Anxiety and depression in an evangelical context: part 4

(Part 3 is here.)
 
The role of friends

Through those difficult years I had various coping strategies and means of support. The loyalty of friends was very important to me – friends who listened and encouraged, and who managed to convince me that they valued me and saw good in me at times when I saw nothing good in myself and couldn’t understand why anyone would consider befriending me. I particularly remember the kindness of the minister and his wife at Airdrie Baptist Church, Liam and Christine Goligher who often asked me round. I’d sit at the bench table in the kitchen with their kids, eating banana bread, drinking black coffee and feeling that I was one of the family.

I was particularly grateful for their kindness one Christmas, just a couple of weeks after I’d moved into my own flat, when I was feeling particularly low. They invited me to spend the afternoon of Christmas day with them, and I slouched in a chair in the family room, watching an escapist Western on television.  One of their kids slapped on my chest an orange sticker with an inspiring spiritual thought printed on it. Later, when I got home, I put this on my bedside lamp, where it remained for years – an encouragement, and a reminder that I was loved.

I was also grateful for the acceptance another couple, Alistair and Louise Young showed to me – especially that Boxing Day a few years later. Christmas Day had been fairly successful – I’d gone to stay with my parents over the holidays, and we’d gone out to visit some friends for a meal on the day itself. Later, I was sufficiently encouraged at the quality of communication I was having with my parents that I was encouraged to try talking to them at a deeper level. I wanted to talk about some of the stuff which had happened in the past, and which had upset me. Notably, I wanted to share my incomprehension at their reaction when I told them that I was thinking of buying a place of my own and leaving home. My father’s days-long visible distress and my mother’s antagonistic support of him left me alienated, and perplexed. There was never going to be an easy way for me to break the news to my parents, and perhaps I could have done it better, but nothing I said could ever from my point of view account for the severity of their reaction. Since then, we’d never sat down and talked about that terrible week, and I wanted to explore their feelings about what had happened, and to explain mine. But they would have none of it. As far as mum and dad were concerned, the past was past, and it was unhelpful to revisit it. That, and other unexplored issues and unfinished business hovered between us.

I felt a painful rejection, having once again opened up a small gateway in the defensive wall I’d constructed to protect myself from my parents. I slammed the door shut, bricked it up and concealed the fact that it had ever existed by vigorously plastering over the brickwork. I had to get away, and on Boxing Day, immediately after breakfast, I escaped and headed back to Airdrie. As I approached Chapelhall I thought of Alistair and Louise, and presented myself on their doorstep at what must have seemed a ridiculously early hour. But they flung open the door, didn’t register one iota of surprise when they saw me standing there, and invited me in, and soon I began weeping in sheer relief at warmth of their love. (‘It’s all right,’ I smiled tearily at their nine-year-old who was looking concerned. ‘Big people cry too.’) I spent the whole day with the Youngs, doing ordinary Christmas things – crawling around on the floor with the kids as we played with the Scalextric set they’d got for Christmas, and going for paint to B&Q.

And then there were Tom and Elspeth in Bo’ness, whom I first met when I went to take the services at their church one Sunday. They too were loving, welcoming, affirming. Tom was a GP, and occasionally sat me down and just listened to me. I remember sitting in a high-backed dining room chair while Tom tried to explore with me whether my condition might have been triggered by some forgotten events deep in my past. He was particularly interested in the fact that I lost a younger brother who died mysteriously in his cot at the age of three months when I was just two. While I believed that this sad event cast a deep and lasting shadow across my mother’s life, I had no recollection of being particularly traumatised by it myself.

I have only the faintest memory of my parents tears the morning they found William had left us. I have no recall of having ever personally grieved over his loss: but sitting typing this I realise for the first time how much the sudden departure of the precious, serious-faced baby whose warm body I hold close to mine in that photograph of us sitting together on the kitchen chairs (with my mother, off camera, supporting him from behind) must have wounded me. Fifty years later I feel a sense of loss. ‘My brother has died!’

