87- Widows – How to Deal with Trauma with Licensed Professional Counselor, Michelle Croyle
In this episode, we have special guest Michelle Croyle who is a licensed professional counselor specializing in helping Christian women recover from trauma and anxiety. Michelle provides informative content with the integration of the Christian faith and mental health topics, coaching, and practical resources to enhance your spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and relational health.
You’re in for an insightful and transformative conversation with her. In this episode, Michelle shares her inspiring journey of how she became a counselor and the story of how she started her own practice, “Abundant Freedom Counseling.” You’ll also hear how she discovered her passion for podcasting and started her own show, “Mental Health for Christian Women.” The discussion delves into the powerful therapeutic technique called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) that Michelle uses to help her clients heal from trauma. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of how EMDR works and how it can bring healing to those who have experienced overwhelming events and emotions. As a Christian counselor, Michelle believes in integrating faith into her practice, allowing her clients to find meaning and healing through their relationship with God. She shares how faith can be a powerful source of support and comfort during difficult times, and she provides practical insights on how to embrace spirituality in the healing process.
If you’ve ever experienced trauma or anxiety and are looking for ways to heal and grow spiritually and emotionally, this episode is a must-watch! So, sit back, relax, and join us in this enriching conversation with Michelle Croyle as we explore the path to abundant freedom and healing through faith and counseling. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe to our channel to stay tuned for more empowering content. Thank you for being a part of our community, and remember, you are not alone on this journey of healing and growth.
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Transcription Content Here
[Music] welcome to Widow too soon this is your
host Michelle Bader eversole unfortunately Mark is not here today but as always our kids come first and it
sounds like Alexis has something at the school tonight he says something about Locker night and decorating your locker
even though I think like fourth grade he’ll have to tell us about that when he comes back
but I think they’re starting lockers earlier and earlier so anyways that’ll be fun to talk to him about that let me
think of anything big since we last recorded just living life you know summer my oldest is gonna go back to
college in a couple weeks so we’ve been busy doing stuff for him trying to get him all ready he starts in a couple
weeks his sophomore year at Washington State University um just we got back from Boise I talked
about Boise last week and just been kind of like getting back into life and been
busy with a lot of grief recovery clients which I absolutely love anyways I’m gonna get right into the episode
Mark and I will talk more next time we record about what’s been going on because I’m really excited because I
have a special guest for you today her name is Michelle croyle and I’m
going to tell you a little bit about her and then we’ll get to know her so she is a licensed professional counselor she
provides informational content with the integration of the Christian faith and mental health topics coaching and
practical and beautiful resources to enhance your spiritual and mental emotional physical and relational health
so this is a really fun story about how I met Michelle so last week I was
running I listened to this podcast business school podcast something like
that with Adam Schwab something like that I’ll get the exact link it’s a really great
um podcast anyways listening to it on my run and I hear this woman talk about her podcast
and I was like I need to I need to get her on our podcast because this sounds amazing And I memorized her email while
I was running like you know where you think about letters that go with other letters I was doing that and I got home
and I emailed her immediately and she said yes she loved me on her podcast so Michelle how are you doing today hi
Michelle I’m doing well yeah so can you tell us the name of your podcast I
didn’t want to say it wrong no it’s okay it’s mental health for Christian women yeah so that was the title that Drew my
attention when I was like oh I want to talk to her so so tell us first before
we really get started a little bit about just like who who’s Michelle Coyle like a little bit about who you are and maybe
about how you got started with counseling and with podcasting and let’s
just start talking sure um so I had a degree in Communications
and journalism and and um basically it was because uh
I I went in for Behavioral Health and thought I might do counseling I wanted
to help people even in high school I knew that’s what I wanted to do but um I found that uh it was just not
something I was ready for as a college student so I moved into my minor being
my major and that’s what I graduated with and then um years later we had three kids
um oh let’s see probably eight down to three eight down two
um and I said to my husband I think I’m supposed to go back to school for my counseling degree oh wow and
um he’s you know he was supportive and and I went to Liberty and got my masters in professional counseling and then
um because I homeschooled my kids and like you said kids come first right family first I um just I couldn’t get
licensed you have to count the hours you have to have 50 000 hours within like a
