ENGAGING YOUR SPIRITUAL JOURNEY AS A THERAPIST, WITH WHITNEY OWENS | EP 25

[DAWN GABRIEL]
Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Welcome back. This is Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast. Today, I am going to be showcasing a reverse interview that I did with my good friend Whitney Owens, who is from the podcast, Faith in Practice. She’s also a consultant with Practice of the Practice and she and Alison Pidgeon are the main consultants for Group Practice Boss. So if any of those sound familiar, this episode is going to be for you. We are going to talk about the spiritual life of the therapist and how to engage in your own spiritual journey. So this goes out to all my therapist friends and listeners. Whitney and I, our friendship goes back a long way and so we just have a really good time talking about how we integrate it into our personal sessions, how we integrate spirituality into our life and how that impact us as therapists.

As I’ve been doing this podcast, Faith Fringes since April, 2021, so it’s only been like four or five months and I am loving it. I’m loving everything I’m talking about. I’m loving the interviews, but I’m also noticing a passion of mine that is coming up is spirituality in the therapist and how important that is to engage that and to practice soul care, which to me I will be into more of what soul care is to me. I’m going to actually do a three-part series on it. I’m going to do an overview of what soul care is in general and then I’m going to talk to some other, interview some other people about self-care, but then I’m also going to focus specifically on soul care for therapists.

The reason I am getting really specific on that is because as I’ve known, and as I sit with my team over the past six years, I just see so much of my team, myself. We hold sacred space clients, and sometimes we can hear a lot of things that it’s just really hard for us to do that alone and we need to take care of that and we need to not do it alone, and we need to have some good community around us. But I’ve noticed that engaging in soul care as a spiritual practice is huge for me personally, it’s huge for my team and it kind of takes healing and kind of unpacking some of what we’re hearing to a whole new level. So that’s why I’m going to spend some time just focusing on therapists. I am soul care.

Today is going to be one of those episodes. You’re going to hear more on kind of diving beneath the surface and you’re going to hear more on how you can take care of yourself as a therapist. I’m sure, even if you’re not a therapist, I think you will get some things out of this. You’ll get behind the scenes and see how therapists really think. But also I wanted to say, if you are a therapist and you’re listening to this and you want to hear more I am actually going to be launching some retreats that actually spend a weekend where we can practice self-care together so that we’re not doing this alone. And I actually am going to be running a beta, I’m calling it a beta test because I need some therapists to really weigh in on what they really need when they go away on a soul care retreat. And I am going to be doing that January 14th through 16th, 2022 in beautiful Colorado.

Yes, I know it is winter, but a lot of times it’s beautiful here in the winter and we have a cozy hotel, retreat center that we’re going to be at in Monument, Colorado. It’s going to be in the forest. You’re going to be able to see Pike Sneak in the mountains. There’s going to be fireplaces and hot tubs. So I want to let you know I’m only having 10 people come to this. I want to keep it small, but I want people who are going to be able to give me feedback and really help me figure out what is really needed at a retreat for therapists who want to focus on their spirituality and who want to focus on soul care. So if that is at all interesting to you, I’d love for you to reach out to me by email, dawn@faithfringes.com and ask for more specifics.