Tom’s wife Elspeth introduced me to the writings of Henri Nouwen, who at that point was a new name to me, and whose insights into the struggles of faith. I much appreciated. I remember one bright, sunny Bank Holiday Monday when Elspeth phoned to ask if I’d like to go out with her and the children for the afternoon. We drove to Aberdour on the north side of the Forth Estuary and, and explored the town, and visited the shops where the kids bought sweets and cheap plastic ‘made in China’ toys and then went back to their house and sat watching Little Lord Fauntleroy on TV, and I felt so at home in the grace of their acceptance.

I did sometimes wish, however, that my friends were able to do more for me, or rather that the love they were showing could penetrate more deeply and healingly, for while at one level I was appreciative of their care, another, deeper level often went unreached by the light of their love. And there were times of course, when I simply needed space, not companionship. One day during the three weeks I was signed off from work, a church leader phoned to ask if he could come round to see me that evening. But I felt completely exhausted – I’d been out all day with another friend, I was struggling through my ironing and just about to go to bed. When I told Robert that I didn’t feel like seeing him that night, he seemed rather upset. ‘Tough,’ I thought.

There was another occasion when intervention, given with the very best of intentions, was anything but helpful. A team from Gold Hill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire  visited our church in Airdrie one week-end, leading worship and ‘ministering’ to those members of the congregation who made their way to the front of the church at the end of each of the services. I went forward on the Saturday evening, and explained something of my situation to an earnest young team member, who very kindly prayed with me and for me. However, all I can remember of his prayer was his rebuke of the ‘spirit of suicide’, which I didn’t find at all helpful. His words terrified, rather than liberating me, as I wondered again whether there might indeed be a demonic element to my problems as well as issues with brain chemistry.

Living by mantra

Another thing which helped me through the dark days was what you could crudely term ‘living by mantra’ – allowing myself to be sustained and directed by verses from the Bible and by other inspiring words, which were empowering because they were truly meaningful to me.

‘There is nothing to fear except fear itself.’ I’d repeat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words to myself when oppressed by anxiety. If God was with me, and if my end was in God’s hands as much as my beginning had been, and if God was infinitely more powerful than any other spiritual force, then, I argued, it was absolutely true that the only thing to be afraid of was the fear which further distanced me from any sense of God’s presence. And yet at times my deepest fear was of what I might do to myself, and I found it difficult to include that fear among those which I could exchange for peace in the presence of God. For I was not confident that God would intervene to prevent me from harming myself if I was sufficiently determined. 

Another daily mantra helped me remember that my perspective on reality was seriously askew. ‘It’s as though I’m looking at life through dark-tinted spectacles,’ I’d tell myself. I might be seeing darkness and hopelessness; I might have a sense of detachment from what I was doing and from events going on around me, but these perceptions, I reminded myself endlessly were merely illusions generated by a malfunctioning brain. Reality was different. Reality was light and joy and immediacy, and I must live as I knew the world to be rather than as I saw it through the filter of damaged emotions. And by reminding myself constantly of this I survived through many days, but it is a stressful way to live. 

Which is why, perhaps, another of my daily mantras was a line from a hymn which I frequently muttered to myself as I drove to work – ‘Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow.’ It was an expression of trust that God was with me, that God would provide the courage, energy and resilience I required to get me through the day and face its challenges. It was also an expression of hope that a day was coming – maybe not tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, maybe not even next week or next month – but coming, sometime, when once again joy would break through. 

This same hope for the future combined with a realisation that the waywardness of my emotions was cyclical in nature is evident in another of my mantras – ‘I have been here before, and I will be here again’, -  muttered in the middle of a particularly painful day. It was an acknowledgement that things weren’t going well, but also a recollection that previous, similar experiences had passed, giving way to a breaking-in of light. I was reminding myself that if I could only hold on, this time too the pain would lessen. 

Those days, my very favourite song at church was based on a verse from the Bible – Psalm 32:7, where the writer says to God ‘You are my hiding place; you protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of victory.’ This song I’d sing to myself frequently as I committed myself to that hiding place in which, though the feelings of fear might persist, I nevertheless had some hope of security and protection. ‘What time I am afraid,’ it concluded, ‘I will trust in you.’

(Part 5 is here.)