Day One: Worship

This blog post is part of my 2017 Write 31 Days blog series 31 Reflections on Mental Health and Illness. To read the whole series, click here for the series index page.

To be honest, this is both an odd and logical place to begin talking about the topic of mental health and mental illness. It is odd inasmuch as it isn't what I'd have chosen to start with, but it is logical for me to begin with it as a person of faith. For me, worship of God is essential to my whole life and for my mental health, it is absolutely critical. It is vital to the point that if I am forced to be away from it for a week or two, I find myself struggling harder mentally and emotionally. 

As a Catholic, what worship means to me is the Mass. The Mass is where the supreme sacrifice of Christ is represented and He comes to offer Himself as nourishment for our bodies, minds, and souls through the Holy Eucharist. He is truly present --- Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity -- in the consecrated host and in the cup and partaking of that gift is a kind of sustenance that gives me a whole lot more strength than I have normally. That's because when I receive Jesus, I am receiving an infusion of His perfect, salvific grace. That is extremely powerful. So I receive communion during worship and go out and conquer all the mountains of mental illness, right?

Actually, no. It doesn't quite work like that at all. 

What happens is that it gives me strength for the journey and a lifeline when I am falling fast into the darkness and want to give up. In truth, I don't often feel like worship of God benefits me at all, but that's because day to day, I can't see the bigger picture. Day to day, I'm focused on housework, parenting our three daughters, my marriage, my advocacy work, and therapy. Some days, I'm simply focused on breathing in and breathing out and making it to the end of the day. 

So how do I know that this Holy Eucharistic nourishment that I receive each week as I worship God in community with my fellow Catholics is, in fact, something that benefits me?

 

It's when I've gone through the darkest darkness and am bereft of the mental ability to choose life and light that I see it. When I find myself on the other side of those great chasms of despair which threaten to take me away from this existence, I can look back and see His strength guiding my hands, feet, and even my addled mind. I can see how the graces I receive each week enabled me in those moments to reach out and find a hand to hold to help me back to a place of sanity and life instead of death.

For me, it's that critical. It is, at times, quite literally, the difference between attempting suicide and staying safe. It sustains me in the good times, but when my mental health takes a serious nosedive, that is when I truly believe it makes ALL the difference. I think that's why I feel kind of Jesus-anemic when I haven't been able to go to church and receive Jesus in Holy Communion. I need Him like I need water and air and food. 

For the last two Sundays, I've been unable to meet Him and receive Him in my weekly worship and I can tell. Thankfully, the Church offers Jesus to the faithful every single day of the week at Daily Masses, so there are other opportunities than Sundays. It's hard to find the time on a weekday, but for me, this week, I think it's going to be a priority to come and worship Him again even before next Sunday. 

I'll end with a quote from one of my patron saints, Pope St. John Paul II, which I think sums up this need and desire for worshiping and receiving Jesus in the Eucharist:

Introducing: 31 Reflections on Mental Health and Illness

 

The background of this is images from a special box I made during a period of intensive outpatient therapy. The many images are reflective of who I am, things I like, and goals I set for myself during that time.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 

– Ferris Bueller

Indeed, life does move fast and it hardly seems like two years have passed since I did my first Write 31Days series. I remember being rather daunted by the prospect of writing every single day on a single topic, but felt like God was pushing me to both write and to write about my struggles with mental illness. That series was called 31 Days of Stumbling ThroughDepression and it was about my struggles with a particularly difficult episode of depression. Had I known then what I know now, I would have titled it a bit differently and changed the word “depression” to either “PTSD” or “mental illness.”

At the end of that series, I had intended to keep writing my story, but discovered that I needed a break from it. Instead, I started writing other things about faith, family, and life in general. The thing is though, that try as I might, I couldn't get away from the subject of mental health or my personal struggles. I took a pretty long break from writing a lot about it, but eventually, with a mention of something here or a post on a subject there, I kept writing about it in a roundabout sort of way. My posts have been sporadic at best and not really much of a story, except for the fact that much of the things I've written have been pieces of my story.

I thought that I wanted to continue where I left off two years ago with this year's series, but after much discernment and looking at this year's Five Minute Friday Free Write prompts for 31 Days, I decided to go in a different direction. Part of my discernment about this included the fact that, as in the last two years, I have a lot on my plate with staying on top of my mental health, family life, and helping organise our local Out of the Darkness Community Walk for Suicide Prevention.