Again, that’s going to be January 14th or 16th. I’m looking for 10 therapists to join me, to do a beta test and kind of give me feedback on a retreat I want to start running. And because it’s going to be a beta test, I’m going to offer it a really low price, the only time I’ll be doing that. It’ll usually be more. So I’m probably going to offer that half of what I normally would. So please reach out to me if that is something you’d be interested in, coming at a retreat where we can just really focus on soul care together as therapists diving into our spirituality and just being in community with others who get it, who get what you go through every day, of holding that sacred space for clients and just needing a break to pour into ourselves and to maybe connecting to your face, connecting to God and allowing that spirituality to fill you up where sometimes we get depleted. Well, not sometimes a lot of times we get depleted and we don’t have a lot, much more to give. So I welcome you to just reach out by email or if you have my phone number, shoot me a text and I would love to hear from you. Well, let’s listen in as Whitney interviews me. We kind of have a really good talk back and forth about engaging your spiritual journey as the therapist. Thank you again for listening
[WHITNEY]
On the Faith in Practice podcast today, I have got my good friend, Dawn Gabriel. She is a repeat coming on the show, but she’s got some new things to share with us. So I’m super excited to have her. Dawn is the owner of Authentic Connections Counseling. It’s a private practice in Castle Rock, Colorado. She is a private practice consultant and the host of the Faith Fringes podcast. She is a licensed professional counselor, over 15 years experience, has worked in a variety of settings, such as college campuses and community mental health and private practice. She’s passionate about helping people achieve freedom from what’s keeping them stuck and specializes in creating space to look deeper into your spirituality and faith free from judgment and shame. Dawn loves having deep conversations over Chawan. She’s a hiking trail enthusiast, mom of two boys who love living in Colorado. Welcome to the show Dawn.
[DAWN GABRIEL]
Thanks Whitney. I’m so excited to be here.
[WHITNEY]
Glad to be talking with you. That’s always a pleasure of mine. So let’s kind of just dive in here because I’ve had you on the show before. So if people want to get more of your backstory. They can go back and watch that or listen to that. Watch it? I don’t know what I’m talking about. That was, I don’t know, in the first maybe episode 10 or something like that. So if y’all want to hear more from Dawn you can go back and hear about our practice journey. And we talked about making faith an important part of your practice in that episode and that was great. So now she’s kind of doing some other things around spirituality with counselors. So we’re going to talk today about how do you bring in the spiritual journey in the work that you do as a therapist personally, and in the way you run your business? So I’d love to just kind of start a conversation about that.
[DAWN]
Yes. I think it’s so important. I feel like, especially now where we’re at in this world and our nation spirituality has really become important to people more than ever. People are really excited about talking about it because I think they’ve realized we can’t count on things we used to think we can count on and we really just need to have something deeper to ground ourselves on. So even people who didn’t believe in spirituality before I feel like are seeking it, but especially therapists, if that’s been part of their faith journey, I think are really seeking that out too.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. And that’s been so evident through your podcast that you launched, what, about a month ago? When did the podcast launch?
[DAWN]
A month ago and a few days, but nobody’s counting.
[WHITNEY]
That’s right. And you had what, a hundred downloads pretty quickly, right?
[DAWN]
Yes. I was shocked and humbled, but yes, it was awesome.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. So I think that just speaks to what you’re talking about, such a need to have these conversations. People want to connect over faith, over their journey, over their pain. So actually, can you share a little bit about the podcast real quick so people understand what Faith Fringes is all about?
[DAWN]
Sure. Thank you. That’s kind of you to say that yes. Faith Fringes, we really just focus on a place for people to explore more of their spirituality and their faith journey. We kind of want to leave out the judgment and the shame, which a lot of people associate more with religion. So I’m asking people to kind of step out of maybe past hurts and kind of look at how can I connect to God and maybe on a deeper level or a different level and let go of maybe past preconceived notions? So there’s been a lot of, unfortunately I’ve been hearing a lot of stories of religious trauma and spiritual abuse and just people realizing, but I still want to connect with God. So a lot of times we look at yes, people exploring that spirituality. We definitely go into stories. It’s a big part of the show, exploring how pain, hurt and doubt can actually lead us closer to God and then just authentic community, like having important conversations around things that really matter. And then the last I have to bring in how hiking trails are transformational and really spiritual to me. And I love hearing stories about that too.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, definitely. And see, I was on one of your episodes in the first 10, I think. So for those of you that are listening, if you’re thinking about spirituality, which if you’re listening to this podcast, you should be, so you should head on over to Faith Fringes and listened to it. And then she did an interview with me about some pain that I’ve experienced in some of my life journey. So I think y’all would probably enjoy listening to that. She’s just got some other guests and great stuff, so really encourage people to listen to her podcasts. But I want to get started on how do we as therapists kind of explore our own spirituality and how does that impact our work?
[DAWN]
This is one of my favorite topics. My team, I have nine therapists and a couple admin. So a lot of times in our team meetings, they have indicated they want to explore this. So it’s kind of been a growing thing the last two years, I would say of our six years. So we have been diving in as a team, but what I’ve noticed is, so depending on where you went to grad school, if you went to a Christian grad school or secular, that kind of changes when you’re in private practice, because the messages as well with any grad school, a lot of times is you can’t bring spirituality into a session. So it kind of makes you, I remember my journey when we worked at, or when I worked at a psych hospital, we had to be very careful bringing God up.

