Anxiety & OCD Across Generations (#359)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I'm sitting down with my friend of 12 years, Sara Billups, to talk about her brand new book Nervous Systems—and all the many meanings implied in its title. We start with how anxiety gets passed down through generations. Sara shares about her wonderfully neurotic Jewish father and frequent medical “scares” that shaped her nervous system before she could even articulate a worry. But this isn't just another Seinfeld episode or therapy session about family patterns—Sara takes us into how anxiety operates at three interconnected levels: our individual bodies, the church body that's absorbed America's cultural panic instead of offering an alternative, and our body politic that's turned every election into an apocalypse. Sara introduces me to a counterintuitive Jesuit practice called "holy indifference" that she discovered through nine months of Ignatian spiritual exercises, which maps perfectly onto OCD treatment principles. We wrestle with impossible questions like whether progressive Christians should keep reaching across the aisle to conservatives when the stakes feel existential and whether learning to lose—politically, personally, physically—might be the only way to stay sane in a world that's convinced every loss is the end of democracy. Sarah's Book | Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics Sarah's Substack | BITTER SCROLL Sarah's Podcast | That's The Spirit Previous Episode with Sara | Orphaned by Evangelicalism (#175) ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Sherlock Holmes.
0:02.0	It's an unusual name.
0:03.0	Introducing Young Sherlock, a new Guy Ritchie series.
0:07.0	What game are we playing today?
0:09.0	Discover the origins.
0:10.0	It's cleaving. Those days are surely behind me.
0:12.0	Of crime's most iconic mind.
0:14.0	There has been a break-in.
0:17.0	Astoned. You should be a detective.
0:19.0	Starring Hero finds Tiffin, Donald Finn and Colin Firth.
0:22.5	If you start wearing a hat like that, I will no longer be friends with you.
0:25.9	Young Sherlock, new original series. Watch now only on Prime Video.
0:44.7	Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind, the show that explores the intersection of psychology and religion and spirituality. My name is Dr. Dan Koch. I am a licensed therapist
0:50.8	and a researcher in the psychology of religion. And today I am rejoined
0:56.5	by a personal friend of now 12 or 13 years, Sarah Billups. Thanks for being here.
1:04.6	Hi, Dan. It's so good to be here.
1:07.5	Sarah, you write what is what you call bitteritter Scroll on Substack. You co-host the podcast,
1:15.6	That's the Spirit. I think both of those are new ventures since you were last on to talk about
1:21.2	orphaned believers, your previous book. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Well, that's the spirit. Definitely is.
1:26.9	That's new. BitterSroll. I was probably poking around substack in 2023, but it's kind of been a couple year thing.
1:32.4	Yeah. So we'll have a link to those as well as your previous appearance on the show, or maybe appearances.
1:38.8	I can't remember. One of them might have been a patron thing. I start to lose track after a while.
	...

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