five year Max and I wasn’t about to go full time while the kids were young and needing me so
um I didn’t didn’t work in my field until so I got the degree in 20 uh
January of 2011 so I officially graduated in December of 2010 and then I
didn’t actually go back to the like outside office until all three of my
kids were teenagers and that was only very part-time so I did a little bit of
here a little bit there um right but it was still pretty much um I could schedule it around the family
and everything then finally they all were teenagers and I could start counting these hours and right um then
once I once I was about six months away from licensure um there was something that happened and
no no fault of anybody but just something that happened at the group practice I was working part-time at and
um it just it was the time to leave and here God had had a Pinterest board that I had already done of oh man someday if
I ever have my own practice I had no idea it was like for now you know so in 2019 I um I just I was like I think
God’s saying now so um it worked and I did it and then the pandemic came and it
filled my practice and I have it back so yeah the pandemic I mean it’s awful
and I you know I I think that it existed
um but as far as a counseling business a lot of people needed it so uh it turned out the the Christian
Counseling Focus was perfectly positioned for where people needed it
right and then tell me about how you got started with podcasting oh um so it was during 2020 the spring
you know like maybe a month after and things had slowed down a bit and my practice wasn’t full yet and I was in a
practice Building Group and the man who led it um basically was teaching a podcast
course and I was like I’m in and uh was nervous and unsure and now it’s like
second nature and I just love it right right and so what do you specialize in
your field so I specialize in helping Christian women recover from trauma and
anxiety and so trauma is defined by me as wound
that’s where the word comes from so in the general population they you know you might think War trauma
um the devastating one-time big events and that is definitely a trauma but also
it’s sometimes the everyday things that we deal with that are too overwhelming that we don’t have enough resources for
or enough support that we don’t know how to process don’t have the tools for
so trauma is varied but if you have a wound
it and you can’t get past it and I don’t mean past like pretending it never
happened but like really where you get kind of a time stamp on it that says
okay this is now passed and now I’m moving on if that doesn’t happen there’s
a good chance that you’re still struggling with unresolved trauma so I would guess a lot of our listeners
um have are or have been in that place I mean I’m sure you would consider it a
huge trauma you’re absolutely passing away yeah and something I wonder if you know anything about this so something I
experienced I had never experienced um after my husband died I started actually having physical things so he he died of
cancer but he actually died of a blood clot that’s his cause of death and so literally three days later I thought I
was having a blood clot I was lightheaded and I started having this anxiety that I’d never had and I read a
book that said if you especially if you witnessed a death it can change and it can give you more anxiety have you heard
of that much about that um not specifically related to a death
but knowing how the body works with trauma and such it it you know people
literally can die of a broken heart um because there is just the changes
that that happen in your nervous system when you’re overcome with things such as
grief um it can definitely have these physical effects so I’m not at all surprised that
they’ve correlated those together right
right I heard it on your podcast the other day but I don’t remember what it means can you tell us what that means and then what do you do and what what
kind of people would this be good for okay so EMDR stands for eye movement uh
reprocessing now I did it Bev eye movement desensitization and
reprocessing I think that’s the first time I’ve ever screwed it up yeah EMDR yeah
um I was thinking too much about how I was going to explain it to pay attention to what words were coming into my mouth
um so basically the eye movement part it doesn’t have to be eye movements it can be any type of what we call bilateral
stimulation okay so meaning it could be tapping on both sides of your body it
could be holding pulse or like electronic pulses that go off on in each hand it could be eye movements going
back and forth by following a clinician’s fingers or
um watching a ball on a screen that the clinician can control or having a light
bar if you’re in the office and it’s kind of like just a light that moves back and forth and you follow it with
your eyes it can also be auditory sounds so it’s um they can you know do it in in each
year so it’s not really about the eye movement although that’s what’s been tested and shown to be very effective
for trauma scientifically they’ve done studies and and EMDR does help resolve
trauma um the thing with the bilateral stimulation that there’s probably more
to this um because we’re still learning more and more the whole trauma field and what it
does to your nervous system and how to heal and process it is only about 40
years old something like that 45 years old like in the 80s um is when EMDR
started to be discovered and developed and so it’s relatively new in the big scheme of things and now we have more
information about the effects of development and attachment and the body and the nervous
system the polyvagal system the somatic experience so the way your
body stores trauma so we have a lot more information now than than they used to