So it kind of dampened some of my exploration of my own stuff, because it was like, you can’t talk about this in session. You can’t bring this up. This is not okay. So I think, but I would disagree because I have worked with clients for 15 years now and I think people want to talk about it and it gets to the essence. Like, even if you go through all the coping skills, I know I’m talking about clients, I’ll get to the therapist in a minute, but when you go through all the coping skills and all the stuff, I still feel like there’s a piece of clients who they still need to go to a deeper level, and to me, that spirituality and more soul level stuff. So I had a mentor who used to say that sometimes psychology is more tending to the flesh, like just managing symptoms of the flesh and not really getting to the soul and not that and I kind of agree with that, but I think as believers who do have a connection with God, really integrating into how we view that as well and how we can dive in, as much as we dive into our own, I feel like we can bring that to clients too, but we have to do, it’s just like anything. You have to do your own work before you can take clients there. So that’s my intro to why we need to be working on it as therapists who have a faith.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. I love how you said that about the psychology and the symptoms. I’ll be sitting with that a little bit. You know, I really love Irvin Yalom and have read some of his books, especially about existentialism. He would say that every client is coming in and talking about fear of death, like fear of death is a part of every session. So I also think that with that spirituality, I mean our ideas of death and where we go and what happens, relates to our soul work that we’re doing.
[DAWN]
Absolutely. I totally agree. In fact I just went through a training last year, a spiritual direction training, and one of the main themes of that, and this was by Larry Crabb, who’s a famous author and spiritual director himself and a psychologist, e’s a clinical psychologist or was, I’m sorry. He just passed away like a couple months ago. But anyway, his teaching was that actually, we all are afraid of yes, the physical death, but we view life as little deaths and what we’re afraid of. But it’s not real death. Like we, for example, when you go through a huge wound or trauma, or just in life, we make a note to ourselves like this means death to me and I will never put myself in that situation again. We build walls and defense mechanisms. So he looks at it as like false stack kind of versus what is real death to us.

And as believers actually, real death would be separation from God, like eternity away from God. That’s real death. So when we’re on earth, we get mixed up with the temporal versus eternal. So realizing what has spoken death into your life that maybe you need to bring back to life really? So that’s actually where I went with my therapist. We did a team retreat last year too and we just sat around. We had a whole day retreat at my house and we sat around and I kind of was teaching this, like let’s go back and look what has spoken death to us that we need to work on and how can we connect more spiritually to God to feel that life, true life? So it was beautiful. Like everybody was crying.

