SPEAKER_00: 0:00

We try to strong arm ourselves into being the perfect Christian. And that's not what God ever intended. In the Christian world, we believe that I I I'm I'm gonna say this and I don't people are gonna say, no, I don't believe that, but I think we really do. We believe that the fall didn't happen to the brain or to the mind as well. It's like it only happened to the body. And I know we say we that's not true, but I believe that because we can't see it, we don't believe that there's an issue. And hello everybody, and welcome to A Better Way to Heal, where faith meets therapy.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

Well, hello everybody. Hello, hello. I am Ellie and I am Issa. And you are watching A Better Way to Heal.

SPEAKER_02: 0:55

Yes. So Ellie, it's been a minute since we've been via Zoom or anything that's like third party. We've been doing our podcast face to face for a while now. I know that when we started, we did a few of these. So I guess we're going back to our roots. And since we're going back to our roots, I thought maybe we should go back to basics. Um, you know, with our podcast, the goal is to yes, let everybody know about your book, but not just for the sake of knowing about the book, just knowing the content of the book and how important it is for believers to not dismiss therapy, as well as people in therapy that may not have a strong faith foundation can also pursue faith for healing. We see counseling and therapy as a tool for healing than being a healer. So I'm gonna ask a few questions since you are the subject matter expert, and I I know there are questions that I've had in the past, so maybe our audience will have those questions too. What is the difference between therapist and counselor?

SPEAKER_00: 1:57

That's such a good question, Asa. And one you would think would be a really quick and easy answer, and yet it's not. There are, depending on who you ask, there are many different answers to that question, but uh a therapist is often someone who heals and does the deeper deeper level healing. And uh a counselor is someone that often is someone who gives advice or helps people with minor life challenges. Now, you might have like a finance counselor, a career counselor, a school counselor, those kind of things. They don't do deep trauma work and things like that. Now, that being said, a licensed professional counselor does deep trauma work and also career counseling, school counseling, and all these things. So the terms can very much be muddied, and there's no real quick one versus the other, but someone with an advanced degree for sure uh that is um like maybe a master's degree or a doctorate degree or something like that, you might consider more of a therapist, but there are many people that have advanced degrees that call themselves a counselor, or license says licensed professional counselor in the state of Texas. Other states have different ways that they name that.

SPEAKER_02: 3:23

That is very interesting. So as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, is maybe therapists more of a label um based on the treatment plan than necessarily an education thing. So I'm just trying to like bring it to more clarity for our audience and even for myself. So I think if it after listening to you, I see counseling more as a coaching type of thing, right? You're just you already have addressed trauma or have overcome trauma, and this is just like a maintenance, like how to move to the next level. And maybe therapy is between something acute, something that's happening or even chronic, and that you have to deal with, heal from in order to move into the coaching aspect of therapy. I'm right. Am I did I explain that?

SPEAKER_00: 4:10

Well, yeah, um I I wouldn't give it yes. And it's it's multi-layered for sure. And I I so sometimes it's not even necessarily about whether or not you're you seek a therapist or a counselor. It's the finding someone that's a good match for you, someone that you connect with, and whether they call themselves a counselor or not, because there's a and the reason why I'm so I don't want to say particular, but there's a a big push in the counseling world that there's not given enough respect for the counseling title. But that's because it's so readied with people that don't have advanced degrees, like a master's degree or a doctor's uh doctor's program, can still call themselves a counselor. So it is an education level. I mean, think about going to physical therapy. There's different levels of that, even a physical therapist versus uh maybe an assistant or something like that. So there's different levels, but yes, there is definitely um, you know, you can go to a a counselor for trauma work if they're licensed properly.

