Clinical Psychologist

I am Ted Witzig, Jr. I’m a clinical psychologist here at ACCFS, and I am from Morton, Illinois. I was born and raised here, and grew up here, and have raised my family here. When I was going through high school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I’d looked at things in the biological sciences and eventually thought about becoming a physician.

And, in fact, that’s what I planned to do. And all my college applications went out in pre medicine. A really unfortunate thing happened during my senior year of high school. And that was, I had a good friend take his life. And that, you know, is impactful for anyone. But for myself as a high school senior, it just really spun me around and trying to figure out why would somebody do this?

And, oh, you know, there’s a lot of can, could have, should have, would have, you know, and what should I have done? Could I have done those kinds of things? It was at that time I started talking to my mom and dad, talked to my elder Joe Breaker about what it would look like to go into the counseling field. As I was growing up, I didn’t even have a frame of reference for being a counselor.

There was nobody I knew who was a counselor I didn’t have any framework of for that, but I did with being a physician and being in school and it actually was a better suited field for me because what I realized is many of the reasons that I wanted to become a physician were about working with the people and what I realized is that, along the way, after the fact, and this is God’s goodness after the fact, you see these things, but I don’t know that I would have made all that good of a physician.

In one sense, I’m a lot better suited for working with people’s emotional hearts than I think I would be dealing with the bodily chemicals and their physical hearts. The skill set that I think that God was prepping me to use and developing had to do with really engaging people and meeting people where they’re at with a natural curiosity about that.

The counseling field is such that people don’t come to counseling with easy things. Okay. People deal with their easy things on their own or in their networks. People come to counseling with their hard things. And another skill set is tenacity. Because not every situation turns around easily. Some don’t turn out the way that you want them to turn out. Some turn out wonderfully and you have to be able to have enough grounding to be able to keep a sense of wellness, even when situations around you are not.

And so, I think that though that’s where my faith in Christ and just even working in an agency like this, just the belief about God’s transforming work in people just has always been really important to me.

But I think it’s really important to remember that part of this is, we’re a vessel working along with God in these situations. As counselors, we’re not superhuman know-it-alls. We just don’t have that ability. Today, the main focus of my clinical work is around anxiety disorders. And so, that’s things like generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, social anxiety, those kinds of things. Those are often accompanied by mood disorders like depression to different degrees. And so, most of my clients, probably about 80 percent of my clients have an anxiety disorder and a mood disorder.

I also have the privilege in my work of working a lot with people who are in ministry and ministry families. And growing up as a minister’s kid, being in the ministry myself has given me a real appreciation for the opportunities and the sacrifices and challenges of ministry families. And so, that’s a really important part of my work.

In terms of where I went to school and my journey of schooling; I started out here in central Illinois at Illinois Central College. I got a two-year associate in arts degree and then transferred down to Illinois State University where I completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. But after the bachelor’s in psychology, I stayed at Illinois State University and went into a master’s program in counseling psychology.

I was really drawn to counseling psychology as a field because it had a preventative approach. And I really liked the idea of thinking through the model of prevention. And, in fact, my master’s thesis was on premarital counseling and the transition from engagement to marriage because I wanted to look at how do we prevent things from happening.

Once I got done with the master’s program, I was only out for about a year before I decided to go back and pursue my doctorate in clinical psychology. There’s a lot of overlap between the two, but clinical psychology tends to look more at the things that are broken or things where people are struggling.

So, I’m really glad that I got that breadth of thinking. How do we think through prevention? And how do we think through helping people through struggles? And it really fits with what we do here at ACCFS in terms of thinking about helping the hurting, nurturing hope, and encouraging growth.

And I love that spectrum. Then I went on for further study. It had a lot to do with thinking about helping the church in starting a counseling center. And we didn’t have ACCFS at that time. It was into being and I thought, you know what, if I could help the church and help other people get into the field and so I wanted to be able to help other people get into the field and really to discern whether it was a good field for them.

And I was a beneficiary of people like Ron Messner and Dick Kilgus who were brothers in the church who helped me in that discernment process. And my parents and my elder so that was really important to me as well. I went to a program called Fielding Graduate University. Fielding is a psychology professional school, and it has campuses all around. And so, I attended in Chicago. I was there for six years. I could have maybe got out in five, but halfway through, Donna and I had our twin daughters, Julia and Karina. So that was very interesting.

You know how those things are, you think you see how life is going to be and I’m very thankful for how it all turned out, but that was interesting being in school and having the twins. But going through the Fielding Graduate University program, along the way there was where I really developed an interest in obsessive compulsive disorder.

