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Record Live is a conversation about life, spirituality and following Jesus in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Hi there, everyone. I'm Jarrod. And I'm Zanita. We are your hosts of Record Live, a podcast where we talk about church, faith, and living well. We believe as followers of Jesus, faith is more than just a set of beliefs. It's a way of life, something we put into practice. Let's go live.
Hello everybody we have a very special guest with us today. We have Dr. Jennifer Shwirzer. And I'm really excited to have Jennifer. I feel like every guest who comes on I say, I'm so excited, but I'm genuinely so excited to have you on. So, before we get into things, Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah, I'm a mental health provider. I do mental health coaching virtually. But kind of moving away from that into managing a whole network of mental health providers under the brand Abide . To get there is put abide network and a search engine. It'll take you to the website. We have close to 50 coaches and Zanita is one of them. We believe
community health model and also a discipleship model where when people get help, they also give help. So we ramp people up to be able to help people with mental health. We really like to teach and empower and we just do all kinds of stuff. We have mental health coaching, we have free support groups, we have workshops and virtual workshops.
We have, uh, Friday night bible study called Food for the Heart Bible Study that started at the beginning of Covid and continues to this day. It's a proper virtual church. So we have a lot going on under the umbrella of Abide network, and that's, yeah, that's what I'm about.
What was the question? ? That was good. That was a good answer. I really like your emphasis, as you say, on, I guess mentoring and discipling and developing people. Yep. And that's, I guess not, not every mental health provider is created equal in that sense.
Not everyone's doing that and investing back into communities. So that's kind of unique as I see it. But if you don't mind, can you tell us a little bit of your why? Like a lot of people have a lot of reasons to go. Yeah. This sort of area. Why did you choose to do this?
Because when I was in my early thirties, I developed clinical depression and could not find help anywhere. I wanted, of course, a therapist that believed in the Bible because that's where I was at, and it's much easier to open up to someone who shares your worldview. But I couldn't find anything like that, even if it was a Christian therapist, much less the Seventh Adventist, because everything in those days was done in person.
You just didn't do telephone therapy or counseling or coaching. Of course, the virtual and telephone world has opened up since then, and I think God impressed upon me to provide some kind of service where we could reach everybody in the world who wanted biblically grounded, scientifically informed therapy.
Counseling coaching harmonizes with an Adventist worldview. Now we will take anyone, we never exclude any client at all. Anybody can come. I've had clients from other face, I've had clients that didn't believe in God, et cetera, but we offer a niche product to a niche market, and that is that Adventists need mental health providers and it has really hit a sweet spot. Like we have intakes every day, pretty much at this point. We have almost 50 coaches and counselors providing services, and it continues to grow. That's my why. I needed help and I couldn't find it.
And I thought, wow, you know, I, I think often we minister out of our l osses. So God has been able to do just that.
So good. And I love what you're doing. I've seen it help so many people. As well as running Abide you are also a musician and a writer. Do you have any other hidden secret talents before we move on ? Um, well I, I did do music for a number of years, but I have had health issues that have affected my voice and I've decided not to do it professionally.
I still dabble and love it. I was a chef for a long time in a vegan restaurant in both New York City and in Philadelphia, and I have a real knack for that. I can cook blindfolded with my eye and my pants tied behind my back practically. I don't do it very much now, so just for my poor husband, . Well, before we get into things, since we're tackling the topic of joy, yeah. Um I feel like a lot of people struggle to differentiate between joy and happiness. And when we see it in the Bible, joy is often paired with struggle and trial and it's a bit uncomfortable when we look at joy in that way. Can we start by just defining joy? What is it and what is it not? Yeah. I think by kind of the definition you're alluding to, happiness is contingent upon circumstances. Joy can be experienced in spite of circumstances, and sometimes it can be actually sort of kindled
in bad circumstances. So one of the things I say is we should expand the context in which we can experience joy. In other words, it doesn't have to always go well to experience it. I like to give people the example of my car breaking down. And you know, I was at a really poor stage in my life. I was working an internship and I wasn't getting paid.