To that end, instead of continuing my personal story, I am going to use this year's FMF prompts to do a series of reflections on mental health and illness. Each post will feature the day's prompt word and a brief reflection on a mental health or illness topic. Although I'm not going to really do these in five minutes or actually as a free write, I want to keep them fairly short and edit them as little as possible so as to keep with the spirit of Five Minute Friday. Although this won't exactly be a continuation of my story, I will be sharing pieces of it at times along the way as well as sharing things I've learned through my journey.

I hope that you will find these posts to be helpful and educational in some way. Please feel free to leave me comments and let me know if you found them helpful. I'd also love to know your thoughts on these topics too! Most of all, my prayer is that these posts will serve to bring light to the darkness and hope for those who may be struggling (or watching a loved one struggle) with mental illness. God bless you!

The Big Lie of Mental Illness

One of the most difficult things about living with a mental illness and trying to manage it is trying to recognize what is true and real versus what is a lie. On the surface, that sounds like a silly statement because most people have a pretty firm grasp on reality in their day to day lives. I mean, they know that the sky is blue, that the grass is green, that people need oxygen to live, that gravity keeps us all rooted to the ground, etc. These are more general truths and easier to see. The harder things are the more specific and personal realities. That's where mental illness likes to lie and convince you to swallow those lies.

To outsiders, these lies are very obvious. For example, a person struggling with bulimia or anorexia hears the frequent lie that they are fat, obese, or overweight. For those who are outside of that disease, it is very easy to see that the person struggling with the eating disorder is either a healthy weight or underweight, but it's not so easy if you're the one struggling with it. You may stand in front of the mirror and try to convince yourself that it's a lie and that you need to eat to stay alive, but the illness has lied to you so often and so loudly, that it's almost all you can hear about yourself.
Depression lies. Bipolar lies. PTSD lies. No matter the illness, they all lie.

While each illness has lies that are specific to it, many of the lies that mental illness tells tend to overlap between the various illnesses:

• "You're worthless."
• "No one cares about you."
• "You'll never get through this."
• "You shouldn't need help. You should be stronger than this."
• "He/she only stays with you out of guilt, not love."
• "This is hopeless."
• "You are alone in this."

I want to address that last one -- "You are alone in this." I think this is one of the single biggest lies that pretty much transcends every mental illness. You feel as though no one has ever gone through what you are going through or that no one you know has any idea of the pain you feel. You may feel physically alone because of a lack of support via family or friends or trained professionals. You may feel spiritually alone as though God has abandoned you or as though no one in your faith community understands what you're going through (and sadly, many people of faith still believe mental illness is something that can be prayed away or is the result of demons or sin). You may feel isolated due to your living situation -- living alone, living in a rural area, having no family or friends close by to help.

Here's the truth about this lie -- you are NOT alone. Let me repeat that. YOU ARE NOT ALONE. If I can convince you of one thing, I hope it's this. I know that it sounds simplistic and perhaps a bit like I'm trying to make light of your feelings, but trust me. I've been there and I know how fierce this lie is and how easy it is to believe it.

I've heard this lie (and many others) more times than I can count. When I was in so much pain and the feelings of being so totally alone were so strong, it made believing this lie as easy as hearing it. I've believed it so fiercely that I have done things that were detrimental to my mental health and that only made my illnesses worse. I would isolate myself, stop reaching out to others, hide my pain from those closest to me, and slowly drown in my feelings to the point that the pain was more than I could bear and suicide became an option that I not only considered but actively planned.

So what changed?

Well, for one, it took my big brother Chez knocking me over the head several times with his own particular way of phrasing things. Every time he heard some expression of my feelings of being totally alone, he would firmly, but kindly tell me that "feelings are not an accurate barometer of reality." In other words, our feelings about things don't always tell us the truth. The reality is that I am surrounded with people that care deeply for me -- including Gray, my kids, Pendragon, Sif, Rikert, Fr. B, and my big brother Chez -- who all want the best for me and that best includes improved mental health. But feelings are strong and this wasn't an easy or fast change. In fact, it took not only Chez's admonitions and support, but also various supports from Gray, psychological help from Pendragon, and Fr. B's prayers and support. Most of all, it took me making a conscious decision to believe that I wasn't alone so that I could reach out to those people when I felt most alone.

Let me be clear -- that conscious decision didn't erase my feelings or the lie that pounded through my head. Far from it. If anything, there were times that the lie grew much louder and more difficult to fight against and the feelings of loneliness grew stronger along with the temptations to let go, sink into despair, and embrace suicide. In many ways, once I made that conscious decision, the fight actually got harder because that decision meant that I was suddenly having to trust people and be really vulnerable with them in ways that I hadn't before.