SPEAKER_02: 5:26

Gotcha. I understand. So there is a a mixture of education and the actual treatment that in relationship between client, counselor, therapist. Yes. Okay, very interesting. And sometimes it's about semantics too. I think sometimes we become very familiar with certain terms and that's what we use because counseling can even be referred to a lawyer. Lawyer is a counselor, so it's a very interesting thing. I guess the the broader term of counseling can make it confusing when you're talking about psychology and therapy. The important thing is we should all have a counselor. Why do you believe it's a good thing for people to do maintenance for mental health, whether you have been diagnosed with any behavioral health or mental illness at all, just as a human privilege?

SPEAKER_00: 6:19

Well, I think that sometimes we can get very set in our ways. And the people around us, our husbands, our wives, our children, our parents, our friends, they can they cannot always see your blind spots. And we all walk through life with biases. There's there's no way around that.

SPEAKER_02: 6:44

However, yes, absolutely. And I think about it as uh in this way as well. If you're in a marriage, let's talk about marriage, you know, marriage counseling is something that's very big. That's that's more common, I believe, in churches and more ingrained than mental health per se. And I don't necessarily feel like they are equipped to handle what I have to say. So here enters a therapist or a licensed counselor, and you are able to unpack all those things and be able to present them to that spouse at some point because the idea is healing. The idea is that at some point I can sit down and talk about this. Because a lot of a lot of times that process of unpacking comes with a lot of junk. A lot of junk that is not even part of the beginning, it's just stuff that has accumulated there. It's a lot for somebody to carry. So if you unpack it with somebody that has no skin in the game, it's a lot easier to be completely honest, completely vulnerable, and even be able to walk through those emotions instead of verbal, and I'm gonna say verbal diarrhea, right? They can make them sick.

SPEAKER_00: 7:54

Yeah. I think a lot of times that as we're uh unpacking with the therapist, they can see things that we don't see, those blind spots, like I said, and it really helps them when the therapist kind of helps them understand why they have those blind spots and why they have those stuck points, and it's uh really developing that sense of awareness of what's going on, why their body reacts the way that it does, it helps to give them language so that they can then work any kind of relationship, marriage relationship or anything else like that out in a deeper level because they're they understand what's going on internally. I don't even understand why I react every time my wife wants to look at a house. I don't understand why I'm reacting that way. And then when you come to find out that there was insecurity as a child in housing situations, you understand or you start to understand why. And sometimes a therapist can help you find that reasoning.

SPEAKER_02: 8:57

And I like how you said it, find the words to then be able to express that in a healthy way. And because sometimes all we have is our body signs, our anxiety, our reactions, and there's no verbal way of expressing it. So, yes. So, my other question is as a faith-based therapist, uh, or licensed counselor, we keep on going back with the terms, but how do you do you believe that your tools, your treatments, your substitutes prayer, faith? Do you believe that it's a substitute to your faith?

SPEAKER_00: 10:14

So I believe that uh faith-based therapy can be very effective. I think that faith and therapy can go very hand in hand because it really incorporates the whole person and it doesn't leave part of the person outside. Uh research stated that people that have a connection with a higher power, for me, my higher power is God. I'm identify as a Christian. Research says people that connect to a higher power in their healing process do better mentally. So there's that because you're incorporating all of who you are in the therapeutic process. It's like, here, let me take part of my brokenness, leave it outside the door, and then I'll come in and fix this part and then pick that up on the way out. Or we can, when we don't include the two, we can also, let's say I just go, I'm just going to the pastor, and maybe they don't understand why I have trauma reactions and and why I recoil every time my husband who loves me and I adore every time he touches me at a certain time of the uh of the year or something like that that might be connected to a trauma memory that I don't even know. My body knows because the body keeps the score. I might not even understand that. So really bringing the two bringing the the faith and the the therapy together into the therapy into a you know a safe space, clients tend to do better. Yeah. Think about uh there are therapists that will sometimes dismiss a c a client's faith and and then it's left the person feeling like, well maybe I'm maybe I'm putting too much faith in this X, Y, or Z, whether that is God or you know, and um and it causes fractures there in the healing process and they don't heal properly because now they're now they're faced with another, you know, issue.

