BP 167
My name is Sarah. I am mentally ill.
I began having symptoms of OCD when I was nine—intrusive thoughts crept into my mind, and I couldn’t stop thinking them. When I was younger, my stubbornly repetitive thoughts were about accidentally burning the house down and killing my parents and younger sister.
When I grew older, my obsessions changed. As a teenager, I gave my life to Christ only to find myself consumed by persistent, troubling thoughts that I wasn’t a Christian, that if Jesus came back, I would be shut out of His kingdom and end up in hell. These were just my primary obsessions. There were many lesser ones as well such as a fear that I would sexually abuse my younger cousin when I babysat him.
Over the years, I saw a handful of different therapists. One did play therapy with me while another used cognitive interventions like thought stopping and thought replacement. The third psychologist employed exposure therapy to desensitize me to my fears of badness, and the fourth therapist even did some EMDR. They all helped a little.
But there was something deeper in me that never got touched.
I suffered, largely alone, in the private world of my mind and heart. I came close to walking away from Jesus on multiple occasions because He didn’t seem to hear my cries for deliverance and because it was my anxious thoughts about not being a Christian that tortured me the most. I reasoned that if I divorced Jesus from my life that maybe my entrenched obsessions would lessen or entirely abate.
What a relief it would be to have a quiet mind.
Just think of it—my inability to tame my thoughts just about drove me away from Christ and even on a few occasions led me to contemplate death as an escape! How tragic is that?
Finally, the fifth therapist helped me discover the root system that fed my mental illness. The following is a summary of my healing journey that happened five years ago now.
My therapist told me that my mental illness was birthed in a “perfect storm incubator” that involved many variables. The main ingredients that contributed to this perfect storm were these: 1) my temperament; 2) my father’s reaction to his job loss; 3) one comment from my mother; 4) my youthful interpretation of the world around me; 5) Satan’s lie.
First, I was born with a sensitive temperament that hated conflict, raised voices—actually anything that was loud—and a mind that repeatedly rehearsed uncomfortable things around me and tried to understand them. (I think I was quick to assume that if there was a problem in the house, it was always my fault—such is the downside of childish egocentrism.)
So it was that I was quick to notice anything that was “off” . . . then feel deeply upset . . . then be obsessed about the cause of the tension in our home. My mind was always trying to think of ways to be a better daughter so the bad things would stop happening in the world around me.
Second, when I was seven years old, my father’s construction business failed, and he was without work for four years. During this time, the fun, safe dad I had known all my life left our family—not in body but in spirit. He became irritable, sullen, anxious, and was easily triggered by his environment. Worst of all, he was so moody that I never knew which dad I was going to get—the quiet and depressed dad or the explosively angry dad.
He yelled a lot at my mom, my sister, and I when he was in a bad mood. It was almost like he needed to vent, and the slightest irritation would set him off. Did I already mention that I hate anger and yelling and assume that I am somehow responsible for it? I get nauseous and I want to run out into the woods in our back yard and never come back.
The third ingredient in my mental illness mix happened on a normal but fateful day when I got angry at my sister for some reason I now do not remember. I just know that I was angrier than I usually was, and my mother observed it. In a distraught voice that pierced my heart, she said, “When you get that angry, you remind me of your father.”
That one comment from my mother unlike hundreds of previous others that went in one ear and out the other was captured by my brain and branded on my frontal lobes. Somehow, it led me to make a portentous decision in my nine-year-old mind: I decided that all anger was always bad and that therefore I should never show any anger, or I would become the dad I had learned to dislike and avoid and who had hurt my mother so badly that many nights I rubbed her back while she wept.
Never ever did I want to become my dad who had changed so much for the worse and hurt all of us so deeply during the four-year season of his discontent.
A less obvious but additional variable was that somewhere in the labyrinths of my mind, I didn’t want to hurt my mother with my anger since I already had witnessed how devastated she had been by my father’s anger. I didn’t want to add to her pain. Later, I came to understand that my mother (who was maybe a bit like me–sensitive) was emotionally fragile—hypersensitive to the emotions of others. But of course, I did not know that when I was nine.
So, I was avoiding my dad’s “eruptibility” and also parenting my mother by comforting her. She didn’t directly ask me to take care of her—I was just sensitive (remember my basic temperament?) to her emotional distress. I could read it on her without even trying.
The fourth ingredient (maybe a little redundant) in the perfect storm incubator came clear to me when I realized that there was a three-step progression in my own mind that contributed to my mental distress. The progression consisted of my vigilant observing of my environment, my subsequent interpretation of what I observed, and then my chosen coping response to my interpretation of what I observed.