I did not expect this Whitney. Like everybody was crying. Everybody wanted to talk. And I realized we need a place for therapists to engage in their own spiritual journey, connect on a deeper level because they’re sitting with people all day long. Like we are, we’re sitting with people all day long hearing stories of death or traumas, and it’s so hard. And how can we, sometimes we get overtaken by that as therapists. And if we’re not doing deep soul care work, we can get depression. We can get depressed and just feel so down and heavy if we’re not clearing some of this work.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, you’re making me think of times where sitting with clients where you leave that heaviness is so hard to manage and figuring out how do you let go of that heaviness.
[DAWN]
Yes, absolutely.
[WHITNEY]
Well, good. Well, I’d love to hear how can therapists do this on their own? Like how do you find your spirituality? How do you find your healing? What kind of recommendations would you have for people listening?
[DAWN]
Yes, I think first of all, like just allowing yourself some space to explore it. I know part of my podcasts, we talk a lot about, have you really looked at your faith or your religion and kind of separating out your relationship with God from maybe the religion you’ve been brought up in or the, for me it was conservative, evangelical Christian, and there was a lot of to-do lists that maybe didn’t match the Bible. So I think really knowing your own faith and really owning it as your own. If you’ve never done that, I would say I would start there and really connecting with God and asking him, like, how do you view me? How do you view the world and like, where are we, not, what does this community think of me? And what does this community say I should be doing? Just really getting personal on your own relationship to God and who he means to you.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. I mean, those that have been listening to the podcast know that I’m a therapist, but also I am a pastor’s wife? So I totally fill that dilemma. Like I’ve done some of my own work, but I so easily step back into that place of, oh, I have to be this type of person or I can’t share with people my struggles, my doubts, because I’m supposed to be a leader. And just, I have to be really intentional all the time. Like, no, be authentic, be authentic because I can so easily go right back to that place of walls up, not being vulnerable. So sometimes I just force myself to be vulnerable as awful as it feels because if I don’t, I’m going to go right back to my place with walls.
[DAWN]
Yes. And I feel like you have a double whammy because I feel like as therapists, you have to have this level of, oh, I’m supposed to have it all together with my emotions and then a pastor’s wife on top of it, Whitney, I don’t know how you do it.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Somebody told me one time, I’m going to have some messed up kids.
[DAWN]
I feel like that’s how I feel about mine too.
[WHITNEY]
They seem to be doing okay. So I’m okay.
[DAWN]
Yes, but it’s true. I think we all, I think with therapists, especially, I think we get so tired. Sometimes we just know how to sound like we’re vulnerable in deep, but it’s still a fake level, if that makes sense. And we still have to go, sometimes we need to have people in our lives who can go to an even deeper level with us. So that would be my second thing is after you’re exploring your own spirituality and your faith journey really, and is having friends at least one or two who can get even deeper in, in that authentic, vulnerable, because you can’t be vulnerable with everyone on a certain level. So yes, if you can have one or two friends who will ask the harder questions, like, what do you think God’s saying to you in this, even though it’s hard? And not as like a, I hate when people throw a Bible verse out because they don’t know what to say, just to make you feel better. I’m not talking about that, but really saying like, I know you value your relationship with God and where do you think He’s showing up in this or where is He not showing up in this and people to just really ask those questions for you.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. That’s so good. And I don’t know if you hear this from therapists, but boy, it is so hard to find people to be vulnerable with. Like as soon as I start sharing anything, they immediately share their problems because you’re the counselor. They want to tell you things and you have to listen. I mean, I literally have had to call people and before the conversation starts I have to just blurt out, “Don’t talk. I have to talk. I have to tell you something before you start talking.”
[DAWN]
Yes. It’s so true. Like, I need you to let me do this.
[WHITNEY]
Because then we just go back to that place and then we let go. We are like, now what I had to say wasn’t important when really it was so important. And if I don’t become intentional about it, I’ll just go right back there and not be vulnerable. And as I’m kind of hearing you say that I’m thinking about my own spiritual journey and I’m like, “Okay, this is good. Who do I need to open up with?” And honestly, my therapist is a big part of that. Like our therapy doesn’t, we all know this is therapy. You don’t have to have some crazy wild thing happen in your life to have a therapist. But I love it because my therapist provides me spiritual direction and can really ask me those questions and be intentional when I don’t have another hour of time where I do that with somebody.
[DAWN]
It’s so true. You’re like, I will smack down money so you will just listen to me for an hour. I need this so bad.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Most definitely. So that’s such good advice. Do you have any recommendations for people? Like how do you find those people to be vulnerable with? And like, for them to be at a deep level where we are, because we’ve done so much work as therapists, it’s so hard to find people that are that insightful. You get it?
[DAWN]
Yes. Whitney, this has been my life the last 10 years here in Colorado, especially because, well, I’d find myself, I’m drawn to other therapists. Because you can get deep and you don’t have to counsel them. That’s the other thing. If you’re at, sometimes you’re in groups, you do go into, “Oh, that must be so sad. How does that make you feel? What do you think that means?” And you just don’t want to play that role. So honestly, this, my friends make fun of me. I have this small group of five women and it took, I like prayed about it for like over a year, but I literally put out like a manifesto saying, I’m looking for a group of women. I want to go deeper spiritually. I don’t want it to be fake. I want it to be vulnerable. I don’t want drama and I don’t want to be the therapist. So I want people who can challenge me as well. Are you up for it?

