While people often feel comfortable talking about physical pain, they may shy away from topics like emotional pain and mental illness. This week’s guest is family man and mediator Mike McCullough. He speaks openly about his struggle with depression and anxiety and shares his story in the hopes of reaching others who may be facing similar hardships.

It’s important to have friends and feel comfortable turning to them for support, McCullough says. There are times when depression can make it hard to feel motivated, so it’s critical to get up and move around or take time outside to kick start your system. But above all, McCullough says it’s faith that put him on a better path to accepting the pain he’d felt in his life and building up the tools he needed to move forward.

This Week’s Takeaways

-Bring together the spiritual, emotional, and physical

-Understand it can be helpful to sit with pain or hurt and learn from it

-Restart your system by getting outside, doing exercise, and moving

-Have a support system for when times get tough

-Persevere with acceptance

Quotes

“We can focus on the emotional, the physical, but we also have to focus on the spiritual because, you know, we are a spirit. We have a soul and we live in a body. So, we’ve got to have all three line up.” -Mike McCullough

“That weakness is literally your superpower. It is a gift from God.” -Wayne McCullough

“Friends (are) hugely important in our lives for a variety of reasons, but particularly when you’re going through physical or emotional pain, you’ve got to have people around you.” -Mike McCullough

“You can’t regret the past. It is what it is, and you’ve just got to learn from it.” -Mike McCullough

“I want people, if they’re listening to this podcast, to know, one, there’s hope, and two, to experience God in some way in their life.” -Mike McCullough

References

This week, the McCullough brothers mentioned Dallas, Texas-based Dr. George Burris, the New Hope class at Park Cities Baptist Church, and the following:

-You Gotta Keep Dancin’ by Tim Hansel, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96162.You_Gotta_Keep_Dancin_

-Lisa Ann McCall, founder of The McCall Method, https://mccallmethod.com/

-Brennan Manning, https://brennanmanning.com/

-Richard J. Foster, https://renovare.org/people/richard-foster/bio

You can contact today’s guest, Mike McCullough at [INSERT] and our host, Wayne McCullough, at [INSERT].