Ep. 166: Mental Health (feat. Alison Stevens)

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week, we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Ryan McCurdy:
Today we have with us Alison Stevens, who is the Clinical Director of Wagner Hills, which is a recovery house program and the Women’s Director for the Wagner Hills Women Campus. I had such a great time talking with Alison today about the things that she is part of and the activity that she’s involved in, but we also talked about the ramifications, the effect of mental health, even on our spiritual life, on our walk with God.
So some of the things we talked about were mental health and what Wagner Hills is part of and how a recovery program like that one is doing amazing work, but we talked about the complexities of mental health and fundamentally we believe that God is inviting us to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Understanding that our mind, our emotions, our body, our soul is all interconnected and we cannot compartmentalize is another thing that we talk about with Alison and so God is concerned with you and with me, the whole person of us, not just one facet of our lives and so Alison and I have a great conversation and I trust that you will enjoy this episode with Alison Stevens.

Ryan McCurdy:
Well today with me on this episode of indoubt, we have Alison Stevens and she is the Director of the Women’s Campus at Wagner Hills as well as the Clinical Director for both the men and women’s campuses of Wagner Hills. For those of you who don’t know, Wagner Hills is a one-year program that is aimed to help individuals heal mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually through a relationship with God and others. Alison, it is so good to have you with us, thanks for being here.

Alison Stevens:
Great to be here.

Ryan McCurdy:
Could you expand a little bit about Wagner Hills? But maybe actually before we do that, would you be able to tell us a little bit about you and what God has done in your life and how you ended up where you are now?

Alison Stevens:
Sure. I’ll just say very quickly I grew up Catholic, actually in a family of 14.

Ryan McCurdy:
Wow.

Alison Stevens:
Yeah, my parents were very Catholic.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah.

Alison Stevens:
Moved around a lot and then started at UBC the year after high school. God just called me to Himself and to being born again, so I’ve been a Christian for many, many years, and the first part of my career I was actually a Bible teacher in a boarding school in North Carolina and then in Bolivia for a term. Then in my 30s, I went into social services and I worked in social services for 12 years, so I worked in all kinds of programs and that whole period was very secular, secular in that I worked for just community organizations and contracted by the government and then did my Master’s and PhD in counseling psychology at UBC and became registered as a psychologist and so for the last 10 years I’ve been doing private practice and I actually went into practice in 2005, yeah, 2005, so longer than that, but I was doing private practice while I did my Ph.D., and then just was feeling a little bit like too much of the same thing, even though I loved my work, and I actually heard Jason Roberts, the Executive Director of Wagner Hills on the radio and at the end of his little blurb for Wagner Hills, he extended an invitation and said, “If you’re interested in knowing more about us, come on out for a visit or give us a call.” So I got to my office and I gave him a call.

Ryan McCurdy:
Wow.

Alison Stevens:
Now here I am. That was like two and a half years ago and here I am now, the Director of the Women’s Campus and Clinical Director.

Ryan McCurdy:
So maybe you could explain a little bit more about Wagner Hills for us and then also what your involvement is there as the Women’s Director but also as the Clinical Director over the whole.

Alison Stevens:
Sure. Wagner Hills, you get into the treatment world for addictions and there are many, many different kinds of treatment centres and the spectrum of services. Wagner Hills is… the thing that is amazing about it is most treatment centres are clinical programs so that’s kind of their focus is what kind of clinical things do we need to do to facilitate healing and recovery from addiction? Wagner Hills, they have that, but what they at the foundation of it is that healing really is it’s more than addiction, it’s where is this person broken? What are their needs? Creating as a foundation that healing really comes through Jesus. It comes through Christ and through His completed work on the cross. That has to be the foundation for recovery and recovery has to be broader than addiction.
That’s kind of the focus of Wagner Hills and so it was started, the men’s campus was actually started I think it’s close to 40 years. It’s 38 or 39 years ago, and what’s beautiful about it is it has this kind of three-pronged approach to how they facilitate recovery. There’s the spiritual as the foundation, there’s the clinical like counselling and group work and all those kinds of things, teaching and classes, but both the men’s and the women’s campuses are on acreages. They’re both stunningly beautiful. What Wagner Hills did is they created a kind of working farm so there’s a work program as well. That’s what I love. I always say I’m not like a giant fan of Sigmund Freud, but the one thing he really got right is he said life is really about love and work. I think that’s Biblical, that God created us for relationship but He also created us to do something that fits with who He made us to be that is productive and life-changing, world-changing.
That’s kind of what Wagner Hills provides. People who come there get the healing that comes just from being in community, they get mentored and discipled in Christ, they get clinical treatment and they’re part of a work program where you learn to work shoulder to shoulder with other people.