And I was just started in with, oh God, why now? Why me? And all of a sudden I decided, you know what? I could just have fun with this. . I could have fun with this if I wanted to. And I got up on the roof of my car and started singing, waiting for the tow truck to come. When the tow truck came, I jumped in the cab and chatted up the guy and smiled when he gave me the bill.
I mean, I just decided I'd be happy. And that's, I think how joy differs from generic happiness is you can experience it in spite of, and sometimes almost because of bad circumstances. I heard someone explain it like, happiness is external to you, something you're seeking or something that happens to you.
Whereas joy is a choice like within you. And I think that's why it's so important, as Christians to find joy because it's a quite a theme in the Bible, isn't it? This idea of joy and trying to seek it.
There's a guy, uh, I'm forgetting his name. But anyway, he has this approach to relational psychology, and he has a book out called Return to Joy. And his prayer is that we were creating, that's how the human psyche is constructed, is to have continual joy.
Well, obviously in a sinful world, if you have continual joy The men in the white coats are gonna come because you don't wanna be happy in the middle of a burning building, for example, or in the middle of pande or whatever. But you wanna test reality, but you can always come back to it. So you may go off into negative emotions for a period of time, but you will come back to joy and that's kind of your stable stopping place if you can say it that way. And I think he's right. I think we are created for joy. Sin has indefinitely, are continually, but we can always return to that state of joy. So we are gonna have some negative emotions and part of helping positivise emotions is counterintuitively enough to normalize negative emotions because what happens if people don't normalize their negative emotions is they start developing secondary disturbance where you're disturbed and then disturbed about being disturbed
In other words, I should never be sad. I should never be afraid. I should never be angry. You're gonna become more distressed because you've made those rules for yourself. So part of having more positive emotions is normalizing negative emotions. Once we do that we can then try to cultivate those positive emotions.
It reminds me of something. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the Stockdale Paradox. It was coined during the war by a man who was held in prisoner of war camps in Vietnam and Uhhuh.
He wrote a book about how he survived and what he observed through people who did survival who didn't survive. Uhhuh . And he said in his book, the ones who didn't survive, were the extreme optimists who would say, we'll be out by Christmas. And then Christmas would come and Christmas would go and they would get disappointed and then they would be like, we'll be out by Easter.
And Easter would come and Easter would go and they basically died from disappointment and broken hearts. And so I think is what you're saying, it's kind of about managing our expectations as well? Yes. And what happens to so many people and particularly Christians, is something bad happens and they're like, God, let me down .
Life is terrible connotation of God. He never said we wouldn't have difficulty. In fact, he said we would. And so part of what we have to do to get past that disappointment factor is adjust our expectations. And that's part of growing up. I've been through long stretches of time when I had false expectations, just like the people you described.
I became disappointed because life just didn't meet them, and that can cause depression. It did in my case, where I was really, really depressed because I thought God would make everything go well for me. Then I started developing health problems and I felt rejected by God or abandoned by God, but that was not because of him.
It was because of a false expectation.
This is a bit of a curly question for you, but just speaking about those false, what does curly mean? Sorry. Probably in Australian term. It could be difficult to answer potentially, but. In what ways does our faith sometimes set us up for those unrealistic expectations of God? Like do you see any systemic ease in our belief system as Adventist or just generally as Christians?
Yes. Give us difficulty in the mental health space. Cause I think we need to tackle and engage with some of those challenges. Think about how children's books are written. Kids are taught that if they do everything right, good is gonna come to them. And you can't completely disavow that.
I mean, it's true on a certain level that when we make good choices, it creates a trajectory in our lives toward good things happening. But there's always that element of chaos. In life on earth and things that have nothing to do with the choices we've made that come upon us.
And in those little children's story books that say, well, if you're just unselfish and a good little boy or girl, then you're gonna get an extra dessert, or you're gonna get an angel by your side. You're not gonna get hurt or whatever. We do have to
cultivate that sense of trust in God's presence and whatever comes, he'll make it good in the end. But on the other hand, we need to tell kids, very frankly, life is awful. Sometimes things hit that come outta nowhere, and I think we could stand to incorporate more of that, don't you think in our children's literature?
