A cloud of anxious melancholy hangs over me. I am
keeping my life together, more or less, going to work each day, sustaining
myself with frequently-muttered mantras. ‘Strength for today and bright hope
for tomorrow.’ But oh, when will the day of bright hope come?
I had an ear infection, and the surgery referred me
to a hospital clinic. Too miserable to be much bothered by a sore ear I almost
ignored the appointment and drove straight home. But I turned in at the
hospital gates and took a seat in the waiting area.
When the time came, I sat patiently while the doctor
examined the ear and prescribed whatever treatment was necessary. I was touched
by the tenderness of his examination, the gentle tone of his voice, the quality
of his care – and all this for a problem which was a mere flea-bite in
comparison with my emotional wounds.
How I wished I could bring my crippling inner pain
into the healing aura of his tenderness, but of course that was not why I was
there, and I left the clinic still borne by my burden.
It’s that pain which, despite my hesitant smile, I
carry with me as I sit down with you here today. I have some hope that here in
this room I will find an aura of tenderness into which I can unpack my sorrows
in safety. A tenderness which gives reassurance before any healing work is done.
A tenderness which indicates that you are not afraid of darkness, and that you
are comfortable to travel with me through my hellish valley of shadows.
I need you to be clear at the beginning about the
agenda for our meetings, and the possible outcomes, and whether, and if so how,
I can contact you between our sessions. You are here, I imagine, to listen to
what I have to say and to feed back, both affirming and challenging. Will you
be able to help, or might you be referring me on to yet another agency? Can you
look me in the eye and say ‘I’m not going anywhere?’
I need to be clear too about what the nature of our
relationship is, what the boundaries are. I know it would be so easy for me to
become dependent on you, but I realise in my clearer-seeing moments that this
would be neither helpful, nor appropriate. You may need to remind me of this
from time to time, gently.
There are things I would really appreciate you asking
me. It’s probably an enormous relief to talk to you, but I need help to get
started. So don’t hesitate to ask me gentle, probing questions. Ask me to tell
you how I’m feeling, and how long I have felt this way. Remember that my
numbing sadness may be indivisibly linked with profound fears and anxieties.
Remember that I may have come to accept very recently
that I am depressed, that I have a
mental health issue, and I may be overshadowed by the fear of having
unwillingly entered the unknown country denoted by these words.
If I am to unburden myself to you, I need to know
that you are unshakable. And so, as I talk, I may test you with small
revelations to see how you react. But I have a deep need for you to listen to
the worst of my fears, and by acknowledging them without being fazed by them to
diminish their power over me. I need to be told that there are others in this
strange country I have entered who feel as I now feel.
To put it bluntly, I may be afraid of doing violence
to myself or to other people. There was a time, personally when every time I
saw a rope or a piece of cord I would involuntarily think ‘You could hang
yourself with that.’ Every car coming
towards me as I walked along the pavement was an invitation to leap in front of
it. Drying knives in the kitchen with a friend was torture because of the fear
of what I could potentially do with those sharp blades. Seeing a baby in a pram
triggered either an impulse to damage it, or the fear that I would be overcome
by such an impulse, or both. I need you to listen to stuff like this, to know
that it’s OK, to know that despite it all I am loved and accepted, and your
gentle unshakable listening gives me hope, the most precious gift of all.
Do please ask me if I have suicidal thoughts, and if
so how I handle them, and the extent to which I make these thoughts at home in
me. Personally, I found it difficult to discern if I was actually suicidal, or
simply desperately anxious that I might be. I need you to keep listening, not
to minimise or diminish what I’m telling you in order to make you feel better.
I need you to be hospitable to my pain, and in so being whisper hope.
Do ask me also if I am aware of the causes
of my melancholy. Was it triggered by some event, or some loss? Is it the
result of some tension over making major life choices, or the result of moral
conflict? Do you detect as I am speaking that there’s a part of me, a part of
my identity which I find hard to accept and so am trying to deny and bury it? Am I engaged in some activity which my
deepest self knows isn’t right for me, but which I find hard to abandon? Do I feel torn between the person I know
myself to be, and the person I feel my family or church expects me to be?