And that’s what I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on. And it really gave me a chance to go very deep in an area that was really interesting to me. But along the way to the Ph. D., I got a second master’s degree in clinical psychology. So, it was kind of funny because as I was in school, I loved school, I should also say I was doing some work as well and I didn’t desire to just be in school to be in school. I desired to be in school to learn so I could apply.

I was always trying to figure out what I couldn’t figure out how to help someone or someone didn’t get better when I thought that they could have or should have or whatever, that sent me on that. Yeah. What’s the next thing that we can do to help this? And so, I actually had the opportunity to go into and do a two-year neuropsychology certificate. That would have just added a couple more years to my doctorate. Donna was not nearly as thrilled with me going on and she requested that I get done with one degree and have it paid for before I go to the next.

So, if I was going back and starting over today, I think what’s interesting is how much change there has been in the counseling field and the medical field. And so, today you can’t think about doing counseling without doing telehealth. That is a whole new field and it was almost unheard of back when I started.

The other thing, though, is that I’m more excited about the opportunities to help people today because we know so much more. There have been many people in my career, especially older people, who grew up at a time when they didn’t know how to help certain people and they were told that they were going to have to live with things forever.

There was no treatment. Over time, with research and understanding the brain, understanding emotions and relationships, things that were once considered untreatable are now treatable. What really captivates me about this field is because it’s really working with the four main areas that God built people in.

You could break this in different ways, but they’re physical and biological, emotional, relational, and spiritual. And the counseling field really works at the intersections of those. And that’s what I really love about this is because, while not every issue involves all of those things equally or maybe at all, many of them do and I love the fact that when we’re working with the whole person. And as a Christian in this field, to have a worldview that has a way to understand brokenness and understand hurt things in this life, but also to understand God’s grace and his healing and that redemption and reconciliation are close to God’s heart. That makes this really exciting to me. It gives me a framework to understand that things are broken, but also that God is making everything new.

So, one of the things that I found very important in my work and in my ministry is to be able to understand the value and the importance of things like the research and the scholarship that goes along with the counseling field. But I want to also say, not at the expense of the Word of God, and the many times the simple truths that are so profound, and the Christian worldview.

And I think one of the things, I was told flat out when I was going through my master’s degree by a professor, Ted, you can be a Christian or you can be a psychologist, but you can’t be both. And he just told me I had to choose my path what I was going to do. And I understand what he meant because he didn’t see how there could be any integration, but part of the reason is that I believe there can be that integration. When I think about the Word and the Christian worldview, and I think about the counseling field and understanding human beings and the counseling field, I don’t look at those as equals.

I look at it like this, that the Word is foundational, and it provides the formation of what human beings really are, what our goals in life are, the boundaries about life and relationships. And so, when something in the counseling field doesn’t fit within that, we don’t just say, well, hey, psychologists say and this is what we’re going to do. This is the newest thing.

We, by all means, look at it and say the Word speaks into this and we’re going to stick with the Word where we have that clarity. And I think also though, that’s one of the wonderful things that God has allowed human beings to understand more things about the body and the mind, and as we do then to be able to use those in a way that is redemptive that can bring relief to suffering, reconciliation in relationships, or even provide healthy foundations to relationships.

My day is split a couple different ways. I’m a clinical psychologist. I also happen to have an administrative role here called clinical director, which means that part of my job is to oversee all the counseling that happens. What that means is I provide some of the supervision for the other staff. I make sure that the work we do is up to all the current standards and that we’re making sure our systems are secure. Because of how important confidentiality is, and those kinds of things, I work to ensure that we have the processes and systems in place to support that. So, my day goes back and forth in those roles.

I might start out in the morning having a meeting with the department heads talking about what’s going on in the agency and then work with a young mother dealing with depression and then work with a ministry couple who is adjusting to a new role in ministry trying to figure out how that works with their family and marriage.

Then we may end up doing a lot of work that interfaces with trauma and post-traumatic stress. And so maybe I’m working with somebody that we’re really crunching through some hard things and so we may have a two-hour session where we really work on doing some very specific deep work to try to help a person get through that.

Then I might work with somebody trying to overcome some kind of behavior that violates their values. So it might be somebody dealing with pornography and struggling with sin or with addiction. But I would say that in general, the thing that I ended up seeing the most of throughout the day is something called obsessive compulsive disorder and particularly a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that wraps around religious and moral matters called scrupulosity.