Ryan McCurdy:
That is so cool. I think that workpiece is I think specifically unique to a lot of maybe recovery treatment centres where you’re working with your hands in a garden.

Alison Stevens:
Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan McCurdy:
I think that relationship with even creation is probably holistic and healing and there’s probably many people who are unfamiliar with that feeling and that being in touch with God’s creation and so that probably has a huge effect on individuals.

Alison Stevens:
Absolutely. We’re looking… I think I’ve always in my career had this privilege of God putting me into work that I love and where I felt like it mattered, but I think the vast majority of the world doesn’t do that. The vast majority of the world works to make an income to provide for their family.
For me, one of the things that was on my heart when I came in and I just, having worked in the field for so many years, you know how important it is that people don’t just get healing of the heart but that they actually discover who they’re made to be. How has God gifted them and what are their interests? I just saw the potential at Wagner Hills for what can we do to create something that gives men and women an opportunity to try different trades and skills?
There’s this kind of common vision of how do we want to include supporting education and how do we want to … treatment can be very kind of compartmentalized. You did your year, this is what you get, now on your way, but the reality is in addictions the high majority of people who go through a treatment program go back to using.

Ryan McCurdy:
Okay.

Alison Stevens:
Yeah, they do. Why is that? Part of it is that often treatment programs are not long enough because they don’t have the funding or there’s too many gaps in the system and people fall through the system so they leave and there isn’t a network of resources and support to help them to continue in their journey. That’s one thing we’re looking at as well at Wagner Hills is how can we create kind of a continuum where people can stay after a year? We have second years or even third, people who kind of stay on the farm. They might be off doing schooling, but they’re living on the farms or they… whatever it is. They might be doing an internship or whatever out in the community. We’re just trying to look at how can we do this in a way that really, really gives God all the room He could have to provide as much healing and health as can happen.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. I have to say, I’ve been to Wagner Hills. The passion and the excitement about, “Hey, we’re going to Chapel. We’re gonna go worship.” It’s like, I see so often in churches that it’s like, “Oh, we gotta have the full-on band, it’s gotta be lights and smoke and cameras and then people will get excited.” Coming to Wagner Hills, it’s like 50 guys in a room, one acoustic guitar and these guys are giving it.

Alison Stevens:
It’s loud.

Ryan McCurdy:
They’re just sold out for Jesus and passionate and I think that is a beautiful picture of these guys have such a close remembrance of what they’ve been saved from and so they want to respond.

Alison Stevens:
Absolutely.

Ryan McCurdy:
I know what Jesus has saved me from and that to me is amazing. I’m super curious, what would be one of the reasons and what are some of the… I don’t know what the statistics are for why people end up in addiction, or what’s the… is it a slippery slope that starts somewhere? I don’t know if it’s that easy to answer, but what would…

Alison Stevens:
It is, of course, it’s very complex. There has been such a tendency in treatment to focus on addiction as the problem and so you want to look at addictive behaviour and addictive personalities and is there a gene and all of that and if you can address the addiction then people are gonna be okay, and that’s just crazy-making to me.
One of the things that I do about every three or four… I teach a class once a week with both campuses together and we cover everything. We cover depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction and sexuality. We just cover everything. I just kind of really pray into it and look at the research and just kind of go what is gonna be helpful here?
One of the things I do every three to four months is I listed 50 different issues that can be an issue that are part of your brokenness. It includes everything from attachment to your parents went through a divorce to you went through a divorce through you have a disability or you have fetal alcohol syndrome or you’ve been through trauma or you have… I listed all kinds of addiction from gaming to sexual addiction to drug and alcohol to gambling, or you have depression or you have anxiety.
I just listed like 50 different things and then what I did was put a big circle at the top like a pie, and I said… I handed them all out and I say, “I want you to just sit there and think how many of these issues are an issue for you that needs to be addressed?” I get them to circle it. They will circle, some of them circle all of them except for six. Then I talk to them, that whole class is about why do we think that you can deal with addiction and not address all those other issues and you’re gonna walk out of a treatment center and you’re gonna be okay? That’s insane.

