin and a new nature. And in a sense, we all have. And when that happens, it's kind of like this shroud comes down over us, and we just can't see and comprehend things correctly ever after. But then Jesus comes along, and he referred to himself as a second Adam.

And I think the connection is that when Jesus says he's a second Adam, he's not referring to fallen Adam. He's referring to pre-fall Adam. And the role of Christ—one of the roles of Christ in his work—is to help us become restored to a position somewhat of the pre-fall Adam.

So by faith, I believe that God has a picture of us or a reality of us that exists in the eternal realities of each one of us without sin. And that's a self that, as we put on Jesus Christ, we're actually rediscovering who God intended for us to be without sin.

So there's a self that exists that we need to own and actually build in. And that is the self that we are in Christ. And that is really, truly who we are, that the self that we need to deny is an imposter.

So

I guess my encouragement to this person is, and to anyone who would identify with this question, is to work on your own problems first.

It's really hard to help another person if you're both in the dumps.

So maybe that's all for that one.

All right. Moving on to the next one.

Oh, we missed that last part. Oh, about do you know of any groups? Is there any support groups in the Mennonites? I don't know of any. It's a very unfortunate thing. I think it could be helpful, maybe. But yeah, unfortunately, there's not even a lot of—I don't know. It seems to me sometimes there's not even a lot of compassion for any sort of acknowledgment of a mental illness, let alone a support group. So it's pretty tough.

Okay. How can I teach myself to sit with stress and uncomfortable situations, and how do I strengthen my damn as illustrated in the chart shared in part one so I don't get caught in a spiral of toxic thinking?

Well, just want to make a comment. If we can move along a little, we'll get through a few more.

So this one is

how can I strengthen my damn and sit with the uncomfortableness? Well, first of all, we need to realize that there's nothing wrong with being uncomfortable. And that's where I think the biggest thing is, is that we want to run away from our suffering.

And it's like we need to just sit with it. We need to feel it. We need to experience it and actually be okay being miserable for a period of time. It won't last. But it's kind of like the more I run away from—let's say I'm scared of the dark, so I won't go into a certain room after dark, and I just do that and do that. Well, guess what? My fear of going to places in the dark is going to get bigger and more incapacitating. So you want to expose yourself to the bad feelings as much as you can because then you actually become braver. And what was the last part?

How do I strengthen my damn?

So as you sit with and exercise yourself in exposing yourself to the things that you're afraid of, that makes your damn stronger. It's kind of like lifting weights. If you can't lift 100 pounds, you break it down into 25-pound increments, and you lift and you lift and you lift. Eventually, you'll be able to lift 100.

And it's the same way with your damn.

Just feel it and feel it and feel it and feel it. And eventually, it'll get better.

So one of the examples I like comes from John Dee.

He told me one time—it was about five or six years after his son was killed in a car wreck. He was like, "Conrad, it's the saddest thing that ever happened to our family." And he said, "It still is sad today as the day it happened.

The only difference is," he said, "I'm coping better." And I think that's the best explanation I've ever heard for relating to grief. And it's very similar to other feelings that we don't like. It's like you have to visit them. You have to talk about it. You have to expose yourself to it over and over and over. And eventually, you become stronger.

Thank you. That's very helpful advice. Moving on to the next one. Thanks a lot for your time and understanding of those of us who struggle with this. It meant a lot just to feel like I'm not the only one and someone understands. I truly have a heart for others going through the same and would love to pass on anything that could help them too. How does the experience of scrupulosity and trauma fit in with what the Bible says about God having not given us a spirit of fear, but a sound mind and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding? How can I struggle and wrestle so much with this while still being a child of God?

So the first one, not giving us a spirit of fear. So I don't think that our difficulties in life come from the Spirit of God. Our difficulties come because we're in a fallen world. So yeah, I think it's pretty obvious that God's Spirit is not what's troubling us.

The other way I would look at these verses is that there's verses that, to me, talk about a Christian experience and almost the opposite of peace that is beyond our understanding. We're in a battle. We're in a kingdom of God coming with balance.

So there's a wide array of scriptures that describe a Christian experience. And some of them may seem like they're actually opposites or describing something that is different than another verse would talk about. And to me, it's kind of like a bicycle wheel.

You have the rim, and then you have the spokes that go toward the hub. And what keeps the hub in place is the tension that the spokes have from the rim into the hub. So we need to learn to be okay with more than one truth being true at the same time and that there can be tension between them too. But actually, we'll find our way best through life by navigating between two truths and letting both truths stand. So hopefully, there's times when we experience peace that's beyond all understanding, but there's going to be times whenever we're tore up really, really bad.