You know. Surely. What about when we become adults? What, yeah. What you're saying is some of those . Mm-hmm. ideas stick with us, and then our world gets rocked. Basically, our foundations are, are torn apart when something really bad happens. Mm-hmm. Are there any ways that adults have the same things given to them though as children do?
We talk about the prosperity gospel, you know, and God will give you all this prosperity. He is gonna bless you and you're gonna have all basically heaven on earth. I don't think that in my church you hear much prosperity gospel type stuff preached. But I think we all have an element of that in our psyche where we want an insurance policy kind of God. Where we sign on and we expect something in return. And when you look at scripture like Paul said, His whole goal of his life was to know and the power of resurrection. If it ended there, you'd think, okay, that's a great insurance policy.
Sign on with Jesus, and you know the power. But then it goes on, it says, and the fellowship of his sufferings being made conformable to his death. So where the gospel ultimately leads us is to where we would rather be with Jesus in suffering than free from suffering. And apart from him. And if you think about, if your whole goal in life is to be free for suffering, you're eventually gonna just become a drug addict and you're gonna bring more, or whatever, some way of numbing pain because there's no way, no one on earth believer, unbeliever lives a life free of suffering.
It just doesn't happen. Sooner or later if you have that expectation, you're gonna wanna numb that suffering out, and so you're gonna end up in a very bad place. I guess on that, does our view of God affect our ability to experience joy as well? I think so. I think if we interpret the negative experiences as God not loving us or something along those lines, then we're gonna have a really rough time and it's gonna impact to psychologically.
In fact, there's research to that effect by a woman named Tanya Luhrman, who studied the way people pray related to mental health outcomes. And she discovered that when people prayed from a place of believing that God was punishing them through misfortune, holding blessings from them. That the more they prayed, the more unhealthy they got.
But when people prayed from a place of believing that God was generous and kind and loving to them, then the more they prayed, the better they got. It's almost like, um, don't pray until your God concept is right. And that's why we need preaching about the character of God because if not, we can end up with a bunch of very religious people that are extremely unhappy.
So let's start thinking about joy. You know, some people we see as joyous, we meet someone and we're like, wow, that person has a lot of joy in their life. But some people are just a little bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. You know, they're a bit wet blanket, sort of, you know, a bit of a downer on the party and it's like, oh. And we tend to attribute it to their personality or just even genetics, oh, that's just how they are. But is there hope for those who are a bit less obviously joyous? Like how do we start to bring joy into our lives? Is it a choice that we can make? Or are we cursed with just genetics and upbringing and stuff to be stuck in that space?
I love the question. You know, there is that genetic element. There are some people that are just natural optimists. My husband is one of them. He always thinks he's getting better and younger and healthier, and the reality is that he's over 25 and everybody over 25 is on a trajectory downhill. He's just eternally optimistic.
That's just how he is. So it's a temperament thing. I'm the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm the Eeyore guy. And so your question was, is there hope for the melancholic ones among us. And the answer is absolutely yes. So back when I was trying to find counseling, because I was experiencing what I now understand to be clinical depression, I was really a negative person and the more I felt negative, the more I believed that everything was terrible and awful.
And the more I believed that everything was terrible and awful, the more I felt that everything was terrible and awful. We call that emotional reasoning when you look at your emotions as evidence of what's true. And I didn't understand what I was doing, and it was when I finally studied psychology that I saw what I was doing and was able to correct it.
And specifically cognitive behavioral therapy where a person addresses their thought life and says, what am I thinking and how is my thinking affecting the way I'm feeling? So I learned how to manage my thought life and to say sometimes my emotions are lying to me. It's just not true that there's no hope or it's not true that no one loves me or it's not true that I'm guilty and ashamed and I should die.
You know, I would think these extreme things, cause I felt extreme. So I learned how to manage my thought life and I noticed that my mood lifted and since then I've been trying to help other people with the same thing. Hmm. So there, there is definitely, like I went from a person who was pretty chronically depressed and definitely chronically negative. And here's a little kind of subplot and that is that at the time I was writing a lot of songs, producing recording albums, and I got a lot of great songs out of the melancholy, you know, the melancholic artist stereotype. So I was a bit afraid of actually getting better.