Alison Stevens:
I tell them, “You need to know yourself and know what it is that you need and just this sheet alone can tell you what are the priorities,” and then I’ll get them to pick the top five or pick the top 10, now prioritize them. Then I get them to, and I’ll say, “I know this isn’t statistically accurate, but on the pie chart, show how much of the pie is that issue.” Then they get this picture of themselves, and then I tell them, “Take ownership of your own recovery,” and I say … When clients come in to see me and they say “I’m ready, we’re gonna talk about this or we talked about this last week so I assume we’re gonna continue,” they say, “Nope.” They come in, they have lists on their phone. They say, “This is what we need to talk about.” I love it because they’re taking ownership of their own recovery.
If we do not provide a more wrap around kind of what is gonna heal people and then I think if they learn to be open about their problems, they’re gonna get some healing, but we can never forget in the end it’s all death unless they have salvation. That’s why I think Wagner Hills, I think we have the potential to be something that is really just phenomenal because I think we’re getting it right in terms of what is gonna help people to heal.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, even the whole person.

Alison Stevens:
Exactly.

Ryan McCurdy:
As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the whole person. It’s not just I’m physically sick. We’re all… we’re so integrated. The song that I always reference in this type of conversation is, there’s a Lady Gaga song, and she says, “You can’t have my heart and you can’t have my mind, but do what you want with my body.” It’s so fascinating that this is actually a belief, that your physical body is not connected to your mind, your emotions.

Alison Stevens:
Crazy.

Ryan McCurdy:
Where Jesus comes in, He’s like, “No, no, no. Hold on. The whole person.”

Alison Stevens:
Exactly.

Ryan McCurdy:
You are one person and what’s the great commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. He doesn’t just say love the Lord your God with your heart, or just your mind. I’m curious. Is that a belief that people think, if I fix this area of my life then all the other ones will be fixed?

Alison Stevens:
I don’t… it’s funny, I don’t find it so much as a belief. I find it more as a way of coping, that people in order to manage life when it’s difficult, compartmentalize. They stay in their head and they don’t deal with their emotions, or they’re disconnected from their body, or they compartmentalize like they manage really well at work and then they go home and everything’s a mess. People compartmentalize to cope, but when people feel that you’re for them, that you believe in them, that you’re not judging them and then you start to talk about the whole person and that if they’re really gonna get healed, I find there’s hunger everywhere.
I’ve always taught that way, worked that way, and as a psychologist, I work that way, and I find people are always responsive because they’re not coming to me because they don’t need help, they’re coming to me because they’re saying something’s not right. The other thing is the truth, that God is Truth and He’s lord and so He’s working and people, even when they don’t belong to the… they haven’t given their life to the Lord, they already belong to the Lord, but when people hear Truth, they… often I find people, even if they’re not Christians, they know truth and that verse in John, John 8:32 that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free, that’s true for all mankind.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. Totally. I guess one of my questions that comes out of that is from that position though of maybe seeing how people cope with their stuff by compartmentalizing, what would be from your perspective, is the area of life, whether it’s mind, heart, will, or strength that people tend to suppress or want to ignore? If there’s an issue that this one area is the one where they’ll try to avoid or they’ll have a hard time listening to.

Alison Stevens:
Of those kinds of components?

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, those kinds of components.

Alison Stevens:
The emotional.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah?

Alison Stevens:
Yeah, because we don’t want to feel. It’s interesting because the Bible is clear that transforming of our mind is what changes us, but like you said, God made us a whole being and I pretty much always find that the way to where our need is is through our emotions. With clients who are really kind of cerebral, they’re very in their head, you can present… they’ll talk about something and they can talk about it in this very kind of cognitive heady kind of way.