SPEAKER_02: 12:24

Yes, yes. So it doesn't based on what you said, it doesn't replace it for you. It's a complimentary thing. And I see it from my side, right? Because I uh I like to focus on the faith side since I don't have the training or the counseling education, but I see it more as kind of helping you to know what to pray for. So for instance, when Jesus was with the disciples and they had walked with him, and mind you, these these were men that the Torah was read in front of them, they went to synagogue, they had all the religion, right? And they were walking with Jesus and they would watch Jesus pray. And one day they said, Jesus, teach us how to pray. So I see this as being therapy when you're trying to unpack all of the symptoms from your emotions, your triggers, and your therapist helps you give it words and understand it, and meaning now you can go to the throne and pray very specifically. And I am not saying that when we pray out of faith and say, God, just heal me from this or help me understand this, that he doesn't answer. That is not what I am saying. I do know that for me, it comes with answers. It comes with like this is because of this. So it's a different type of unpacking. And sometimes people's wounds are so deep and so severe, they can't even make themselves pray. So when you're able to verbalize it, then I can tell, Lord, Lord, help me forgive the person that abused me. Like you can verbalize this. Help me, it's unforgiveness that's hurting me. So help me forgive. Sometimes trauma is so deep, you don't even realize that what you're actually grappling with is unforgiveness at times. And I'm not saying always, I'm just giving an example. Sometimes you don't even remember it because you were a child. And going through therapy kind of helps you. Actually, your parents were narcissistic. You don't have a name for it. Oh, I'm like, oh, so this is what's happening. Okay, help me forgive them, help me then understand them, help me see them from different eyes, and also see your own part. Like, like you said, sometimes we have blind spots and our family members tell us, but we become defensive because, well, you're part of the problem. But if a therapist is like, maybe you're overthinking this, maybe try to think of it this way, it's it seems less aggressive and more of like, let's work on this together. And you can go to God and and speak clearly to him. Mind you, he already knows. But in this conversation, you know too. And you can actually see where God is working because you know more specifically what is bothering you. And when you don't know, and it's this general thing, you might even miss little miracles that God is doing in your life. When you're like praying generally, God, like, God save my marriage, right? I believe that He'll answer that prayer. But if you're going to therapy and the therapist is like, I don't think you guys communicate well. Maybe you need to start listening. So now you go, God, help me listen, or help me give me the words that I need to say. So when you start praying in that way, you start it manifesting with silence in you, self-control in you, you can see the prayer being answered in a more specific way. And it gives you these guidelines, like goals that you're reaching instead of feeling like my prayer hasn't been answered, but you haven't noticed, oh, I'm communicating better. Okay, we're still mad at each other, maybe. We're still having gotten to the bottom of this, but we heard each other today. We listened to each other. And there's this little victory because that was part of the problem. Does that make sense, right? I'm trying to absolutely, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 16:07