I thought I would lose my creative edge. Not true the depressed, creative people that tend to produce a lot of great work. Mm-hmm. aren't clinical. When they get to the point where they're really, really sick, they stop being creative.
So it may be that melancholic genetic that does set you up for being a little creative. But out of control Depression definitely doesn't help the situation. And managing the depression doesn't kill your creativity. So that's a little bit of a subtext. But long story short, I did get better and I am better now.
Like my default talk about returning to joy. My default is it's happy most of the time. I'm happy. I still feel very deeply, particularly when interpersonal things happen. You know, relationships get stretched, stressed out. I probably feel a little deeper than the average person and can get a little derailed by things emotionally and lose sleep and stuff.
But I always return now back to home base, which for me is joy. So can you change? Yes, you most certainly can.
When I think about trying to experience more joy, I automatically think of adding things into my life, like going on a cool adventure or hanging out with fun friends or running and jumping in the ocean. But you're actually saying a big part of experiencing joy is in your thought life?
Well, I do think it's choices you make too, and I think it's very important to engage in self-care. If you want your mood to be solid, you need to self-care. That means get exercise, eat healthy, make sure to take care of your social needs.
Don't expect to just be happy outta nowhere. We're adults now and we need to take care of ourselves. We need to be like, okay, what do I do to make myself happy? I'll tell you what I did. I live in Orlando, Florida. It's a hundred today.
Now my air conditioning is broken. So it's super hot down here and it's really hard to get exercise when it's that hot. I put a pool in my backyard. My neighbor had an aboveground pool that they gave to me, and I, it cost me a lot of money to get it all set up. It was in sacrifice, but I needed that opportunity to exercise and cool off.
And every time I swim I thank God that I did that and I thank myself that I did that. So we need to also make really positive choices. Can you give us some, and I know you've written whole books on some of these things, but what are some easy to implement steps that we could maybe even take today that could start to change our outlook and find joy in the everyday?
I would incorporate the self-care. Don't think that it's an option for you to, to neglect or worse yet harm yourself in any way. The analogy I use is if I had a rusty bike in my yard and I'd throw it in the dump. Would that be okay? Of course it would be okay if I did that with my neighbor's bike.
Would it be okay? Of course it wouldn't be okay. Why would it be okay for me to throw my own bike, rather my neighbors because I own my bike. Well, the reason people beat themselves up or neglect themselves is because they think they own themselves. They do not. God owns them and they have a responsibility to care for themselves.
So even if you don't love yourself or care about yourself enough to care for you, for you do it for God until you can actually do it for yourself as well. And so that's number one. And the other is, I would start with, managing your Thought life using a simple exercise that I wrote called FAR. Think of it as, put these things far from you.
Find, find, argue, and replace. So the first thing is you find whatever the event is in your life that bothered you. And then the feeling, you find the feeling, identify i e. The event, the feeling, and then finally the thought. What are you thinking? Try to identify what you're thinking that is tripping you up.
Then you argue with it. In order to argue with it. You use a list of, and I'll give you a term to put in a search engine, distorted thought styles, and then put CBT, like cognitive behavioral therapy. And identify which of those distorted thought styles you're using. So for instance, things like catastrophising.
Making things worse. Or over-generalizing. Thinking if someone has one trait, it must be their whole self. Black and white thinking. You know, either if someone's a good guy or a bad guy, nothing in between. These are all distorted thoughts, styles that people engage in. Real common one for people with depression is emotional reasoning.
My emotions are telling me the truth. My emotions are standalone evidence of what's true. That's a distorted thought style. Also, mindreading is a big one. When people are depressed, they think they know what people are thinking. They often think people don't like them or whatever. So you identify which of those distorted thought styles you're using.
And once you do that, then you go on to replace that thought. That's more nuanced and detailed and truth-based. You don't leave out the negative because the reality is life is tough. Like Zanita pointed out, you know, people are too optimistic, they lose it on that score. So tell yourself the truth, what's really going on, but don't negatively skew it.