Ryan McCurdy:
Rational.

Alison Stevens:
Yeah. Then I’ll say, I just want you to stop and I want you to tell me what you feel. What emotion does it bring up? The ones who are super cognitive will go, “I feel like… ” and then they’ll say something cognitive again and I have to actually teach them to feel. If you think about addiction, addiction is actually avoidance. It’s avoiding sitting with yourself. It’s avoiding sitting with how life has made you feel, what the brokenness feels like. It’s a moving away from yourself, but so is anxiety. Anxiety is constantly trying to move away from yourself. The healing is learning to turn around and move toward yourself and that means learning to sit with your emotions and sit with how trauma feels for example in the body, learning to move towards yourself because when we move towards ourself is where now there’s an openness for God to actually connect with you and speak to you.

Ryan McCurdy:
Even as you were talking about the avoidance piece, or more so the rational, cerebral, logical, yeah, what are you feeling? Let’s not ignore this and how does that connect to the whole picture? I just think as you were talking about it, you’re talking about me. There’s some times even with my wife, she’ll be like, “What’s that feel like?” I’m like, “What do you mean? What do you mean? Is there supposed to be a feeling here? Am I supposed to be…”. Then she’ll probe deeper and deeper and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I am feeling this way.” I didn’t even realize it and I think that’s one of the things is that it’s a skill. Not everybody knows that skill.
I’ve definitely had to learn that skill and I’ve had to invite people to be like challenge me and say, “Hey, where are my blind spots? Help me feel what I’m trying to feel.” This is kind of an aside, but how do you go about teaching people this skill, the strength to actually go towards the inside and say, “Okay, I’m gonna walk around the compartments of my soul with a flashlight and say, “Holy Spirit, reveal in me the areas that You want to work and let me be open to it”? How do you teach that?

Alison Stevens:
Yeah. It’s interesting because I’ve obviously done a lot of education and so you learn a lot, the theory of trauma and addiction, like depression and anxiety, you learn all the theory and you learn the techniques and at UBC they have labs that have two-way mirrors with a whole bunch of counselling rooms and so you have your fellow students and profs who are watching you and so you go through all of that but there is a core part of it that you cannot learn from a book or in a classroom. It comes from in here.
Sometimes I see counsellors who have excellent clinical technique but there is not the deep, deep working of God in their life that makes them able to actually connect with people in a way that can really just release the room for God to work through the relationship.
The thing I often see with people who are like that is they don’t even know they’re like that. They think they’re a good counsellor because they are smart and they have good technique, but I have seen counsellors who, they don’t have all the theory but there’s something so human about them. A saying, like the women’s campus, always quotes me on this because I always say it, the ground at the foot of the cross is level. I love that. There’s only one who’s elevated and that is Jesus. The rest of us, we’re all the same. It’s very easy for professionals to kind of hide behind their skill or their technique or their training and their education or whatever and we can’t forget that I am you, you are me, we are all lost, we all need a Saviour.
For me, it’s working with people in a way that is just so human, where I’m not elevated one inch above you, I’m coming alongside you in your journey and I’m asking for an invitation because you get to invite me. I’m not gonna tell you that I’m gonna give you a bunch of answers and information and whatever. When you turn the power over to them, to own their own healing and to have a voice and to tell you what they need, to tell you what you’re doing isn’t working or helping. When people are empowered and when they know that it’s okay to be broken because we all are. The ground at the foot of the cross is level. It puts things in the right position and now Jesus can work. It’s beautiful.

Ryan McCurdy:
It is beautiful, and it’s a beautiful picture of we all come to Jesus in the same way.

Alison Stevens:
Yes.

Ryan McCurdy:
As we tend towards wrapping up our time together, a curious question is for those who are listening who find themselves in addiction, and maybe it’s not debilitating them, but maybe it’s they go through their classes and then they go home and they play video games for nine hours and then get two hours of sleep or they’re addicted to pornography or they have relationships that they’re maybe addicted to in terms of they find their identity in others, what would be something that you would encourage them with? I want to ask this because you mentioned it twice I believe so far, is owning your recovery. I’m curious if that is a big theme for you or if that’s something you would encourage to take on.

