Welcome to Ask Dr. Julie Hanks, a safe place for healing conversations that educate and empower you to

prioritize your dreams, revolutionize your family, and personalize your fate. I'm your host,

Dr. Julie Hanks, a psychotherapist and coach offering online courses and programs to help women

all over the world heal themselves and their relationships.

Join me here every week as I coach a listener through a specific challenge and empower them with

tools to find healing.

I'm so excited to welcome Caitlin to the podcast today. Welcome, Caitlin.

Hi, thanks for having me.

What is your question for me today?

My question is, how do I separate experiences with imperfect people in the church from my testimony of the gospel when the church is

entirely made up of people who will always make mistakes and can hurt us? Yeah, that's a really good question. Do you have a specific example

that you're willing to share that we could talk about? Yeah, you know, there's obviously been

little ones over time, but I think the one that really almost startled me a while ago was it was about a year and a half ago and I was pregnant

with my fourth child and was asked to take on a leadership calling that came with a lot of stress

and I accepted because my mentality was you don't say no to callings.

And so I did, I accepted this calling and it was going really great for a while.

And I had my baby and things started to get kind of bad.

And I was really overcome with postpartum anxiety and depression and I found myself

getting anxiety attacks like days before meetings and activities and I also really felt this push

like when was I going back to church? How much time did I need? But I felt like they're asking for a timeline

and I didn't know how to give that to them. And so I ended up going back about, it was like

eight weeks after. And it just still didn't go very well.

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