and it it’s just exploding right now as to like we can do something about this
stuff that maybe couldn’t have really been understood to be dealt with at this
level before and so the bilateral stimulation the the two main points that I think are the key again other people
might have more concepts of of what that is from their understanding but what I see it doing is one it keeps you in the
present moment and two it keeps you um using both hemispheres of your brain so
it’s helping you to kind of connect the the different parts of the brain we store information differently in in in
places in the brain and uh that is often tied to where our eyes Focus as well so
that’s possibly why the EMDR um uses the you know the eyes was the
start because that does help you to process um but they found that even other types
of stimulation if it’s on both sides of the body that’s that people sometimes
end up moving their eyes anyhow so like if you were to hear sounds or you know
hold pulses or whatever you might be moving your eyes back and forth anyway or tapping um but the the point of it is one to
ground you in the present two to have both sides of the brain working together and um
as you kind of take that information um in into like as a therapist what we’re
what we’re doing is we’re saying the information about how to ground into the present moment and to have full
awareness is what EMDR is the best at if you can watch and bring the body and the
emotions into it not every amdr therapist believes that but that’s what I’ve found to be the most effective
so when we’re talking about the body we’re starting with you know the the
bilateral stimulation but we’re also bringing in um an image from an experience that is
disturbing uh what that negative belief you resulted in you from that experience
the feelings that it’s bringing up in the present moment and you know at the level of the disturbance so on a 0 to 10
scale and the location of it in your body and so when you can kind of we we do
that based on what the client’s presenting with so if somebody were
overwhelmed with um grief for instance and they couldn’t
go to a store or something that reminded them of somebody right yeah we might we
might just for Simplicity say okay so when you think about the experience of getting ready to go to the grocery store
that the two of you shopped at what image comes to mind that best represents
that and then the negative belief and it’ll be different based on how the
person coded the story you know for themselves some people might be I’ll have comforted when I go to the grocery
store but if it’s a trauma wound for this person it might be I’m only going
to ever buy for one person you know and then that might be something that you
know I am always going to be alone right so like we kind of narrow it down as to and then as we process the information
is not always I feel alone you know it and it’s like
it it the negative belief the the way the brain can also bring in other
information weight I’ve been through hard things before for example this is hard and it hurts but I can find ways to
get through it again um letting your body feel What It Feels So EMDR takes the therapist takes you
through sets of like 40 seconds each something like that um
where you they say take a deep breath and release and what are you noticing now and the client’s job is to not have
to do anything but observe they say it’s like riding in a train and You observe the scenery going by so all you’re doing
is letting your whole system integrate so that it can
process what needs to be healed because when we’re in trauma we’re typically in
fight or flight and that part of the nervous system doesn’t allow our our logic to come on so if you’ve ever felt
like numb uh like you’ve numbed out or in a panic or whatever it’s putting
pause literally on the part of the brain that allows logic and so that is hard to
bring into that and when that happens you also don’t get the what I said about
a time stamp as saying this is this is over now and it feels like it’s still happening you
may still be having effects in the present moment but like for instance someone passing
away they only pass away once they’re not still passing away right but you
have moved on since they passed away but if you can’t move on since then in your
system then we need to help you get your time stamp so to speak and that could be any
number of ways but it’s customized to the client so whatever is getting in the
way of being able to to say okay like I need to grieve or I need to
um have a mindset that allows me to figure out why I can’t move on and and
to say something different that I can actually believe as well these are the types of things that eventually all get
integrated so that the time stamp happens it doesn’t mean that you won’t still be sad or that you know you would
have chosen it or anything like that it doesn’t take away the memory of the loss
or the life that was lived it simply helps your system to be able to process
it so that you’re not constantly feeling like you’re in a deep black hole or
constantly anxious or constantly numb or whatever it is oh that’s really
fascinating have that all did I explain that okay yeah okay this is really
that’s the best I’ve ever heard it explained I had an experience I shared with the listeners but I’ll share it
again because I’d love to hear your input on this because it was something strange I’m like that wasn’t regular
griefest so I’m I’m usually not in grief I have grief for my kids a lot but this
was something completely different it was like a couple weeks ago my current husband Joel and I were downtown
Portland and there was this guy who was like can you call 9-1-1 there’s somebody
dying on the road so we call 9-1-1 and it was like a homeless guy who had