Alison Stevens:
Owning your recovery, for me, I’ve practiced for many, many years in the area of PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder, and people where the posttraumatic stress is more severe, it’s extremely difficult. They can often be so broken they need you to almost tell them which way to turn and how to walk and so it’s kind of like you just had a baby, you said earlier.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yep, yep.

Alison Stevens:
It’s kind of the process of raising a kid where there’s a movement from totally dependent to increasing independence and your job as a parent is to facilitate that and support it and build it, guide it, but more and more the day comes when you no longer have that kind of authority. They actually, like I was talking to my 25-year-old son on the drive in and I love watching how he’s becoming his own person. Yeah, so there’s that. Knowing where’s this person at, how much are they able to kind of take the initiative and own their recovery and how much do they need me to say or need me or the other staff to say, “Have you considered this? Are you still doing that?”
Then the other thing that is so, so critical is there… I think it’s for a number of reasons, but the whole kind of recovery and treatment and detox, that whole community, because it’s very political and it’s all related to funding, so there is a tendency to want to say, “Okay, here’s this treatment program and here’s the miracles that are gonna happen when you’re in our treatment program and then you’re gonna move on,” without saying the truth, that’s not actually true is that, so the piece and the point I would want to finish with is that recovery is a journey. It’s a lifelong journey of healing. Addiction is one piece of that, and that’s true for all people.
Do you know Freedom Session?

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, yeah.

Alison Stevens:
We’ve brought it into Wagner Hills.

Ryan McCurdy:
Oh cool.

Alison Stevens:
I was there last night and so I facilitate a women’s group of women with posttraumatic stress, but I do the program even though I’ve been a Christian for many, many years, I’ve been in practice, I’m a psychologist, blah, blah, blah, but I still need my own healing.

Ryan McCurdy:
Absolutely.

Alison Stevens:
We are all on a journey and when people finish a treatment program, it’s not like they’re done so that’s why we want to work with people, to go what do you need? What are the resources that need to be in place? What we tell them when they “graduate” from Wagner Hills is you are part of the farm, you’re part of us. Stay connected and we just try and continue to walk alongside people in our journey and they walk alongside us.

Ryan McCurdy:
I think that’s key. Even with Freedom Sessions, it’s a program that’s a very deep, internal looking with community and it’s over a course of a large number of weeks.

Alison Stevens:
It can be 20 weeks or it can be 30 weeks depending on if you do the whole thing.

Ryan McCurdy:
But what’s key there is I have a friend who’s doing it right now and he’s loving it.

Alison Stevens:
Great.

Ryan McCurdy:
He’s just like, “You’re in community. You’re sitting around a table and it’s like, we’re all on level ground here so let’s have this conversation as human beings and we’re all going through this in our own way.” I think that’s what I’m hearing some of what you’re saying is, really two things are sticking out to me, is that if you can own it, own it. If you can’t own it, it’s still wise to be in community.

Alison Stevens:
Absolutely.

Ryan McCurdy:
If you can’t own it, you definitely need community. So in both pictures is this invitation and I think that’s where the Gospel invites us to take on His strength, His spirit is alive in us and so we can walk with our head up high because we know we’ve been forgiven and that emboldens us to own our stuff because we know He paid for it at the cross and to invite other people in. This is a beautiful story, beautiful conversation.
Alison, thanks so much for being with us. It has been a joy to have this conversation and I hope that in the future we can do this again.

Alison Stevens:
Excellent. Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan McCurdy:
Thanks for tuning in this week with this episode. Having Alison Stevens is such a joy and I hope that this conversation really spurred some thinking for you as what it means to be a follower of Jesus with either mental illness and how that affects our mental health and hopefully how to care for and love those who are walking through dark times or difficult times or times where their mental health is fluctuating.
In all of these things, we believe that God is inviting all of us to, like I said earlier, be transformed by the renewing of our mind and accepting that we are not perfect and letting God do His work by His spirit in our lives, it’s all a process for all of us but it was such a joy to talk to her.
Join us next week as I have a conversation with Danielle Strickland around empowering women to use their voice to share their story. And so hope that you connect in with us next week and listen to our conversation with Danielle.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.