They totally make fun of me now, but they appreciated it. And I was like, I am so sick of getting into groups. Like I’d be leading groups at my church or something and I would have all these women join but then I realized, oh my gosh, it’s because I’m a therapist they joined. And I was exhausted and I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I feel bad in case they’re listening, but really I was drained and I’m like, I need equal relationships. So I think you have to be intentional and ask for it. And yes, so that’s what I’ve done and to the point where it, last year was hard because the COVID, we didn’t meet, but just recently a couple of us went out to dinner and I’m like, we were like, it’s time to start up again, meeting. And I said, I want to do this new spiritual direction stuff. I don’t want to do a book study. I think we should do spiritual direction. One of them said, but will you feel like you have to lead it because we haven’t studied spiritual direction and we know that’s really important to you? Which I really appreciated [crosstalk]. And they like pulled up the email. So that, I don’t know. I hope that you just have to be super intentional and ask for what you need.
[WHITNEY]
And the importance of prayer, I mean, you prayed and prayed that God would direct you to these people. And there’s something to be said for that.
[DAWN]
Yes. And you know what, Whitney, I was thinking about this yesterday, maybe in preparation for our talk, but I realized I’m like, why didn’t I have that before? And I had went through a time of grief because my mom had passed away. It actually was the same year you moved to Tennessee, a couple of my other good friends moved away, and not Tennessee, sorry. One of my friends moved to Tennessee, you moved to Georgia, another one moved to North Carolina and then another one moved to Oregon. Like I had four close friends move and my mom died and I went into like a hole for a year, at least, or two. And I realized I went back to my old ways of just lead, just lead a Bible study. but I still remained fake. Like I had to be this person and I wasn’t able to grieve and just be, and probably be taken care of in that year.

