BP162
This post will be short and hopefully, sweet.
I have just a few bullet points here:
- Jesus said that the two great commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
- God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three personalities in one Godhead that have existed forever. For eternity, they have been in relationship together–communicating, singing, glorifying, loving, thanking, praising, being with one another.
- You, as a human, have been made in the image of this eternal Triune God. The Imago Dei was the blueprint from which you were designed.
- Therefore, it follows that you, who were made in the image of God, are like Him. One of the most important (the most important?) ways you are like Him is that you were created for relationship. You were made for love, “withness,” being known, being seen, being comforted, being “held” emotionally and physically.
- When a human struggles with mental illness, it is most often (almost always) due to a breakdown in relationship. The mental illness is not the primary problem but points to the root of the problem, namely, a relationship issue that involves a loss of love and presence.
- Part of the issue in a relational breakdown most often includes the behavior of the other person toward you including such things as abuse, abandonment, neglect, bitterness, jealousy, shaming, rage, divorce of (and even the death of) parents, parental mental illness, physical and emotional incest, even a desire by another person to emotionally murder your spirit. However, the most critical part of the relational breakdown is your response to the other person’s (perceived or real) behavior toward you. Often, your coping response (especially if learned as a child) may be unhealthy and may very well be the critical variable that is producing your mental illness whether it be anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, bipolar illness, psychosis, OCD and all personality disorders. Yes, you may have even been severely and repeatedly sinned against, but your response to being sinned against may still be the most critical factor in your healing journey.
- Since your mental illness most likely is due to relational breakdown between you and God, you and other humans, or you and your own self, you need to heal this breakdown in the context of a healthy relationship. Unhealthy relational dynamics are responsible for your emotional/psychological/spiritual symptoms and so the only way to learn new healthy dynamics is by moving toward and learning to trust people in the present. Even though past relational failures by others may have contributed to your coping skill of withdrawal, hiding, or extreme self-protection, you must today move toward someone who is safe, predictable, healthily challenging, and loving so that you might be willing to come out of your ‘safe’ by isolating fortress.
- Now we’re back to Jesus’ two great commandments that we began with, namely, to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. You need to find someone who is capable of and prepared to love you and then move toward that person. You might move toward a friend, a psychologist (if they are willing to love you—with healthy boundaries), a pastor, a parent, a mentor, even a professor. Above all, you eventually need to move toward the One in whose relational image you were created.
- You were made to be loved by the Triune God who has been loving for eternity—who is love. There is no way around this truth. When you are not being loved (both due to how others have harmed you and how you have coped in response), symptoms appear that include but are not limited to mental illness. Many physical problems can be traced to relational issues as well.
- In conclusion, you have two primary choices: love God, self, and others, or protect yourself against love and relationship. Even if every fiber in your wounded, guarded spirit screams at you to remain in the dungeon and avoid further harm, you must not listen to that voice. To hide is to be alone. To move toward and seek relationship is to be loved and to love. You were made not to be without but to be with. It is your purpose.
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” ~ Ephesians 3:14ff
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” ~ 1 John 4:7ff