I know people with scrupulosity feel like they're in a bad state for most of their life, but I still think in that journey, you can learn to experience other things maybe simultaneously. You may have a lot of mixed emotions, but yeah, I would just encourage people not to get too hung up on any one verse.

Is there a connection between trauma and other disorders like eating disorders? And do people with processing disorders like ADHD or autism process trauma differently? And would that affect healing?

Yeah. So

people's genetic makeup has a lot to do with some of this stuff. But there's always this argument between nature versus nurture. So you can have a genetic makeup that's predispositioned towards something like ADHD and OCD, but usually, there's something environmentally that triggers it and actually gets it started. So it's a combination of experience and genetics. So

some people would say that all mental disorders are triggered by trauma. And you still have to remember that what we're talking about is trauma is a significant disruption of a person's internal world, not externally.

So what we're calling trauma here could, in some people's mind, may not even be trauma, but something experienced that somebody has usually triggers something like ADHD. And if you think about trauma, how disrupting it is, you never expected it to happen.

And so suddenly, out of blue, your life is completely changed. So it shocks your ability to trust in the contingency of sameness. So a person with ADHD, they're constantly bouncing because there's a level of anxiety there that doesn't allow them to just be at rest. So yeah, if you want to read more on that, there's an author by the name of—got his picture in my mind, but I can't think of his word. But he wrote a book called In the Realms of Hunger Games.

And he has done a lot of work on how early childhood experiences affect things like ADHD and OCD because he was born in Austria during the second year of German occupancy. And his mom gave him away to a—they were Jewish. And his mom gave him away to a random stranger on the street to try to save his life. And they were separated for a year before they got back together. So I'll think of the guy's name here before long, but there's a lot of connection between trauma and these problems.

All right. Boys that go to places for counseling often aren't emotionally connected to their dad, and they struggle immorally. At the root of all this is a disconnect from God. How can fathers relate to their child rightly to help avoid some of this? How can staff at these places relate to them so that they can grow into maturity as they should? And how can the church recognize issues and help out before the boy needs counseling?

Well,

without being disrespectful, part of the reason boys end up needing help is because we have this attitude that we know what's wrong with them. So the first three parts of this question are actually statements, pronouncing onto the situation what is wrong with the boy.

And if you want to be helpful to other people, this is something you cannot assume that you know why and what's wrong with them and why what's wrong with them.

Because oftentimes, we're wrong. And if we need to learn to listen rather than assume that we know why they are the way they are.

How can fathers relate rightly to their children?

We need to have times where we just listen and try to hear things from what's going on inside our child. So we can be the best of parents, but what affects our child's life is really what they receive and what their perception of life is.

So I can try to impart something very good to my child, but it depends on what frame of mind he's in, what he's thinking about when I'm talking to him or whatever he brings to the table. He may go away with an understanding that's different than what I was trying to present to him.

So relationships are just really complex. And

yeah, if you want to help trouble people, you have to be extremely nonjudgmental. You can't assume anything. And you need to allow your client to teach you about their problem. And then you collaborate together to try to resolve it.

And that's true even for a boy.

Yeah.

How can staff at these places relate to them so they can grow into maturity as they should?

Experience, experience.

I highly respect some of these places. I have lots of friends that work at boys' camps and so on and so forth. But I always have questions how you can take a 30, 40, 50-year-old man or something like that and send them to Fresh Start and they be helped by a 21, 25-year-old young man. Or how you can have a troubled boy and they go to camp and they're under the care of a 21-year-old chief.

That's something that's beyond my understanding. I do observe that people get help and that there's a measure of success there.

But I guess I'm not an authority on that, how they can help. I mean, to me, there's a level of help there.

I don't know if it would be effective with somebody with scrupulosity.

Thank you for weighing in on that. Some of that's difficult things to get into. We have seen studies that suggest OCD, autism, and trauma as high-risk factors for gender dysphoria transgenderism, possibly due to unhealthy categorization of male and female. Also, we've read OCD case studies about people who have been afraid they were gay because of obsessive thoughts. One lady who noticed immodestly dressed people thought she was the one sinning. What are your thoughts on this and how can we better reach out to these people both inside and outside our community?