Give an accurate picture. . When you use that exercise, it's sort of like you're walking on the dark side of the road and you're not going to the other side of the road where it's just sunshine, but you're kind of going in the middle so you don't get scorched by the sunshine, but you're also not in the doldrums.
You kind of stay in that sweet spot in the middle and it can really level you out to do that.
That's really helpful. Find. Argue. Replace. FAR. I'm going to remember that. Um, can you talk a little bit about the role that people have in our experience of joy ? When it comes to mental health, there seems to be this idea that when you're healing from something, you kind of do it alone. Like you see a counselor, you do your journaling, you work on your thoughts. But when I think about my own personal journey, the thing that's been most healing has actually been the people who have come around me. And so, what's your thoughts on that? Like what's the balance.
Yeah. , I think we do need people. People need people. And what I tell people that are struggling with, for instance, mood disorder or some event that happened that's really blown them off course, is I say, come up with a one sentence version, a paragraph version, a page version, a chapter version, and a book version of what's happening.
Write ' em down and then select the right version for the right situation. So if it's just an acquaintance, someone you don't know well instead of saying fine, you say, actually I'm struggling with some things, but I'm getting better and I'm praying and I know God's gonna see me through. One sentence.
The one paragraph versions a little bit longer, a little more detail, a little more personal. And then the page version's gonna be a little more. And then the chapter version is your best friend. And you tell 'em. What happens to people with depression is they isolate and they have this huge sort of roaring pain going on inside of them, you know, and there's so much commotion internally.
And then there's these people that have no idea what's going on inside of them. And they start feeling dissociative. I'm living in a totally different world than the people around me. And then they start isolating cause they can't handle that feeling. What has to happen is that person has to break through that veil, so to speak, and start to let the people around them know that they're struggling and then really pray that you calibrate it.
You know, don't overwhelm someone you don't know very well with too much detail. But then don't unders share either. You know, it's finding that sweet spot where you're sharing enough, but not oversharing. And did you find Zanita that that was, helpful to start being honest with people about what you were going through?
Yeah. I think at the beginning I tried to take it all on myself and I was like, I don't want to burden people like this is too much because everyone knows me as this joyful person. But definitely once I started letting people in more was when I started to feel like I was actually healing and making progress and people knew that I was going through something anyway, it wasn't like it was a hidden thing.
Um, but you kind of have to let people in, in order for them to be able to help you and for you to be able to process things with them.
Most people, if someone is honest with them about a struggle, they're gonna be sensitive. They may not know what to say. They may say something awkward, but they care. A lot of people care. Take advantage of that. Give them a chance to serve. Jesus asked for water. You know, it's not always about you giving to them. Sometimes it's about giving them a chance. That's biblical to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. It's like Velcro. You gotta open Velcro up to get it to attach.
I really like that idea of allowing others to serve, you know, giving them that opportunity as well and finding healing through community. If we are someone who is journeying with someone who's struggling, you know, we may not be a professional and we should encourage them to seek professional help, obviously, but are there any ways we can help bring joy to people or help them find some joy if we are sort of supporting a friend or a, a loved one who's going through a really rocky patch. How can we support them in that?
Yeah. You mean someone's kind of down in the dumps? How do we get them through? So first of all, you have to kind of determine if they want to get better. There are form forms of depression where well basically built their personality around being Eeyore, like we say.
And so that can be frustrating. And the only reason I'm mentioning that is not to put those people down, but to say if that's what's going on and you're just really determined to help them and nothing works, it might be because they really don't wanna change. They get secondary benefits somehow out of being down.
You know, people care about them and come around them, administer to them, and that feels good to them. A lot of times people will have attachment issues in their history where they weren't given enough attention maybe as children, and then they use these attention seeking behaviors, and that can be one of them.