It definitely does give us uh words. One of the things that trauma does is it steals our ability to form thoughts, our voice. And so that is one of the things that we do in therapy is we help you find that. We help you kind of discharge the traumas that's stored within your body so that every time you're triggered doesn't help it doesn't cause you to. You can be in an argument and and you take everything so personally because it's like I did, you know, you're doing this to me when it's really about this other person is upset about something and it's not always about me. And sometimes we make things about us because we don't, you know, we just we're already at a defense. We're already in survival mode. We don't even realize we're in survival mode. And so uh therapy can really help us figure those things out, and we start working on us so that we're healthier and so that we can recognize and learn how to set healthy boundaries and learn how to have healthy communication. All of these things are so very vital to relationships, marriage relationships, par uh, you know, with your children, with your parents. You know, it's just very important to have healthy relationship skills. And that's something that we aren't trauma is often passed down, even if you haven't gone through tr a traumatic event. Sometimes having parents that have been through traumas, an anxious mom can cause you to be anxious. And I don't understand why I'm so upset every time my husband has to go away for business and I'm afraid to be in the house alone. And maybe it's because there was some a lot of anxiety, and so understanding that helps me then. Okay, maybe I maybe I phone a friend that and maybe I I learn how to because we don't really know we live in an age of so much self-soothing and I mean otherwise soothing, you know, whether it's uh alcohol or it's scrolling, doom scrolling, we call it. We even call it doom scrolling, right? Or vegan out in front of the TV, and there's nothing wrong with watching TV or scrolling, but do I do that to replace this, you know, I'm feeling really anxious, and so I'm doing this to self-soothe. And so we don't know how to sit with anxiety, and so if something happens, we're constantly trying to fix it, where I can just notice, develop an awareness. I'm hmm, I notice I'm feeling anxious right now. Okay, is my body trying to tell me something? Anxiety is not a bad thing, it really isn't. We try to sometimes it's a barometer that says something's wrong. Our nervous system will tell us it perceives things that we don't even realize it's perceiving. And of course, if we've been through trauma trauma, that perceiver could be a little off. But when it's perceiving something is off, it might come across as first anxiety. And if we turn that off with self-soothing, um w any any number of bad things could happen. You know, we could walk across the street when we should be walking across the street because we weren't paying attention.

SPEAKER_02: 19:29

Um I like to equate it with there being a smoke alarm or or something in your home, and then it starts going off, right? And it's annoying. It's a loud noise, it's completely making your brain explode. But instead of you going to find out where the smoke or the fire is coming from, you go and take the battery off the thing to soothe this the noise, but the house is burning down. I think anxiety and even all those feelings that we have that are symptoms of our triggers, like our triggers per se. How we act, of course, is our responsibility. But I think we have a deeper responsibility, like you said, to sit there and think, okay, why am I feeling this way? Yes, this is extremely uncomfortable, but why do I feel this way? Oh, you know what he said. Okay, but why would why that that he said would bother me this much? Like why? And when you continue to peel those layers, honestly, it all comes back to something internal. Not saying that external things didn't put it there, but it's something that you can start working on from the inside out. When I was growing up, you know, I have a double whammy. I grew up in the church, but I also grew up Hispanic, Latina, and that's that was taboo in our family for, you know, not just in my family, in our culture for a very long time. Only crazy people, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but that's how it was expressed. Only crazy people go to therapy. That's not the case. We it's like we can end up going crazy and driving ourselves crazy if we don't speak through these things, heal through these things, and what we're passing down is trauma instead of healing. Yeah, absolutely. So, last question. What do they recommend they do to reconcile those thoughts? Like how what can they start processing what scriptures, or maybe how can they walk their way from I'm just gonna pray about it, versus I'm gonna pray about it and also talk about it with somebody.