Well, here again, this is a classic OCD scrupulous thought. If you read the textbooks, there's actually categories that are very definable. It's one thing about OCD and scrupulosity is that it's a very diagnosable problem because everyone has the same types of thoughts. And it's just almost mind-blowing to actually when somebody tells you the troubling thoughts they're having, sometimes it's almost word for word what the very next person will tell you.

And fears of homosexuality and bestiality and fear of sexual perversion is a very common fear. And what happens is, so we're dealing with people that care very, very much about their character. And the last thing they want to do is be homosexual or some sort of pervert.

And maybe they have some sort of thought or feeling body sensation, and this thought pops in their head, "Well, maybe you're gay." And then that thought alone is traumatic to a very sensitive person. And then it's like the heart rate goes up, it tens up. They're like, "Man, I can't think this way. I got to get rid of this thought."

So they start drastically trying to get rid of the thought or feeling or whatever it is, and it only seems like it gets worse. So if you do this little experiment, it explains it. So if I tell you all not to think about white bears for two minutes, try really, really hard not to think about white bears for two minutes, what are you going to think about? Inadvertently, you're going to think about white bears that you don't want to think about. So you can't win OCD by fighting it directly. You have to fight it indirectly. So basically, what that means is that if you have a fear of homosexuality, you have to learn to let that fear sit and not pay attention to it and actually focus on what you want to be and learn to love what you want to be.

So fear is a very powerful emotion, but so is love and a lot of other good emotions. And we need to learn to meditate and feel those positive things because it doesn't work to fight a negative battle. It's like one of the famous evangelists said, "He that serveth God out of a fear of hell shall surely go there."

It's like there's a level of fear of God that is wisdom, but you have to move from fear to embrace and learn to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Or a negative battle will destroy you.

I enjoyed part one a lot. The clarity on mental health issues was helpful. The use of meds to get frantic thoughts under control made a lot of sense. Is it good to have meds as long as a long-term crutch to coping? When is counseling or other therapy options to be considered so that the individual can not just cope with life but thrive and get back to living a full life?

Yeah. So I don't encourage anybody to just do medication.

Medication is a tool along with other things, but don't do medication alone, or you will become a lifelong user of medication.

You have to do therapy and interaction with other people to get well. And if you do a combination of treatment, usually you can get by with a lot less medication. And the medication makes it easier to do therapy, and the therapy makes the medication more effective. So it's a good combination.

But just to do medication, to me, it enables you to continue in whatever destructive patterns of thinking and behavior that you have without fixing them, it seems to me. It makes it easier if you're actually on a good path to get well. It can be very helpful, very helpful. But I just don't like to see people doing it just only medication.

Now, this is what I— Go ahead. I just love this question. This is just a great question. So the story of the brazen serpent, they may just put it up on a pole, is kind of like an appetizer to the real meal.

And the real meal is, as Jesus said, that I need to be lifted up even as that serpent was lifted up. So what does that mean? Well, the story of Jesus is a limit story, meaning that you can't come up with a story that is more tragic and more heartbreaking than that. And Jesus didn't only just take our sins; he didn't just bear our sins on the cross. He also bore our shame and our fear and all of our bad emotions and everything that we never want to experience.

He took to the cross with him. So what stimulates those emotions and thoughts about Jesus and the cross? Well, Jesus experienced the abandonment of all his friends. Plus, he was the Son of God. Plus, he was in the control of a foreign nation. Plus, he was rejected by his own people. Plus, he was innocent.

Plus, they exchanged him for a criminal. Plus, he knew he was innocent, and everyone else knew he was innocent. Plus, he was crucified, and he knew it was coming. It just goes on and on and on. Plus, he was young.

Every injustice that you can imagine and the emotions that go with that, he experienced. So what do we mean when we say somebody needs to go to the cross? Does that mean that we go to the cross and we just dump everything on Jesus and then we walk away free?

Or does Jesus say, "We need to bear our own cross"? And when we look at Jesus on the cross, we see what he did. And we're like, "Well, if Jesus, my older brother, was able to do that, then maybe I can face the realities of my life." And in facing those realities, it kills us. It kills our flesh.

And then we can experience the resurrection, and those wounds and fears and the tragedy of life can be transformed into something useful. And we can face life renewed.

Thank you for that. That was great. I know someone who obviously fits the pattern Conrad highlighted in this diagram. With the body and nervous system spiraling out of control, the trauma that her mind and body is operating out of seems to be the experience of having internalized an overdose of misjudging and condemnation in her younger years. She needs help to overcome obsessive thinking. Any suggestion of getting help with her thoughts seems to trigger the condemnation feeling and sends her into a feedback loop, making any help given register as trauma. Do you have any suggestions on where to start with someone like that?

