Anxiety and depression in an evangelical context: part 5

(Part 4 is here.)

The therapy of the routine

I often found there was therapy in the routine, as I carried on with tasks and projects which didn’t require too much original thought, but which gave me the satisfaction of being creative, and making a useful contribution. For all the occasional stresses, my work – especially latterly when I was working at the Education Resource Centre planning learning exhibitions with my colleagues – was often therapeutic. So were my church responsibilities – organising the regular book-stall, helping edit and produce the newsletter, even taking services at other churches in central Scotland (but never without the precautionary valium!)

My motives for these activities were far from pure. I suspect they were done more for my own benefit – for what they contributed to my own sense of self-worth – rather than as service to God and for the benefit of other. I believe, however, that this questionable motivation didn’t mean that what I was doing had no value, or that folk weren’t touched by grace through it.

During these years I researched and wrote up theses for MA and PhD degrees, both of which investigated the economics of religious book publishing in 19^th century Scotland. Completing these projects took courage and determination. I remember sitting on the floor one morning, struggling as I wrote paragraph after paragraph, all the while wrestling to keep my mind fixed on the calm serene certainties of T. & T. Clark’s George Street office in Edinburgh in the 1890s and to drown the suicidal thoughts which threatened to reduce me to chaos.

I remember standing at a dark bus stop in Edinburgh’s Willowbrae Road during my Christmas break one year waiting for a bus to take me to the National Library of Scotland, afraid that I’d throw myself in front of the vehicle before it stopped. When I got on board, I’d avert my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the EXIT sign above the other door, because it would remind me of the assisted suicide society with this word as its name. After our evening meal, I’d stand beside the family friend I was staying with in Edinburgh, drying dishes, and panicking in case some impulse would lead me to stab her with the long, sharp bread knife.

I wasn’t particularly anxious about the oral examination of my PhD thesis. What did terrify me was its location – in the professor’s room on the 13^th floor of Strathclyde University’s Livingstone Tower. I sat in the middle of the room, trying to forget how high up I was and to ignore the windows, keeping my eyes focussed on the external examiner, my mind fixed on his convoluted questions about publishing economics. 

But I made it through, and graduated MA in 1983, and PhD in 1987. There was no great sense of achievement, but I guess nothing I did would have been enough to make me feel fulfilled. Later I was to learn that you are most able to enjoy and feel satisfaction in what you have done when you have a prior sense of wholeness and fulfilment. At the time, I guess I simply moved on to the next project, the next challenge, for though there was no sense of achievement when a project was complete there was an undeniable therapy in the process of working on it.

And there were other routes to therapeutic escapism. I remember waking up at home on the Monday morning after I’d abandoned my holiday in Wales  (I’d come back from my parents’ place on the Sunday) wondering what on earth I was to do with myself for the two weeks which stretched ahead. There was no peace to be found in going for long walks; when I visited the Monklands industrial archaeology park at Summerlee in Coatbridge on a blistering hot summer afternoon, I wandered round, feeling remote from the reality of it, even though I was interested to see products made at Murray and Paterson’s steel works just down the road where my grandfather had been a foreman.

Bibliotherapy

But that Monday morning I drove down to the local W.H. Smith and bought an omnibus volume of the James Herriot vet stories, and the first of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, and went home, and lay down on the couch, and read and read, and managed to lose myself in these marvellous escapist narratives, except at points where the raw pain of life invaded the stories, heightening my awareness of my anxieties. I am grateful beyond words to Herriot and Trollope for what they did for me those weeks. Perhaps they saved my life.

I also appreciated escapist television programmes in which could simply lose yourself for an hour. That fortnight they were screening episodes of a manic successor to the Anneka Rice Treasure Hunt series, which involved contestants trying to complete a challenge while being pursued by a hooded figure in a helicopter whose task was to locate and immobilise them. I seem to remember that it was pulled from the schedules after a couple of programmes had been transmitted because the audience figures were dire. It was loud, and crazy but somehow I managed to lose myself in the mayhem, and for that I am deeply grateful.

Specifically Christian books were often particularly helpful, both for the hope they awakened, and for the realisation they gave me that I was not alone. I remember being encouraged by books by Christian psychologists, such as David Seamands’ Healing for damaged emotions which reminded me that I was of infinite value to a God who loved me. I believe God  brought healingly alive in my heart some of the ideas in these books.