As a Christian, am I committed to doing things which I know to be, or
believe to be wrong? Is guilt the trigger for my sadness? And if so, am I
convinced that these things actually are
wrong, or is it simply that the church tells
me they are wrong?
As you listen to me, can you detect in me, or discern, or intuit an
underlying cause of my melancholy? As you listen, and reflect back to me, you
may help me to see something in me which I have not already seen, or been
prepared to see. But do it gently. Probe tentatively. In love.
And ask me how I view my depression as a person of faith, a Christian. Has
my faith contributed to my depression and fear, by making me apprehensive of
judgement and the wrath of God? Do I feel impossibly burdened by the
expectations my church seems to load on to me?
Expectations both in terms of the beliefs I am supposed to hold, and the
activism I am supposed to engage in? Do I feel that I am a failure in God’s
eyes and everyone else’s, and deem myself to be beyond the reach of God’s love?
One day I will come to realise that behind the darkness the sun still
shines. In the mean time, I may be raging at God. Or else you may detect in me
a buried or frozen rage towards a God who has apparently abandoned me despite
my best efforts to love God. In fact this rage, unacknowledged because I
consider it unacceptable, may be contributing to my condition. Help me to see
that it’s OK to be angry with God, OK to rage at him with colourful vocabulary.
God more than understands. God can take it when we are real. God likes it when
we are real. Healing and peace and rest can come, in time, when we are done
with raging.
Perhaps, on the other hand, my sadness has made me lose faith in God
because of the sense of hurt and abandonment I feel. You may hear me sharing
this with you in a mixture of sadness and defiance. Please find a way, in word
or in demeanour of signalling to me that this, too, is OK, that the God you
continue to believe in can cope with my unbelief just as much as with my anger,
that you are not shocked, that I am still secure in the hospitality of your
listen and will remain so whether in our journey togather I come back to belief
in God or remain agnostic.
And, still on the subject of faith, please ask me whether I think
depression is incompatible with faith. Listen carefully as I unpack any fears I
may have that my sadness indicates a spiritual defectiveness. Ask me how I have
come to think that way. Encourage me to explore the lives of outstanding
Christians who have, throughout their lives, struggled with melancholy, and
with the absence of God.
Ask me too what help and advice I have sought before coming to you, and
what prompted me to seek help. My answers will help you understand what stage I
am at in dealing with my sadness, and how seriously I have taken the business
of finding help. Ask me about any
medication I may have been prescribed, and its effectiveness or otherwise.
You may find that I have been given and tried to follow advice from
friends or spiritual leaders and it hasn’t made a difference. You may find that
I have sought help from people I have trusted, only to be met with the repulse
of incomprehension or fear. If this is the case, help me to see that there are
those – like you, I trust – who understand, people who don’t offer easy
solutions.
And ask me what the important people in my life think about my depression.
Do they find it hard to accept? Do they give me the impression that my
depression casts some kind of stain on the family? Is there a family history of
depression, and how does my knowledge of that history affect my thinking just
now? Do I feel guilty because I know my condition disturbs those close to me?
Do I feel when I am with them that I am ‘ouside looking in’ , and that there’s
a great imprenetrable barrier between us?
Do I feel guilty because I no longer feel appropriate emotions, only
fear and anger and guilt? And am I angry with them that they can’t give me the
comfort I crave?
You may want to try to fix me, but please don’t rush to find ways of
making it all OK. This strange country
of mental health issues may be transformed into a place of joy and freedom –
indeed I hope it will – but if you try too rapidly to fix me, I may feel that
you are not really listening to who I am, now. Let me be! Listen! Let your attentiveness be
an assurance that it’s OK for me to be where I am, now. There can be healing in
your simply being present, and not trying to fix anything.
Remember that silence can be our friend, and is rarely our enemy. The
hospitable silence in which I find courage to articulate the deep things, once
I have seen in your reaction to my sharing of the more superficial things, that
I can trust you.