This is a really good question too because what's being exposed here is how sensitive OCD and scrupulosity is and can be and how easily it is triggered. So what I would suggest is that instead of going to this person and saying, "Hey, you realize you have a problem. I think you need to get some help," you just need to skip that part and say, "Hey, I've run into this book or I've run into this person who actually understands OCD, and I think maybe they could be helpful." And you throw that possibility at them instead of reminding them of who they are and where they're at.

And then you walk away and you let them sit with that, and they may be able to reach out on their own. Because when you go to a person like this and you say, "Hey, I see you have a problem.

I think you need to get some help," that's a judgment on our part. And that triggers the obsessions and guilt. So they feel guilty already that they have a problem and that they feel like they're not utilizing God's grace properly and that if they would work harder, they could get on top of this. And so they already have all this self-condemnation.

And this is what's so hard about scrupulosity is that when the thing that would actually help them triggers their OCD. So

non-judgmental, think about what you're saying and what it's portraying to that person. And so when a person like this comes to me and sits down, I don't say, "Hey, I understand you have a problem, blah, blah, blah."

If they just— they'll come in, I say, I introduce myself, they introduce themselves, and I'm like, "Maybe you want to tell me why you're here." And then if they don't want to talk, I may say, after some silence, I may say, "Well, just tell me what's going through your head right at the minute.

What thoughts are going through your head?" And you need to give them space to teach you about what's going on inside their head. And it seems crazy, but counseling is not what a lot of people think counseling is.

It's not me trying to impart some great wisdom onto another person, but rather it's letting that person teach me about what's going on inside their life. And then we collaborate together to where that person actually figures out their own issues and what they need to do to get better.

And they're the ones that do the work. The only thing I do is help facilitate and guide them in that healing. But so many times we think counseling is we go to another person and they impart to us what we need to know. And it just needs to be a lot different than that. And

what really makes a person get better is to be able to identify their emotions, be able to verbalize them, and experience them in the context of a relationship with another person. And for some reason, that makes people feel better.

Thank you. That was actually the last question we had to address this morning. I did have one come in on the chat. I'll read for you here, Conrad, if you could answer it. It says, "You talk a lot about the trauma factor in these disorders. Where does burnout or overload fit into this picture? Is this something that you address and deal with in your ministry? Does burnout relate to the trauma discussion, or does it fall into another category?"

So burnout,

we have difficulty with this as Christians because we quote to ourselves verses, like, "I can do all things through Christ. He strengthens me." And when we get tired and burn out, we can get a guilt trip that we're just not in Christ enough, and we're just not spiritual enough, or we could just fly right through this. But we need to understand that those types of promises were made in light of Genesis chapter 1. And then it says, "In the beginning, God created a man and a woman." And the very term man and woman or human being insinuates something that is very fallible. And so you have to understand these types of verses in the context that they're given.

And my old school teacher, Dwayne Tucker, used to tell us in school that if we didn't understand the first three chapters of Genesis, we really didn't have any business in the rest of the Bible. And we need to keep that order of operations. And the whole thing of burnout falls under self-care, lack of self-care, and a lack of an understanding that there is a self that we need to take care of.

So when you use the term self, we just have red flags go up. But we need to acknowledge and realize that there is a self that needs to be recognized and taken care of. And that a lot of the spiritual realities—I feel like there's a physical reality to every spiritual reality.

And so it's hard for you to experience the spiritual power that Christ wants to impart to us if we're not resting and we're not eating food and we're not taking care of our bodies. There's a connection and a relationship there.

All right. I think we will open it up to more questions. There was someone wondering if you remember the name of that author of the book you mentioned earlier.

Well, just give me a second. Okay.

Gabor Matte. G-A-B-O-R is his first name. Matte is his last name. M-A-T-E. All right. Thank you. It's actually pronounced Gabor Matte. Gabor Matte. All right. Does anyone have any questions or comments before we close here?

Can I give another disclaimer? Sure.

This is a wide audience. And I like to try to help people, but I do operate under the restrictions of a license. And it's difficult for me to relate to people outside of the state I'm licensed in. So I'm not against trying to help in a minimal sort of way of somebody that's many miles away, but I'm restricted in what I am allowed to do.