SPEAKER_00: 21:26

Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that that's so important and one of the things that I do when we do the the um conferences is we really have to understand that the things that we've been through leave a lasting impact and we can love God all with all of our heart. But if there's a lot of things that is going on inside of us, if we can get some real deep trauma healing that can be expressed deeper. When I say that, I mean that when we realize that we have a that there's something going on, there's a reason why we can't just pray and forget it. There's a reason why we can't just lay it at the altar and walk away from it. There's a reason why. And it doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't mean that you don't have enough faith. It doesn't mean that you have a demon. I mean, I've heard people say this. You mean I don't have a demon? When we understand what childhood trauma does to the adult body, then we can it makes it easier to understand, okay, hate didn't cause this because we try to strong arm ourselves into being the perfect Christian. And that's not what God ever intended. He cre I mean, God He allows us to go to a medical doctor when an arm is broken or something like that. Why wouldn't we go? In the Christian world, we believe that, and I I'm I'm gonna say this, and I don't people are gonna say, no, I don't believe that, but I think we really do. We believe that the fall didn't happen to the brain as well, or to the mind as well. It's like it only happened to the body. And I know we say we that's not true, but I believe that because we can't see it, we don't believe that there's an issue. And it shows in the way that we interact with other people, it shows in the internals. I had a client once that says, I, you know, I really I'm really feeling like I'm doing so much better. And I'm wondering if the people around me can see that. And the thing is, is this person was really good at masking. And when we're really good at masking, other people might not notice when you start getting really healed because the internal is now starting to match the external because we put on the church face, right? It's Sunday morning. Okay, let me get my makeup on and my hair done and get my jewelry on. Okay, I'm looking good, now I can go. And they see the Facebook face, but they don't see all this stuff in here, you know. And so it's the if they can reconcile that as long as this is in here, as long as I'm tied up in here, I'm not gonna be as effective, I'm not gonna be at the top of the game, the game being, we are we are put here to be representations of Christ. And how can we do that effectively if we're still bound by all of this mental health stuff? If we can just get to a level of healing, if we can just figure out what it is that is you know, because everybody is different. We've all been through different things, but we've all been through things. We've all been through things. And whether we hide it internally or whether we've truly dealt with it. And some people truly have, and they've been through horrendous things, and that's great. Help somebody else, but you know, free people can free people. But we have a responsibility to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. And if you know better, do better.

SPEAKER_02: 25:22

Yeah, there is no doubt that we serve a healing God and that Christ, you know, his death on the cross by his stripes, we are healed. But there's many instances in scripture in which action goes hand in hand with faith. And the only thing we cannot earn or work towards is salvation. But every other promise in the Bible requires action. Every other thing that God has for us in the kingdom requires us doing something about it. And I think sometimes we muddle that together. We muddle the f the grace of salvation with our responsibility to get up early if we want to make it to work on time, our responsibility to be stewards of our finances in order to be blessed. Why can I say that many times what he gives us, what he gives me is a plan, what he gives me is an opportunity, what he gives me is a direction. I have to walk it out. It's like you're free. You're free to heal. You don't have to be what it happened to you in the past, and you don't have to be who you hurt in the past because sometimes we're not the victims, sometimes we're the perpetrators. So that's the freedom, that's the gift, that you are no longer that creature, but what you do moving forward is on you. I'm just gonna walk you through every day, every step of the way. And I feel like therapy is a really good way to walk out our healing. It's to walk out the knowledge that we're free, that we are forgiven, and to really walk that out and then share it with other people. I believe that was Jesus' intent for the church from the beginning. We can carry our faith and we can go into an office with a faith-based therapist. And honestly, it doesn't even just because they're faith-based, it might not even work right away. It's a relationship that needs to fit in correctly for you because it is where you're gonna be super vulnerable. It is somebody that, even though they have the same tools and the same training, there has to be an energy between you.

SPEAKER_00: 27:28

Yeah. Yeah. Something that reminded me, so in in school, and I found this to be true, and I didn't believe it at the time, that the 80% of the indicators that somebody is actually going to do improve in mental in their mental health, it's 80% the relationship with the therapist. And they could be, you know, the what one might consider the worst therapist in the world. And it's about the relationship between the therapist and the client. And there's um there's just it's not always the right fit. Some people go to two or three or four different counselors before they find the right one, the right fit. And some people they find the right one and they uh the right away, and you just never know. Always just be sensitive. Yeah, we pray that God will take us to the right doctor, right? When we're when we're struggling with something. If we had cancer, I wouldn't say, let me just call and you know, any counselor, I mean any doctor, that that that'll be good. I want an oncologist, right? I want somebody who treats that. So if you've had trauma, you want a trauma therapist. And and if they're faith-based, that's great. I will say that I don't think they have to be faith-based, but you want somebody that's gonna respect your faith and somebody who's gonna allow it to be in the room. So, you know, I I am faith-based, and there are clients that don't want that, and that's okay. And I honor that and I respect that because the it's about the therapeutic relationship. Yeah. You know, uh in my book, the the first one that I wrote, A Better Way, uh, uh, it talks about the very basic, if we don't meet people's very basic needs, we're talking about the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then James is like, you can't you can't witness to people if they're hungry. And it's very much it's very biblical that we are to meet one another's needs. According to our faith and according to our gifting. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So uh I think that is that's very important to always remember that that um there's different there's different things that we can do to to meet each other's needs or to meet the needs that we are we have that gifting. And for me, that gifting is to help people find a a deeper level of healing, to bring awareness to what has happened to them and how that's impacting them today, and and really walk into a deeper level of of who they are. It's one of the things I really feel like it gets that's that has helped me, and I know it's helped a lot of my clients, is really after kind of unpacking all of this stuff and understanding why these things are how they are and learning those skills, but also learning who I am, my identity and when I learned that, you know, w the the word talks about standing firm, we can do that more when we're sure of what we believe. And part of that is understanding who we are. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 30:57