If any when the time comes to speak of fixing, do not force any fix upon
me, but find a way of helping me to discern and to embrace the changes which
may make a difference. Remember the cumulative power of small changes, small
actions.
Please understand that I may not at first feel that our time together is
‘working.’ I may have come with high hopes, only to find that your words to not
touch my need, your hospitable presence does not give me comfort. I need you,
please, to accept that possibility, to accept that I may not feel you are
helping me. I need you to be comfortable with that.
Please don’t be afraid of appropriate physical contact. Words and silence
heal, but appropriate touch is their ally.
And please, if you can, find a way of reassuring me that I will be OK, but
let it not be a superficial reassurance, but a reasurance offered once you have
indicated that you have discerned something of the depth of my pain. And find a
way of communicating that your reassurance is genuinely offered to me. I so
much need you to be secure in yourself. I need to know that in saying words of
reassurance to me, you are not actually reassuring yourself.
Don’t expect the Bible to fix me, at least initially. I may know the
Bible, and its promises and teachings as well as, or better than you, but right
now they may not connect with me in any meaningful way. I may be clinging desperately
in the darkness to what I once saw with great clarity. But the Bible’s words
may seem to offer a comfort so beyond my reach that they bring pain rather than
solace. What I need you to do is not to preach, but to be. To embody the divine love, hope and tenderness of which the
Bible speaks.
Speaking personally, over the years I have been helped and healed through
medication, through a journey of self-acceptance and self-understanding, and
through coming to a faith in God and Jesus Christ which is honest and real.
It’s a faith which my beliefs are personally ‘owned’ and not thrust upon me by
others, a faith which has learned to live with unanswerable questions. For me,
healing has been a life-long journey, and I am still learning, still fragile, still
being healed.
I remember one very encouraging day when a verse from the Bible really did
speak and help – this was long before the medics had got me on an appropriate
anti-depressant. I was suffering from severe anxiety and
depression at the time, and was staying for a few days at the building in
Glasgow’s Prince Albert Road which had been the Glasgow College of Worldwide
Evangelisation Crusade, and was still at that point owned by the Mission. I felt I had been abandoned by those close to
me.
On the Sunday morning, in bright sunshine, I walked across Kelvingrove
Park to the Sandyford Henderson Memorial Church of Scotland with some of the
university students who lived at the Mission house, and sat down in the cool
interior of the old building. The only thing I remember about the service was a
verse from the book of Job in the Bible which the Revd George Philip quoted in
a prayer – ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.’ (Job 13:15) I had
never, to my knowledge, heard these words, this naked expression of faith in
God no matter what, this apparently insane conviction that despite the
incomprehensible darkness and pain all would be well.
The translators differ over whether the words George Philip quoted from
the King James version of the Bible are in fact an accurate equivalent of the
original Hebrew, but no matter. For me, that morning, they were the words I
needed to hear, not just for that day, but for the days to come.
I found I could identify both with Job’s sense of alienation and bleak
abandonment, and with the faith in which he was able to say, in effect ‘I don’t
know what you are doing, God. I don‘t know why you are inflicting this terrible
pain on me like a malicious sadist, or at very least sitting back, it seems, a
spectator in the arena of my suffering, but I believe.
Two things were immediately and vividly real to me as I sat in that
church pew. Firstly, I realised that those words could have been said by Jesus
himself. He experienced the sense of
abandonment by God; the crucifixion was desolation beyond all desolation as he
bore the weight of divine judgement. And yet even in this abandonment, Jesus
retained a naked trust in the God to whom he was utterly committed.
And the second thing I realised and experienced was that even if God
were to slay me, even if everything I knew and trusted imploded, even if the
whole superstructure of my life collapsed into the black hole at the core of my
being still I could trust God – and still I did trust God. ‘I believe you are
love. I believe that somehow in this your love is present. I believe. Whatever
happens, I believe.’
And so as we sit and talk together, God is present. It’s not simply that
God is your therapeutic partner as you listen and reflect back to me. For God
is the source of all healing and you, you are God’s therapeutic partner, God
reaching out to me through you.
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