overdosed and so Joel’s got the speakerphone on the other guy’s doing the CPR and I’m like standing on the
side of the road like kind of like I wasn’t there it was the weirdest experience I’m like I don’t even know
what’s happening like it brought me back to to uh to Luke’s death like at his
deathbed and because I haven’t seen anyone die or close to that since Luke died and then when the ambulance came it
was even worse because I had to call the ambulance probably 10 times over our marriage with all the different things that he had and it brought me back to
this feeling of death and this feeling of just scared and we ended up we don’t
know what happened to that guy we prayed he was okay someone got him this Narcan which helps you know opposite uh helps
people who’ve overdosed it anyways we left as the ambulance was getting there but then I just started crying and Joel
thought I was like worried about this guy which I I mean I was we prayed for him everything but he’s like it wasn’t about the guy what was happening and
then I started hyperventilating like I never do this like I couldn’t breathe he’s like what’s wrong and it was just
like I was in the smoke like the time stamp it was like I was living all those times I called the ambulance and
watching him die like all at once and it was so overwhelming and I’ve never had this experience this was like a month
ago and I’ve never had this in my whole life and then I just ended up crying and then like talking to him and getting
past it like what would you say that is like that was so strange to me yeah I didn’t even know what to think that’s a
trigger okay um that so when we go through something painful
our brain is whether we go through it or not our brain is
there to help us strategize so we can survive that’s its ultimate goal on a
very base level and so anytime it feels that it’s in danger of being able to
survive and it has a trauma or something overwhelming to its system that doesn’t know how to process or deal with uh
usually when we’re in fight or flight or freeze you know where that nervous system is like my survival feels
threatened or is threatened then what happens there is the brain basically puts like a marker on everything that
were the ways that those things are encoded and they’re not always encoded into your brain as if
um I mean as they actually happened there they can be coded um separately because you might have
certain like sounds that your awareness goes to and then maybe you remember you
saw something or maybe it’s a feeling inside of you but it fragments and
things like EMDR or other forms of trauma therapy the goal is to help to
integrate the experience from the different fragments as well as then help
you to be able to um kind of uh get that into
everyday life so that you can then integrate back into Life by by healing this so what you’re experiencing
is those markers that your brain made like Fred flags on the things like
ambulance calling danger what’s going to happen all of that your system remembered and so it experienced it in
the present as if you were back in the past and then the way that you kind of
um zoned out there was dissociation and that’s the protective mechanism it’s not
bad it’s a protective mechanism sometimes people are like oh I numbed out or you know things got black or
whatever it can be scary if you don’t know what’s happening um but it’s it’s your body’s that like
your body has a built-in kind of shutdown
um where if it is too much and it can’t it can black out it can you get numb it
can just freeze um because there’s no other strategy that seems appropriate wow well thanks
for explaining that I had no idea because that’s never happened to me and
but I haven’t been around another death situation and I felt like pieces of that
like seeing ambulances and stuff like that but not as Extreme as a few feet away from someone who was potentially
dying yeah and so that’s probably that’s the main part that brought it back right
whoa I’m like I can’t like I can’t be around this like so if we were to do EMDR around it you know we would assess
like whoever you whoever you would go to for EMDR they would likely assess for
um how the experience of the ambulance stuff in
the past is still affecting you in the present and if it’s not but you notice
that oh wait this present experience also had ties to the Past then maybe
that whole experience um but they can help you kind of decide on where to begin with the processing so
that your system can notice what’s happening and get the time stamps like you know you might feel the heart race
in those in those sets those 40-second increments or whatever you will notice
different things in those sets and then after the 40 seconds the therapist will say something like you know take a deep
breath clear it out rest you know something like that and say what are you noticing now so again the observance and
the fact that you have to put your words to it is using a different part of the brain so when we here’s here’s something
that I’d like to say to people is like Star Wars you know like if you went to see a replay of Star Wars in the movie
theater you would hear the music you would feel the like the rumbling of
things you know the the anticipation you’d see it on the big screen you’d feel like you were experiencing this
story but if you were to just read the script of Star Wars It’s just words on a page
right right and that’s the difference between our logic and our felt experience and
when we can find a way to make logical sense of our felt experience
make the meaning it helps us to be able to heal oh it’s so good well thank you I
feel like I got a little mini therapy session right there you’re welcome because I haven’t really