So you have to determine that first. Do they really want help? If they really do, I would say help them, like send 'em to abide.network. They don't have to necessarily spend a fortune, but they may want to get some mental health services, either from Abide or somewhere else. Remove the stigma. Tell them, you know, I've seen a therapist, or I've seen a mental health coach, or I've been to workshops, I've needed help with my mental health. You know, be honest with them about your own journey. And remove the stigma and then help them. A lot of times it involves helping them find help because when people are down, they don't have enough self-worth to even try to feel better, so you may have to come alongside them, but that can get frustrating cause sometimes they're super self-sabotaging and everything you try, they'll find some way to reck it. So just be ready for some disappointments if you're gonna get into that line of work. But, but then there's gonna be those people that are super responsive and grateful and really do get a lot out of the help that you give them. So the most important thing is to come alongside the person and really listen to them.
There isn't a whole lot of listening in our world today. There's a lot of talking, people talking past each other, people giving their opinion about things, and then fighting. But there's very little really true active listening and just listening can be hugely therapeutic. Now you have to be careful with that too, because there's people that'll complain and complain, and they'll actually be reinforcing their own negative thought cycles and you'll be helping him do that. So it's not easy to figure out exactly when to draw that line and when not. But I know, at least for me, that there have been times in my life when I just needed someone to listen. And it wasn't that I was gonna complain indefinitely, it was that I just needed help through something.
And finding that person who is willing to listen was just hugely helpful. And the best way to do active listening, it's very simple. Use the acronym ear, E-A-R. Empathy equals ask and reflect. You do , two things. When you're using thing, you ask questions out of a place of curiosity and love. Open-ended questions.
They usually begin with what or how. So, how have you approached this situation in the past? How are you feeling about this in contrast, the way you felt about that. So ask those open-ended questions, and then I'm back on the E-A-R acronym.
Empathy equals ask and reflect. So the reflect is saying back to the person what you heard them say. Simply paraphrasing what they're saying. Or sometimes it's listening for a while and then saying, okay, wait a minute. Make sure I have this right, that's just the best thing. I mean, I use that all the time, that active listening technique, because it's life changing, it's relationship changing, it's conflict resolution changing.
It's amazing. And so I would just use that with people that are struggling with mental health. Just let 'em know you're listening and work from there.
This is all very helpful. Um, but it just makes me curious because, just observing the world, it seems to be that after the last few years with COVID and with various crazy things happening around the world, there seems to be this explosion of depression and anxiety and loneliness. Like it's just getting more and more common. And yet there also seems to be more education and help available these days. Like we have so many podcasts and so many free resources. What do you think is getting in the way of us actually doing the things that bring us joy or being proactive about our mental health? Do you think it's that mentality that you were talking about? Like a lot of people just want to stay there or.
Well that, and also the bike, you know, where you don't value yourself because you don't realize how much God values you. You, there's a self-respect that comes with the gospel when you realise
Jesus would've died if it was only you. That's how much He values you, and you really savor the truths of the gospel that you can actually start to say, well then I'm honoring God by caring for myself, aren't I? You know, cause he cares about me, but he doesn't have hands and feet like I do, so he can't make a nice meal for me. He can't draw a bath and put Epsom salts in it. You know, he can't pick up the phone and call an old friend. He's not gonna do those things for me, but he would like me to do them for myself . So I think that that's the biggest hurdle, is just valuing yourself the way God has valued you, or at least moving in that direction.
I mean, think about it, the way that we as human beings get our social battery charged is through eye contact. Looking in people's eyes and interacting with them in a social context face-to-face. That all went out the window with covid and people were just literally emotionally deprived.
They had literal neurotransmitters that were compromised in their brains because of the weirdness of all the quarantining and stuff. So that's why anxiety and depression went up, or at least part of the reason. So we need each other. That's a basic, axiom of human behaviors that we need one another.
The church is a great, you know, place to connect and form relationships, healthy relationships and otherwise, but often the church has had a stigma around mental health.
Some of the psychology of it and stuff, particularly the Adventist church I'm thinking of, cause that's the context that I know best. But yeah, we need to, I feel like as a church in some ways, we need to dismantle some of those myths or give people permission to seek help because there seems to be some blockage, you know, we're talking about blockages to help.
And I think one thing that possibly believing psychologists like yourself can do is. Break down some of those myths and give church members permission to do something in a scientific space, not just to pray and hope that it'll get better or to spend time with our church family and think that it will magically heal some of the, illnesses that we have.