And so, I end up working with a lot of scrupulosity because it really brings into focus both that clinical piece of the OCD along with how it interfaces with somebody’s faith and beliefs as well as their concept of God. So, in the area of obsessive-compulsive disorder, particularly as it relates to individuals with a Christian belief system, I have been working over a number of years to try to connect dots, to be able to improve the treatments. And one of the things that I found a number of years ago was that very well-meaning professionals trying to treat this kind of OCD were, were running into problems.

Because the treatment was running into people’s faith. And when that happened, the therapist and the client were not on the same page and clients were not being served well, sometimes being hurt. And the therapists were frustrated because they couldn’t get the clients to do what they felt like they needed to do.

So, one of the things that the Lord has opened up doors is for me to be able to do some teaching, some seminars, and some writing in a way to help impact the field in this space. And that’s very rewarding because it just shows how here we are in a little office in Morton, Illinois and can have an impact outside of here.

But I think the other thing is it provides assistance to people beyond what we can do here. And so, here at ACCFS, when we see something happening in our clients and we think, oh, this would be helpful for people to know, we can do a podcast or write an article and then put it up on our website and be able to distribute that through webinars and other things and then impact the treatment of other people throughout primarily North America, but it goes beyond this hemisphere.

Some of the things that I love about this field are walking with people as they move through this place where they come in and oftentimes, they’re struggling or suffering in some way. And their main focus is oftentimes on the pain. It is for me too. When my tooth hurts, my focus is on pain.

So, that’s not a criticism, but that’s where they’re focused. But one of the reasons I love doing this work and I love doing it here is because we don’t just focus on symptom reduction. Symptom reduction is important, and that is a focus. We want to relieve suffering, and we believe that the Lord would like that.

But beyond that, you know what I love is when somebody then comes through that, and as they start to learn about their identity in Christ, as they start to see how their depression or OCD or their trauma has shifted their God image and how they picture God and relate to God. And when that starts to heal and they come to see God as a Heavenly Father and they as his child who is loved and to be safe in that.

And to be able to then see them move through that area of hope. They’ve gone from suffering to relief of suffering to hope and identity in that. And now they’re thinking about how do I take this hurt that has been redeemed and now go out and be part of that solution? And I just love that because that’s God taking something that in and of itself is not good, the trauma, the accident, the assault, whatever kind of condition, but that by his grace and through the body of believers working together, he can take those things and redeem them. And I don’t mean it’s easy all the time or that everything is fixed all the time, but he can do with it what we can’t do.

And I just love it when I see a dad who gets something under control in his life that might have been not in a good place, but that he doesn’t just control a behavior, he learns to become a godly man that loves and serves his family in a way that is going to impact the next several generations.

That’s beyond what I can do, but I love being able to get a front row seat to what God is doing. And that by the way, is also the hardest part of this work because you see people that that choose not to do the work, or you are trying to help a marriage that doesn’t make it.

I can remember the first couple I worked with that went on to divorce. I wanted to quit. I just absolutely didn’t go into the field for this to happen. And I was talking to one of my supervisors and it was so helpful. Because, like I said, I was ready to throw my hands up and he said, oh, Ted, did you not show up to sessions? And I said, well of course I showed up to sessions. And he said, well, didn’t you listen to them and talk to them and give them homework and tools? And I said, well, of course I did. And he kept asking me these questions kind of leading me on. And I’m like, well of course I did. And then said, and did they do their homework?

I said, well, you know, not really. And did they come to sessions? No, very haphazardly. And did they involve themselves in a community of faith that could help support them? Oh, no, and he said, remember that you are a vessel but you’re not the solution.

And I’ve had to really remind myself of that because as much as I want all situations to end up happy, they don’t. And that’s hard. But I think the other thing is that many do and that makes it worthwhile. I would really encourage people to have a mentor or mentors to walk through this with.

One of the greatest blessings that I had along the way was people at church and my family and even professionally that helped mentor me through this. And it helped me in the discernment process. Is this a good field for me? Is this the right place for me? Because it’s not the right field for everybody. This can

chew people up and leave them shipwrecked on the side of the road. It’s not a friendly field for some people. So, it’s not wise to go into it without knowing what your bearings are and having a faith that can guide you through and people that you can bounce things off of. But I think having that is one of the greatest things, because as issues would come up, I would be able to talk with this mentor over here or that mentor over there, and they would guide me to different information or I’d be able to talk through my questions, well how do I make sense of this?