I realized that I was not a passive recipient of what went on in the environment around me (including dad’s anger and mom’s more fragile personality) but that I observed, interpreted, and then constructed coping skills within my mind that would endure into my adulthood. I arrived at many interpretations, but my primary one was that my anger (and all my other intense emotions) were bad (like dad). My coping skill, then, was to learn to be a “good” girl (non-emotional) who would not be like my father.
In effect, I hid my true self. I killed what I thought was my sin when much of it was actually my genuine self. I sent flesh and blood “Pinocchia” away and became wooden “Pinocchia”. I became fully controlled emotionally. Form and structure restricted content. “Shoulds” killed joy. Needing to be perfect drowned out the intense thirst for grace.
I forgot how to love or maybe never learned how to love in the first place because to love you need to be connected to your heart.
This “killing” leads me to the fifth and final ingredient, namely, Satan, the one who was a murderer from the beginning, the one who seeks to “steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10). The enemy of our hearts plants lies in a child’s heart often as she observes and then seeks to interpret her environment. As I have maybe alluded to a bit already, every child is not as sensitive as I was. I was aware of too much and interpreted too much and coped too radically and so might have been more susceptible to Satan’s timely planted lie in the soil of my mind that told me that I was bad and that my emotions (self) needed to die.
God is not the only one who sows seeds in the human heart.
Satan is a hungry lion roaming around and lusting to accomplish two primary objectives in the human heart: separation and destruction. He desired to separate me from my parents and my own heart by whispering to me to not be real Sarah but to be good Sarah. How powerful and devious a stratagem is that? Does it not sound “Christian” to be good?
Of course, now I understand that God never wanted me to be good but to love Him and receive His righteousness—a world of a difference. How devious the dark prince can be! Using what sounds like God’s will and word to instead kill us and drive us away from others because we fear that we are never good enough, always falling short of God’s will for us and then fearing that He will leave us in disappointment.
So, in the middle of these five ingredients, where did my mental illness emerge?
Whenever a person navigates life by shutting down her true self (which might very well cause her to sin less in the eyes of others since she may not outwardly get as angry or talk back as much, etc.), she will leak out in other places. Since God made me to be seen, heard, and loved, if I cope by hiding my true self for fear of being bad or like my odious father, I will become dishonest. I become not true but false—disingenuous. But I also will experience some type of Leakage.
Is it not better to be honest and sin instead of to not sin and be dishonest? Because even if we do not show our anger on the outside, is it not lurking inside the recesses of our hearts and creating sins of resentment and bitterness within us? (Was it Luther who said to “sin boldly?”)
When I look back at how I shut down my heart, my personhood, my “Sarahness”, I clearly was experiencing Leakage. God hard-wired this Leakage phenomenon in me as a sign that would emerge if I ever attempted to cope in a way that killed me instead of gave me abundant life. Obsessive thoughts of badness and compulsive behaviors to undo my perceived badness were the symptoms that emerged like boils on my skin to scream at me that I was dying alone instead of loving and trusting God.
Did I need meds to help me in my dysfunction? Not ultimately—they could calm my obsessive thoughts and anxiety but would never heal the roots of the symptoms. Did I need to alter my cognitions, my beliefs, my interpretations? Yes. But what did I need the most? I hungered for someone to know me, to sit with me, to walk with me, to not leave me when they saw my mess. Someone who understood me and invited me to come out and be honest. Someone who wouldn’t shame me when they saw not only the good in me but also the bad and the ugly.
The power of my OCD (and my anxiety, my badness, my perfectionism, my controlling eating disorder, etc.) has lessened significantly over the last five years. For that, I am so thankful! It is a deliverance second only to the deliverance from sin and death. Yes, all the old coping skills still awaken—at a lesser intensity–when I am under stress or when I sense messages of shame and anger directed toward me. But now I know the lies in my head and the coping habits that ensue, and I seek relationship instead of hiding.
What are my most effective strategies against the lies of my mind and Satan’s lies? To be in community with others who love and speak truth and to draw near to God and hear His truth instead of the critical voice in my mind. I cannot be alone. I cannot withdraw and fight the battle in my mind by myself. I need the body of Christ and I need Christ Himself.
After all, when all is said and done, life is about love. And love is about being connected with one’s heart, about intimacy, about being humble enough to be fully seen. Love is about unconditional Presence.
Understand that every child will have one or more lies planted in his or her heart during their tender, impressionable years, and that they have unhealthy coping skills in place as a result of these lies. Understand that grown adults still have some of these lies deeply entrenched in their psyches, and that they are impacted by them. Finally, understand that you may be that adult child.
If you find yourself quick to feel bad, distrust others, pull away and hide from God and others, or are beset by symptoms that leak out of your body and heart, choose a healing journey with a safe person and a loving God who will free you from a prison of aloneness and maybe even hopelessness.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” ~ Luke 4:18f
“Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” ~ I Peter 5:7ff