um figure out what that was so that’s really really interesting so how do you
integrate um you have mental health for Christian women so tell me about integrating
Christianity into your practice and how you do that and what that looks like well so my practice is called abundant
Freedom Counseling okay and yeah uh well that is god named it
um because I was like what should I name the practice and uh eventually after I tried like sunshine and things like that
it was like abundant Freedom Counseling and I’m like no I don’t like that I don’t I don’t like that it’s too long
like it’s it’s just too long for a name and um and and I kind of like wrestled with
God on it like no you know and and then finally I’m like okay fine Freedom
Counseling um but so many times it has like been he
knew best because these people who find me
come in with deep wounds and pains and they leave
when when it’s time and they’ve done their you know the work that they’ve needed to they leave feeling free from
that thing that was holding them back and so that’s my goal with the podcast because I can only practice in
Pennsylvania where I’m licensed the podcast I can’t do therapy on the you
know on the podcast or with listeners but what I can do is educate and
knowledge is power um I had emotional abuse uh growing up
in my childhood and so I knew I had these internal experiences I knew I had
this anxiety I knew you know I I had panic attacks I had all this stuff that came to a head in my probably
um like around 30. um and it it was showing much earlier but it around 30 it all kind of came to
a head with panic attacks and when I realized that was trauma and that there was a
name for it and like that that people understood what was happening I was like
oh how’d they get inside my head and there if there’s a word for it then this
must be not just me being like broken there’s got to be like yeah this
actually happens in our systems and once I had that language it was like my
passion to not only get the healing I needed for myself um to continue but to also share that
with other people because If I Didn’t Know It and you know I was in the counseling
practice at this you know in in the counseling field at this point there are people who aren’t in the
counseling field who certainly don’t know it and it would help them so that’s my passion so as far as Christian goes
that just happens to be who I am and how I Market it so that I get my ideal
client it’s not saying I can’t work with other people or that I wouldn’t but it’s
ideal for a Christian to be able to incorporate their faith to whatever level they want to and so marketing that
way allows people to know that they can bring in that part of them too with
somebody who actually understands the terminology and I work with people from all kinds of different denominational
backgrounds um but having just kind of okay here’s here’s this mindset stuff that I don’t
have to explain to somebody else exactly um you know it is is so helpful so but
um you know I just I just think that having the Christian faith is um is so important to a Christian
believer that you can’t keep it out of therapy if if you want to bring it in
how do you get wholeness otherwise so that’s why I specialized in that area because a lot of times Christian women
to get a bad rap in the sense that like they think they have to hold it all
together or they can’t have negative feelings uh you know feelings that don’t feel good and stuff and I’m like no no
no no you got some you got some messed up uh messages there God Made You with feelings uh what are they trying to tell
you let’s let’s figure out what you need and when they realize they’re not crazy they’re normal and that’s my tagline to
the podcast is you know no more crazy lady um because we feel that way but once we
have the information we’re like oh this is what’s actually happening it wasn’t me it was the trauma
or the anxiety or the situation that was too much right so what would you say to okay a lot of
our I mean all of our listeners that I know are widowed um a lot of them are in the beginning of
their journey and it’s so overwhelming just going back to my first few months
where I felt like I could barely get out of my bed it was basically my kids who kept me going
um and it was just a very dark place and I had to learn how to live again
learn how to do I mean we lose a spouse everything in your whole life changes so what like what kind of advice and that’s
kind of a big question but like let’s say you have a brand new person you were working with who was brand brand new
widowed like what what kind of tools would you give them in order to continue
living yeah well I would encourage them to live where they’re presently uh so wherever
they are in the moment what do they need because in that moment they’re in the
center of the circle right at that point they and their kids are
the ones that need the care so they don’t have to worry about how everybody
outside of that immediate circle is responding yes they’re they are the ones right there that need to do kind of that
uh triage you know they they need that and so if that means sleeping more often
if that means going to therapy if that means um exercising or just crying for hours
if that means having people over to laugh I mean it it’s up to the person
right and it may change I just did um as you had mentioned you would listen to my
my college roommate lost her husband at 53 um within three months and he was
diagnosed with cancer and then he was gone um by July um last year and you know when when I
did the podcast recording with her she was saying how you know she could be playing a game with her daughter her
daughters and their friends and be you know okay two days after his death but that didn’t mean that an hour later she