And that ended up having the effect of strengthening my faith. What was helpful was the fact that as there were challenges along the way to be able to talk those through, to be able to study, and to figure out what I believed and why I believed it. That ended up being very helpful.

And that’s one of the things that I would encourage. One of the things that I notice about people considering the field is they oftentimes are concerned about how much schooling there is and they’ll think, oh, you know what, it just seems like such a long time to get to a master’s degree.

Most people going into this field will stop after a master’s degree, so that’s about six years of college. And you could have a wonderful career at that place. I would just say to people who are looking ahead and going, wow, that seems like a long time. I would just say, if this is a good field, a good match for you, I want you to remember how long grade school seemed to last.

Okay. When you think of yourself today, does grade school seem long or short? And in actuality, it feels like that after the fact. So, my point isn’t that it’s easy. The point isn’t that everybody should do it, it’s just that people would say to me, oh, wow, you’re going to be 30 years old when you get out of school for the first time, and all these things.

But I was also able to say, I’m 30 years old and I’m going to be able to do what it is I want to do and minister in the way that I want to minister. And I think the other thing that happened along the way is I realized that my time in school was not just a holding pattern. God had work for me to do there.

And my wife Donna was really instrumental in this. She said to me one day, Ted, I’m not going to live like our life begins when you get out of school. This is where we are now, and God has things for us to do here and now. And you know what, that helped me because then all the way through school as I interacted with professors and other students and did my practicums and those kinds of things, this is where God has us right now and this is where he desires for us to be faithful and that really helped.

When I think about the future in this field, one of the things that really excites me is about the various ways we can reach people today that we weren’t able to reach a number of years ago. Technology has really influenced that heavily. Being able to get information to people in real time is such a huge opportunity. So, what I mean by that is most people know who their dentist is. Okay. So, when they break a tooth, they know who they’re going to call. Okay. Almost nobody knows who their psychologist is until they have a crisis. And so, in the middle of a crisis is often times when people are trying to figure out who their psychologist is, or who their counselor is. And being able to reach people through telehealth is making sure that people who are in areas that don’t have access to good Christian counseling, we can actually get right to them.

Being able to develop and distribute information through websites and through other things when people need it is helpful. And again, somebody might say, hey, you know, I don’t need any of that information about how to parent until all of a sudden they’re like, oh no, what do I do in this situation?

And then they need it. Or marriage is great until it’s not. And so, I really think that’s one of the things that’s exciting to me as the field grows in being able to understand and treat various conditions. The Christian Church is also learning more and more about coming alongside each other through mentoring and through caring for one another and discipling one another. And I just see the great opportunity for that to work together as a counselor.

I see people essentially one hour a week. I need my clients to have a church family that comes around them that is vibrant. And that church family oftentimes has a lot of tools and mentoring and a lot of care that could be given, but they oftentimes might need some additional specific information.

So, I love partnerships and I’m excited about the generation coming up because they are familiar with the technologies. They’re also, I really believe, very much interested in having a vibrant and authentic community. And so, I don’t see technology as the answer. I don’t see psychology as the answer. But I see all these things working together to really help meet people where they are and to grow.

I think about the things that I’ve learned over time and have been very formative for me. One of the things that I went into the field believing was that my job was to learn all the answers to be an answer person and that I just needed to have a book that told me exactly what I needed to say in this situation or that situation. First of all, what I realized is I’m not that different from the people I sit across from. Okay, we may have our struggles in different areas, but you know, I realized sitting in the counselor’s chair that that person right there is not different than me. Secondly, one of the things that I realize is that so much of the work we do is about walking with people. Well, when people know that they are safe and loved and have accepted the ability to work through shame, hard stuff, and to get to where they need to go really opens them up.

When that’s not there, people suffer in aloneness. They can be surrounded by a thousand people, but still be very much alone. To me, I think one of the things that I have really strived to do, I don’t do it perfectly, but I always want to get better at it. And that is being able to help those that I’m with, whether in a pastoral role or whether I’m in a counselor role, that they know that they’ve been heard and that they’re accepted. Right where they’re at.

That doesn’t mean they don’t need to grow, doesn’t mean they don’t need to change things, but they’re heard and they’re accepted. And I think that is just really being able to embody something that’s really precious about Jesus. Because he met people right where they were at, spoke to them in their need, whether it was a Samaritan woman at a well or whether it was restoring Simon Peter after he really messed up. But then it’s also being able to see that even though they’ve had their past, they also have a future. And I love that.