And I just led all these stuff, which is totally Enneagram three, by the way, shout out to Enneagram number three. But then I realized I felt some more depression lingering past grief, and I’m like, I need a community where I can be real. So that’s when I was like, I have to change. So I went through a period of desert, I would say first and then like, I can’t live like this and I believe in authentic community. So I had to go after it and be real with myself. Like you’re keeping these walls up. There’s part of you that needs to deal with this.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, and when we look back on our lives like that, we see that so much of the pain, the difficulty we go through, God uses that to birth something great. Like I think about your podcast and the work you’re doing with therapists. If you hadn’t done that, work yourself, you wouldn’t be doing this great calling and really making a huge difference in people’s lives. So yes.
[DAWN]
Thank you. Yes.
[WHITNEY]
What other recommendations do you have for therapists?
[DAWN]
I think one of the things is, I think we’re afraid sometimes, especially in our clinical training, is we’re afraid to have the holy spirit enter into the session. And I feel like we need, and for me, I don’t know about you Whitney, but growing up and even in grad school, we didn’t talk a lot about the holy spirit. It was a lot of, at least I didn’t, it was a lot of cerebral. Like, I have a theology degree. I had a lot of cerebral, like intellectual awareness of God and Jesus and the Trinity, but I don’t remember sitting and experiencing the Holy Spirit a lot. And I’m not talking, I mean, it depends on where you’re at, religion and denomination. I’m not talking about just speaking in tongues or something like that. I’m talking about like, just really sitting and experiencing God in your life, like with the five senses, which is what I call more spiritual direction or more. Yes, there’s a bunch of ways you can do that. So I think what the Holy Spirit, like really being aware of how you can experience God in different ways. Whether you believe in the Trinity or not there, I think there’s an experiential way to connect with God that I wasn’t taught growing up. And I feel like as a therapist, you can do that and then you can also bring it into session, but you have to do the work first.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. You know, this was a big part of my program.
[DAWN]
Was it, really?
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Or maybe I was just ready to talk about it. I don’t know, but yes, I went to a program, Richmont shout out. It was an integrated program where we took all the clinical courses, but we also took some theological courses alongside those. So that was really cool. Like we took a class on theodicy, like why bad things happen to good people. Love it. Of course, we never figured out the answer.
[DAWN]
There’s a few books on it and I don’t know if they figured out the answer either.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Actually are you familiar with David Benner?
[DAWN]
Yes, I forget —
[WHITNEY]
Yes. So he, you were talking about Larry Crabb earlier, he was a professor at my graduate school. I never took his class. It only popped up every other year and just the way it went, I never got to take it, which was really unfortunate, but some of my friends, wonderful. But David Benner also did some adjunct at my school and gosh, one of his classes was about spiritual direction and we read all, he has like a three-part book series, like the gift of being yourself. I can’t remember all of them right now. You’re familiar. We read those books and we went on a retreat and that was the class.
[DAWN]
Oh, I love it.
[WHITNEY]
Oh and his wife came and she does art therapy and so she actually put up the picture of Rembrandt’s the prodigal son and we all looked at it for an hour. I just sat there and looked at it and then we wrote about it and he would give us some things to go sit. I remember sitting by a river and just focusing on a Bible passage and it was just beautiful. And I remember going back to hiking, I could have talked about this on your podcast. We were hiking, I sat beside a river and we were walking in a line as a class, so humorous and I just was like, oh, I don’t have to work for my faith. I can just walk. I can just be me. And it was whew. It was really powerful. So when I started grad school, my idea was, oh, I’m going to save everybody for Jesus. I’m going to get everybody, they’re going to come in and we’ll tell them about Christ. They’re going to say the salvation prayer and counseling. And then, yes, I got my act together while I was in grad school and really changed the way I was thinking about things.