wasn’t going to be sobbing on her bed and I think just knowing that it’s all okay yeah it’s it’s all okay
you know and that you don’t have to make or be something that you aren’t like it
feel what you feel don’t feel it if you need to dissociate and not feel that’s okay too if you numb out that’s normal
too um it’s all your system trying to figure out what’s happened and regulate itself
and so just take care of you I would just start with self-care Basics if you need a nap if you need you know remember
to eat if you need somebody to remind you to eat if you need oh yeah you know yeah yeah I had that in the beginning my
mom had to make me eat I I mean she helped me remember to feed the kids and feed myself and it’s just such a
whirlwind that you can’t even explain to someone like what you feel like in those moments are so lost like literally feels
like your whole life is turned upside down even though for me I knew it was coming yeah it’s still it was not like
it was so strange yeah yeah well there’s there’s no words for it yeah like to
accurately you know pinpoint everything that you experienced and that’s because
you’ve never experienced it that way before and no one else has you know you
were your husband’s wife so what that meant to you
is going to impact you based on your relationship your history all kinds of
factors and you you are important and you’re not doing it wrong
yeah that’s great advice so last week on our I guess it’ll be a couple weeks when
they hear this we talked about releasing guilt and we we called the title don’t tie guilt to your grief and just talk
about ways to release that and how you don’t need to have guilt like do you have some advice on letting go of guilt
because it’s very very common people say if I would have done this maybe I could save their life or I wish I would have
said this or we had a fight what would be your advice about releasing guilt well if therapists call that Woulda
Coulda Shoulda you know and um is not based in reality because think
about it you weren’t planning for this person to die even if you knew it was coming right your Hope was that they
would live yeah right but if but you know you’re you were planning for this person to live so let’s say you had an
argument before someone had a catastrophic death for instance it’s you had the argument because you
were in relationship a living real relationship with them you weren’t having it because you
expected not to make up right so you can’t expect your past self to know what
your present self knows it’s it’s it’s hindsight and that bias and so hindsight
bias is not seen clearly because you weren’t the person you are today back
when it took place yeah you only learned as time went on
yeah oh that’s really really good uh just a few more questions yeah they were
really um topics that widows talk about so most not all of them but a lot of widows that
listen in widowers um have kids still living at home and are suddenly thrown into this single
parent world that is so difficult do you have some tips or advice for being like
single and like how to survive that and anything you have to say on that topic yeah I think the the main thing is to
not compare your journey to somebody else’s um because you know somebody else might be
in similar circumstances and choose to do it differently than you do and that’s okay that doesn’t mean that they’re
right and you’re wrong or vice versa it’s just people are different every
marriage was different every family makeup is different you know every
personality in that family and so if you think about being a
single parent now or a blended family you know whatever happens as time goes
on either way it’s it’s a brand new situation and so
to again normalize normalizes the big deal normalize the fact that I’ve never
done this before I’ve never I’ve never been at this age in this circumstance
with this set of you know set of things that I’m trying to accomplish so of course
it’s going to be different and it may be hard and then I may still have grief on top of it so I just you know Grace
compassionate understanding and you know being where your body is
oftentimes we travel back in time like with guilt um or the future oh my gosh what’s this
mean and what’s going to happen then and how am I going to mess this up and you really only have where you are right now
so do the next right thing like whatever that is whatever you need if that’s lunch then it’s lunch yeah if it’s
hugging your kid then it’s hugging your kid and just make each decision where you
actually are and take it to God and get support get get reach out first healthy
supports not people who are just gonna like say things that aren’t helpful oh yeah there’s a lot of that yeah yeah
that’s good and then one more topic that’s a big topic is dating again and a
lot of times there’s guilt with oh like they feel weird like um going on a date again you know all these emotions and
one a lot of them ask me how do I know when I’m ready and things like that I
love your your advice on that if someone was like okay I don’t know however long had been like
when they say to you do you think I’m ready like how would you assess how would you help them to know if they’re ready
I would just ask them are you ready I mean like if they say no
they’re probably not ready if they say no yeah and if they if they say yes but
I’m scared that’s a different thing yeah that is you know so if you know they
will know if you’re not yeah but ready doesn’t mean that you won’t feel feelings of being afraid or you know
this is new or gosh I hope this turns out right like so asking specifically
are you ready or not and if you are ready that doesn’t mean that you don’t
have a whole bunch of conflicting feelings right yes that’s good yeah