Can you speak to that just , a little?
Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. I think we need to lift the stigma on mental health. My first 13 weeks book was 13 Weeks to Peace, and then it was 13 Weeks to Love and then 13 Weeks to Joy. So when I wrote my first book, the title that I chose for the book was Jesus Psychology, and the press told me, you ecology in the title, it'll kill the sales of the book.
Because even in Adventism, which doesn't make sense because Ellen White wrote reams about human psychology. But for some reason that fear of psychology entered into even our religious life. And, they said it would kill the sale of the book.
But anyway, yeah, that's a factor. And the way we can, I think, lift the stigma is to start having mental health interventions. That have a biblical grounding that will help feel more open and willing to try things and think about it, you know, psychology, the field is very saturated with new age ideas and sometimes some really strange progressive ideas, strong worldly tendencies.
There's a lot of great people in the field, by the way that are just really unselfish with people that just really wanna help people on a deep level. And so I don't disparage the field entirely, but there are worldly elements and there are approaches to psychology that are very grounded in new age and spiritualistic concepts.
So you can sort of understand why there'd be some reticence. The way that I like to address reticence is to say, well, you know, what can we do? With this counseling model to make it acceptable and you can make it acceptable if you offer coaching, mental health coaching is what we call what we do through Abide.
If you offer it and you say that it's got biblical foundations and it does have biblical foundations cause everyone is a believer. There have been a lot of people that have, that you would call conservatives that have come to us for help. But I'll give you another example. The Lord led me, I live right down the road from Neville Peter,
he's a wonderful singer songwriter. I literally ride my bike to his house and the Lord with him on a project called Jesus Meditations. And by the grace of God, I was able to raise the money to work with him in creating 120 sound files where I start out with a devotional and then he sings the scripture song and the whole thing begins with deep, slow breathing, which has been shown to help calm the nervous system and open up certain systems in the brain. It's tremendously helpful. I knew that using the word meditation would be off-putting to some people, but that's why I called it Jesus meditations. And it's very biblical cause he does a scripture song.
And I explained to people why the breathing is so important and the physiologic reasons behind it. And I have found, for the most part, because I answer the objections calmly and patiently , I find that people are really open and blessed by it, and we've had tremendous reception among people using those Jesus meditations.
So there's ways that you can share some of the things that you would get from a secular therapist that are helpful, things that are, that Christians will embrace and feel safe with. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense. I actually did the Jesus meditations for a period and I found it really helpful as well. Um, we are running out of time, Jennifer, and I know it's a bit later for you over there.
You've given us a lot of practical advice as to what we can do when we are struggling. But I guess to finish up, can you give some practical advice for those people who are actually doing quite well? How can they experience or implement some of that so when they do find themselves struggling, they're a bit more like equipped. Hmm. That's really good. Make sure you build a really healthy social circle and that you have people you can trust that you can turn to, to help you through things, cultivate your relationship with God. It doesn't have to be heavy or exhausting or excruciating in any way. Just have some quiet time every day. You can do it creatively. I live on a lake, and I sit on my pier and talk to Jesus while I'm watching the ducks. I'm not the type. Go in a corner in my house, fold my hands and close my eyes.
I just have to be looking at nature. And I think God respects that we're all gonna worship him. But find a way to commune with God on a regular basis so that your relationship with him is solid. You feel connected to him, you know that you're connected to him and then when trials come, which they inevitably will, you'll have those resources at your command.
I think those are a couple places you could start.
Good-o! Well, if people want to know more about you and what you were doing, uh, where can they find you?
You can find me. I always tell people I'll be the first one they catch in the time of trouble because I'm all over the web name.
You can look up jenniferjill.org that's my personal website. Or you can just go to abide.network. And, I'm on Twitter, and Instagram. I started a TikTok account, which is kinda a stretch for me, but, I'm all over the place. Excellent. Well, thanks so much Dr. Jennifer
We really appreciate you being here with us. It's a real privilege to spend some time with you today. And may God continue to bless the work that you're doing, which is really important for people's mental health and wellbeing.
Yes. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Love what you're doing.
You too. Yeah. God bless.