Yes. And then so I think the church, if you are as a as a believer and a follower of a Christ going to church and you are basing your identity of Christ, you have so much battleground one. When you go to therapy to then unpack all this baggage, you have this identity to fall back on. You have who God says you are. You have you're beautifully wonderfully made. We have so many beautiful affirmations in scripture. So I think we can go with that advantage of being believers and having faith and having a God that already speaks all this life into us. But we can walk with all this understanding and all this knowledge and then have a room with a therapist and have all these tools applied. And we are supposed to go to those spaces and be salt and light and we stop giving so much ground to the enemy we would then be fulfilling the great commission which is to love God and love people. And that has to happen in every space. And some spaces are filled with darkness right now not because they're inherently evil but because there's no light in them. There's no people with light willing to go into those spaces and bring light. So I I thank you Ellie for choosing this space to be light in and I pray that anybody that listens to this and has any doubts or any questions just really bring it to the Lord because it's your faith and your relationship with God but really present this to the Lord and be specific about your questions. Be specific about your concerns and allow God to speak to you. He might use people to speak to you but it should be a confirmation it should be something that brings peace to your soul when you hear it and and trust that you have permission from the Lord to heal and to seek healing without dishonoring him. This is my address specifically to people that are believers and might have some kind of struggle with this. Yeah that's great.

SPEAKER_00: 32:57

That's really great. Well I think we are probably reaching the end I would like to let everyone know that we um I do have the books that are available on my website. There is a it they uh integrate faith and and psychology really um people really start to develop that awareness the the first book talks about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and God's hierarchy of needs and the second book is uh all about a better way and uh it takes us on an eight week journey as we we kind of start unpacking things even in the therapeutic world it helps to have something that really starts to allow us to reflect and pull things out because there's a lot of probing questions in that second book to really start pulling out some of the things that what what do I really believe about this and I don't think a lot of times we understand what we believe about something until until we're hit with the situation it's like oh I guess I really don't believe that I'm good enough. That's the shame piece that I I s I catch so much with clients in the languaging. You know everyone you know they they would prefer to be with so and so or you know these these kind of languages that I hear from people or uh the the the person that is clinging to everything because they don't feel like they're good enough on their own those kind of things. So I talk a lot about shame and uh the resources I have I have a lot of things on the website and so you know go out to the website grab uh grab a book grab a one of our free resources and and you know or hit me up for a consultation hit her up I think that is that is probably where we're gonna leave it at today. Well if you got something out of today's episode uh you know like subscribe share with a friend thank you issa for th these wonderful questions I'm sure that our viewers our listeners have these same type of questions you know because they don't know how to how to what do I even look for? How do I find the right one? Yes well thank you for listening to us or watching us today until next time all right bye bye thank you for watching us we really appreciate you being here if you enjoyed the episode like subscribe share with a friend and join us next time thank you bye bye