One of the biggest hurdles was to learn how to totally let down my walls and be 100% vulnerable with Gray. It wasn't that I didn't trust him before, but rather that I was scared of hurting him with all my pain. You see, the depression and PTSD had lied to me that if I was totally honest with him, he would get scared and have me locked up somewhere or that he would just decide that he couldn't handle "my crazy" and leave altogether.

Because I believed these lies for a long time, I struggled violently and almost daily with wanting to kill myself. The feelings were so intense that there were more than a few times that I made a suicide plan and intended to carry it out. The only person I was reaching out to at that point was Chez. You see, it's easier to be vulnerable with someone who lives 2000 miles away (although I kept some things from Chez too). Thanks be to God though, Chez cares enough about me that after trying to convince me to talk to Gray and running into a brick wall, he went around the wall to Gray directly and told him to talk to me. That was a very hard conversation to have and one that I fought having. In the end, it took several marital sessions and a lot of help from Pendragon (in those sessions and my individual ones) to help me work through my fears and be completely vulnerable with Gray.

In the interest of being completely candid, I still have moments when I struggle with being totally vulnerable and honest with Gray, Pendragon, and Chez too. It's much easier these days than it used to be, but every now and then when things get really dark and I feel alone, I want to isolate myself from everyone again. Instead of giving into those temptations and feelings though, I fight back. I reach out instead of being quiet. I talk to those in my support team -- Gray, Pendragon, Fr. B, and Chez primarily -- and I talk to them honestly. It's not always an easy thing to do either, but then fighting against yourself never is easy.

Gray and I still do marital sessions with Pendragon on a regular basis. Those sessions help a lot. They give us a place to talk through our struggles when they arise, to vent about a difficult week, to strategise when things are tough, and to continue to work on communicating with each other. As I often tell people, it's not that our marriage is in dire straits, but rather that given the nature of my illness, we want as much help as we can get.

Notice that I said "we" rather than "I" in the previous sentence. That's because another thing these marital sessions have accomplished is to more solidly unify Gray and myself into that "one flesh" that is spoken of by Jesus. We are a team in this. I no longer have to fight this alone. That's the thing about mental illness and the big lie that "you are alone in this." It not only convinces that you are alone, but that you must fight it alone, but that's a big fat lie as well.

You are not alone and you don't have to fight it alone. Even if you feel alone as you read this, know this one thing: you have me. Yes, me. See that red square button on the right hand side of this page? It's the one that says "Email The Momma." If you feel alone, all you have to do is click that button and send me an email. I promise that I'll write back.

If you need someone to connect with sooner than I am able to get back to you, you can pick up the phone and make a call. I know that's hard to do sometimes, but you can do it. I believe in you! If there's no one that you feel comfortable calling, then call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You don't have to be suicidal or in a severe crisis to call them. Just dial the number. You can also click the link I provided and chat with them via the internet if you'd rather talk that way. Both the hotline and the crisis chat are available 24 hours a day/7 days a week.

One other option if you have a cell phone and live in the USA is the Crisis Textline. It's super easy to use. All you have to do is text the word "Start" to the number 741741. When you do, a crisis counselor will text you back quickly and talk with you about whatever is on your heart. I have not personally used this resource, but have heard wonderful things about it. If you want more information on it, just click the link above.

The big lie that "you are alone in this" is a hard one to overcome and a hard one to convince yourself to fight against, but it IS doable. Remember: feelings are fickle and not an accurate indicator of what is true and your feelings WILL lie to you about this, but now that you know, you can fight. Reach out for help if you need it. You've got this!

P.S. Lest anyone reading this thinks I've got it all figured out, I want to assure you that I don't. I wrote most of this yesterday (7/13/2016) and I got hit with the big fat lie of being alone today. I was physically alone, but my illness came along and tried to convince me that in my moment of struggle that no one cared and that I was absolutely alone. It smacked me over the head like a sledgehammer. I felt weak and struggled for a solid hour before I finally gathered enough wherewithal to remember that my feelings were lying to me. I wrestled with this lie for a good hour before I managed to remember that Gray was just a text message away and that I could reach out to others. That action of reaching out eventually quelled the lie (after some time and some prayer too), but it shook me a bit. As strong as I've gotten and as much as I've learned, I can still fall prey to this vicious lie. I don't tell you this so that you lose hope, but just to be transparent with you. The hope in this is that I remembered that this is a lie and I overcame it. You can too!