But I also, David Benner, one of the things he said to me was he had had a client come in and the client was not faith-based. And the client said to him, “I do not want you praying for me. Don’t you do any of that stuff. Even when we’re not in session, I don’t want you praying for me.” And he was like, “Well, I do whatever I wanted outside of session.” So that really inspired me the idea of like, we pray for our clients, even when, like we bring the Holy Spirit to their lives, regardless if they want it or not. And then it’s amazing and you can probably tell so many stories too, where we sit with clients, something comes to our head. We’ve been praying for them and some passage or some song or whatever it is and then you feel really embarrassed and awkward and you’re like, “I was thinking about you the other day and this came to mind,” and they’re like crying? “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what the gods said to me the other day where I’m…” And it’s just beautiful. So when we just make that space for the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t have to be all intense. It can just be, you sit down and invite the Holy Spirit. He lives inside of us. So you really don’t even have to invite Him. He’s already there.
[DAWN]
Yes. I mean, I love that. I’ve talked with my team about that saying like we are made in God’s image. So we do, we have the Holy Spirit, whether we are in touch with it or not. And I mean, what better way to show love? And like, that’s one of the callings. They will know we are believers by our love. And what ways to show love by creating this sacred space for our clients to be safe, non-judgmental, compassionate. And we’re sitting there offering this love that is still showing them God, that’s still showing them that huge, sacred. I don’t know. I just love it because even if we never say anything about God, they’re still experiencing who we are in the spirit.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. So when I was in my last semester of graduate school, or my last year, I took a psychodynamic course and my whole senior paper was about how just the relational component with God and how we were created as relational beings and He’s always in communication and always in relationship. And it’s when we’re authentic that we show Him to people and when we experience His love and how like that acceptance is part of the psychodynamic therapy we do with our clients. And it was the best paper I ever wrote. My teacher actually, I’m just going to brag, he saved it so they could show other people. He was the president of the school, Enneagram type one out there. But that is totally the way I think of therapy. It’s just being Christ to our clients, accepting them, loving them, whatever it is, being with them in their junk and how healing that can be for them.
[DAWN]
Yes. And if you’re not comfortable with that yourself, if you haven’t really figured out for yourself, it’s going to be hard to do with your clients. So I think just allowing space for you to be comfortable with God and how He interacts every day that I think that’s important.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. And I was talking to someone the other day about triggers. I wish I could remember who I was talking to. But anyway, the person had said, when we have triggers, that’s when we’re reminded of the things God wants to work on in our lives.
[DAWN]
Oh my gosh. Huge.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. And I think about people I know, or clients I’m working with where I get triggered in session and you have to hold it together and care for them. But then later I’m like, I’m going to talk to my therapist about this. You know, I’m going to have to do some journaling about this and the importance of God’s kindness.
[DAWN]
Yes, yes. Showing up of, hey, I still want to work on this and set you free.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, definitely. Well, Dawn let’s say somebody’s listening to this podcast right now and they’re like, this is my jam. I really want to work on my soul, my spiritual growth. How can they get in touch with you? What kind of things can they do with you as far as getting their faith and all that good soul care stuff
[DAWN]
So you can listen to my podcast, Faith Fringes. It’s on just about anything right now, but Apple. If you want to listen to Apple Podcasts and review it, that’d be great. Rate and review. But I actually offer an email course through my website and podcast. So you could just go to faithfringes.com. My email course, it sounds intense, but it’s really just one email, one short email a week for eight weeks, and then you have a journaling workbook that is fillable online, or you can print it out and journal on it, but it’s kind of an experiential like spiritual journey. It helps you examine your past faith journey, your current, and it also does some experiential spiritual experiences. I would just recommend that because that kind of jumpstarts you into what a lot of stuff we’ve been talking about.
[WHITNEY]
That’s so great. I’ve been sitting here thinking about just the stuff you’re sharing. You’ve got a good book on your hands.
[DAWN]
What do you mean? Oh, you mean from my podcasting? Wow.
[WHITNEY]
No, just in general, like the idea of eventually writing a book about the sole care of the therapist, I think it would be a beautiful thing and it’s something that’s, you’re like writing it down. It’s so needed. And I mean, I will just say to you, and I’ve said this, but, and I’m going to say it on the podcast, when I hear your podcast, you are just in your element. Like I’ve known you for a long time, but when I hear you on the podcast, I’m like, that is her life right there. Like, that is it. You know what I mean? Like, you’re good at lots of things, but I just, you come alive in a different kind of way and I contribute that to God and the calling on your life.
[DAWN]
Wow. Whitney, thank you. That means a lot to me. I think, I didn’t know that it showed, I didn’t know how much the podcast was going to make me come alive until I did it. And it was terrifying. Those first five episodes were terrifying because it really is my life and my ideas about life and the five pillars are kind of like how I do life. So anyway, it was, but I love it. And my goal, not my goal, but my desire, my dream, I hope is to actually run spiritual retreats. I feel like I come alive around groups of people talking about this stuff. So not just the podcast. I’d love to offer retreats and offer space for therapists to just kind of walk through this together.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. So good. Well, you’ll get there, I definitely think. And I’m excited to share you with so many people listening to the show today and so they can follow you and get to know you. So I appreciate you coming on the show today.
[DAWN]
Thank you so much. I appreciate being on it.

Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up.

Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.