I also remember Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Spiritual Depression – I was particularly struck by the chapter entitled Men as trees walking, which describes Jesus’ unique healing of a blind man, unique in that the healing took place in two stages. First, the man was given a blurred, imprecise vision so that people looked to him like walking trees, and then, after a further intervention from Jesus, he was able to see perfectly. I was helped by this as it enabled me to synthesise both the fact that I had been conscious of divine intervention in my life, and yet at the same time was aware of so much dross, so much work-in-progress, so much I wanted to be but was not yet.

I was comforted by the experiences of other Christians who suffered in a similar way, notably J.B. Phillips, the Anglican priest who translated the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into modern English. His suffering from severe depression is described in his biography The Price of Success and is the main theme of The Wounded Healer, a collection of his letters to people who wrote to him for help and guidance. I was inspired by this concept of the wounded having by the very fact of their woundedness the power to bring to other sufferers the healing of empathy and an informed comfort. It was certainly my experience that my personal acquaintance with mental suffering enabled me to draw near both in person and from the pulpit to others who were traversing the same dark valley. And it was encouraging to remember that all of us wounded healers were walking in the footsteps of the one who was our paradigm, Jesus himself.

Though I found reading helpful, I found music depressing rather than uplifting. I had always enjoyed listening to classical music, but during the hard years this – particularly when it was in a minor key, and especially when it was anything written earlier than Mozart – seemed to grip my emotions and pull them inexorably downwards. When I was out for a meal, I’d groan inwardly if my hosts had music playing in the background, for already the tension levels would be rising in direct proportion to the plummeting of my spirits. Christian hymns and songs could sometimes be helpful. I remember a line sung by the then-popular Scandinavian Christian singer Evie (who was performing at the Filey event the year I attended it) which lodged in my mind. ‘The hard times,’ she reminded me, ‘make you strong.’ I hoped she was right, while never being quite convinced of it.

From the moment I came across his work during my university English classes, I loved the life story and writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His passionate poems about the beauties of nature were uplifting, but I particularly empathised with the depressive melancholy which shadowed his life. In To R.B. he explained his longing of ‘the one rapture of an inspiration’, should his friend Robert Bridges to whom the poem was addressed have missed ‘in these lagging lines…..the roll, the rise the carol, the creation.’ Words which are all the more poignant to those of us who seek the same touch of rapture since despite – or perhaps even because of – his pain and sense of failure, Hopkins was still able to write divinely.

I remember concluding a sermon with a quotation from Hopkins at the end of a difficult day preaching at Hamilton Baptist Church. It was at the time I’d become convinced that I was called to be a Baptist minister and that to make this possible God would somehow work a miracle and evaporate my fear of public speaking. I applied as a candidate for the ministry to the Baptist Union of Scotland, and started learning New Testament Greek. But far from diminishing, the stress levels progressively increased.

That Sunday, I drove to Hamilton in complete terror. As the church secretary and I prayed before the service, I was wracked with the usual panic, unsure whether I’d be able to survive the hour ahead. And then I walked out into the pulpit where the little sign in old-fashioned lettering, visible only to the person leading the service, quoted words from the book of Acts  - ‘Sirs, we would see Jesus.’  What kind of crucifixion would they see that morning?

I don’t know how I made it through the service. I was in perpetual fear that I’d collapse in panic, or burst into an uncontrollable tirade of gibberish and obscenity. Word after word, sentence after sentence, I tried desperately to focus on the present moment, simply to survive, second by second. It did not, I imagine, make for particularly edifying listening.

In the evening I, and the congregation, were back for more. I was preaching about the Christian understanding of suffering, particularly of depression. About half-way through the service I realised I might actually make it to the end without collapsing, and my mood lightened.

I finished the sermon by quoting the opening lines of Hopkins’ masterpiece The Wreck of the Deutschland, a poem in which he draws parallel between a recent shipwreck and the courage and faith demonstrated by one of a group of nuns who were on board, and his own experience of faith tested by trauma and pain.  He begins with a description of how God the creator who ‘hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh’ subsequently subjected him to an experience so severe that he was ‘almost unmade’. And then he says ‘dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.’ I quoted those words, and suggested to the congregation that despite the intensity of our pain and darkness the time will come when God will say ‘Enough!’, and once again we will experience God’s healing intervention. I don’t think I felt his finger that night at Hamilton. There was simply relief that I had survived. But the hope was there, no matter how apparently irrational, that one day the cloud would lift and God’s touch would be tangible.

I drove home after the service and gave my £40 fee for the day to the minister of my own church in Airdrie, because I reckoned he needed it more than I did, and I accepted that I had been wrong, and that I was not, after all, called to be the full-time pastor of a church.

(Part 6 is here.)

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.)