What I do is clinical. The terms like OCD and scrupulosity are legislated by the government. And I can't just operate outside of my sphere of what is allowed. But having said that, I realize there are people that don't know anybody that understands them and don't know where to get any help. And I do stretch the rules some, but it's difficult. I just want people to know that. Yeah. I can appreciate that. Thank you so much for making yourself available in this way and answering questions. And yeah, it's fantastic. I can see your compassion in this. And I think that's a good lesson for us to take away is to approach these situations with compassion and understanding that people need to be heard.

People need to be felt and understood from that perspective instead of going at it with, "I already know what's going on or what you're struggling with." And I say that knowing that that's probably the tendency that I would have in approaching these situations would be, "Well, you need to just do this and you'll start feeling better."

Or trying to put my own experience on them and say, "Well, I've done this and this helps, so you should do it and it'll help." Realizing that people's problems are probably a lot different than mine and more complicated. So thank you very much for speaking into these. And I realize this is a very personal thing. And it's been mentioned that there is a stigma around this, but that I don't believe should be there. We're willing to talk about some of the other issues in our lives freely.

I was trying to think about it this morning. Why is there such a stigma? People are afraid that if they open up about a mental health issue, it's going to color them somehow or put them under a certain light for the rest of their lives.

So we need to try to get rid of that because there are a lot of people who are dealing with this by themselves. And if we can't remove the stigma, we won't be able to help them. Yeah. That's a very good point. I mean, it breaks my heart whenever I have anti-Baptist people that sneak into my office.

And I have to make sure that there's nobody else there in the waiting room that they know or that knows them. And sometimes their pastors don't know it. Their family don't know it. And it's so sad. It's like,

"Why we can't be more compassionate, less judgmental?"

That's right. There's things that happen to people that are out of their control.

Most of the problems that I relate to people with are about things that are completely out of their control. I mean, we can't help who our parents are. We can't help what somebody did to us when we were five years old. We can't help what church we're born into. We can't help most of life. We can't change. There's very few things we can actually change.

And oftentimes, and this is something good to remember, especially with scrupulosity and OCD, what people present and what you see as symptoms is not usually the issue. Because OCD and scrupulosity is an anxiety disorder. And what that means is that it's a misplaced anxiety. So they may present with fears of, let's say, assurance of salvation.

But maybe what's actually triggering that is something totally different. For instance, recently, a person I related to got into this scrupulosity, and she was praying all the time. And she had to hold her hands a certain way and look at a certain spot and all this stuff to get relief. And when we got to talking, I discovered that it started like six months ago. And I was like, "Did anything significant happen during around that time?" And finally, she said, "Well, we had a rabies skunk get in our barn, and a cat got rabies. And so all the neighborhood had to kill all their cats.

And this particular girl had several cats that were her bosom pets. And they weren't vaccinated. And so then it was like they had to be killed. And then it was like, "Well, what's the possibility that I'm going to get rabies?" And so it's like, "The doctor said, 'Well, don't worry about it unless you're a bitten.'" But it's like the trauma was a little nine-year-old girl losing all her pets and not knowing that she was going to get rabies.

And that's a scary, scary thing for a little child to be worried about. And so what do you do? You start praying for some sort of assurance. And then it bounces from one thing to another. And then at the root of it was actually a very legitimate fear.

And that's why we need to approach it with a lot of compassion. Well, thanks again. Go ahead. And an open mind to realize that we're complex human beings and that, yeah, maybe much different than what we think.

There's a quote here I'd like to read. "Nobody escapes being wounded. We're all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, 'How can we hide our wounds so we don't have to be embarrassed?' But, 'How can we put our woundedness in the service of others? When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.'" I appreciate that.

Well, thanks a lot again for coming on and addressing these difficult topics and making yourself vulnerable and sharing your thoughts about these things. And I thank everyone who joined us here this morning. If there is a big takeaway on this, it is to be compassionate with the people who are dealing with this. And if you're dealing with it yourself, seek help. Don't be afraid to talk about it. I appreciate that you mentioned in this talk and the last one that communicating these things to people helps and how relational these things are. To me, that's a biblical concept in dealing with a lot of things in our lives is a relationship with someone and showing love on the hearing or the addressing of it and the humility in being able to open up and ask for help.

So these are intricate webs, I guess, of relationships that we need to have strong relationships with people so that they can come to us and that we can go to them. And I see in this the healthy functioning of the body of Christ in being able to have room for these difficulties and to have room for places where we can share our difficulties along these lines. So God bless you in your work. And God bless you for joining us this morning.