there’s if you’re not then you don’t have to yeah and that’s what I tell them like you will know same basic thing I
can’t tell you if you’re ready you will know but yes it’ll still be difficult like the first time like I was on a day
I felt so weird I felt like I was cheating I was married 17 years so it felt really weird yeah um but and it’s
whether you know like you want to push through through those feelings or not and you know there’s a million factors
that go into all that and so it’s so individual um I always tell people and then the big
misconception that we get a lot as widows is like the length of your grief
is how much you loved your your late spouse and like if you own that is a total lie yeah 100 and like I had to go
through a lot of backlash not people I knew but I have a big Tick Tock presence and there were so many you must not have loved your husband if you’re dating
again because I started dating Joel at like 18 months after Luke died and people are like no you’re you know you
must not have loved him like that and so I did a lot of videos on like that is not true I actually currently love both
of them well even even having to say
anything to them isn’t isn’t their place right so I mean even the fact that you
have to say that’s actually not true it’s like who are they to tell you what’s for your life right so if anybody
is feeling that judgment from somebody or somebody trying to put their thoughts on them did they just lose your husband
18 months ago yeah then they don’t have a right to speak to it yeah they are they you and if they’re not you then
that advice is irrelevant because it’s not where you are I would
just honor whether you date or don’t date marry again don’t whatever it is
honor yourself and what God is leading you to it doesn’t have to be something
that looks like anybody else’s Journey because you’re a unique person with your own story exactly yeah that’s great and
if you can find happiness again doesn’t mean that you love your husband that passed any less
it’s just if God said it’s okay to remarry then guess what you’re fine
yeah that’s good advice well I would love for people to listen to your
podcast especially and maybe I’ll put a link to this exact episode the one that
you did with Lisa also a widow I would love for people to listen to that if
they want to reach out to you can you tell us all the places you can find you and I will also put these in the description but I love for them to hear
where they can find you and reach out to you absolutely so everything is mental health for Christian women so if you
want to email me it’s Michelle with two Wells at mental healthforchristianwomen.com uh if you want to follow us on Facebook
or Instagram it is at mental health for Christian women mental health for Christian women I got that backwards but
you know what I mean uh you know whether which one you throw the at symbol um and
um if you want to go to the website it’s mental health for christianwomen.com
so it’s like all one big thing that helps me find you yeah yeah it’s like
everything is the same and that is such a good thing because when Adam the the podcaster where you you know met me
um where when he said you need to change the name of your uh podcast so people
can find you yeah he’s like how about mental health for Christian women I was like oh that’s got to be taken it
totally was not taken anywhere it’s like God held it just for that time so yeah
mental health for Christian women and if you go to the website um again mental health for Christian
women.com um there are some free resources that you can download and also I send a Weekly Newsletter too so
um yeah that’s awesome and I saw something about asking you a question yeah yeah so if
anybody has a question that they would like they can just push a button on the website where it says you know ask
Michelle and then um I’ll answer it on a future podcast oh that’s so awesome so
we’ll make sure that we get the links in there because I want people to hear all these awesome episodes that you have
I’ve just found them so I’m excited to start binge listening or all the good stuff you have to say because what you
have is a gift and you’re sharing it so thank you thank you for doing that and thank you for being a guest today on
this podcast really really appreciate it I know it’s going to touch so many people you have so much knowledge
um that I know is going to help so many listeners like we haven’t had a podcast like this um with a professional
teaching us like this and um I’m very very thankful oh well you’re welcome it’s it’s how God that’s what God
provided for everybody before time with me and what you’re doing is how God provides excited for you before time for
people who needed you to and you know just to encourage people be where they are because yeah you know that’s that’s
where you can impact the world from is right where you are and you know we need each other so um thank you that’s very
nice of you thank you and listeners thank you for being here today as always if you liked this podcast you could give
us a little Bing five stars on Apple podcast Spotify anywhere you listen
um as we shared last time we are now under the non-profit Widow goals which is really exciting because Widow goals
not only provides podcasts and social media support we provide scholarships
for a grief recovery um which is a support group for recovery and then we also do events so we’ll have a link
below if you’ve been touched by this ministry and want to give back you can give back to the non-profit so thanks as
always oh and if you want to be a guest you can email us at widow2 soon at
widowgoals.org and you know how to find us on Facebook soon Instagram all the
places all right we will talk to you later have a great day [Music]
