I‘ve been going back and forth about how much to share about my background in what caused my mental illness and some of what it has been like. I wanted to skip this part because I’d rather talk in generalities, but stories matter, so here is a little bit of mine.

As a kid I was severely bullied, to the extent that the school told my parents that our family had to move because the administrators were afraid of what would happen to me if I stayed there. There have been studies done where they have found that the long term effects of bullying are worse than any other form of childhood abuse. I am hesitant to include this fact at the risk of it seeming I am creating some kind of hierarchy of suffering, but there are a few reasons why I decided to include it. There is so much shame that people who were bullied carry with them. The times I have mentioned having been bullied almost always people’s first response is to say that I don’t look like someone who would have been bullied, and they often then ask me questions about my childhood appearance, weight, and intelligence as a way to try and understand why I was bullied. The message of the bullies gets reinforced—if you were bullied there was something about you that made you deserve it (though I know this is not the person’s intention). No other form of childhood abuse gets this kind of response. No one would ever ask a child abused by their parents what about them made them get abused. When you have already been told by your peers that you are worthless, worse than worthless, and by the others that you are not worth defending this is a constant reminder of the truth of that message. Eventually it got to the point where I wished for, and began to plan, my own death.

But then something happened that saved me, and has become critical to my life. There was a particularly terrible day when, after going to sleep, I awoke in the middle of the night, and beside my bed stood Jesus Christ. And the love of God I experienced was beyond anything I can describe. Any words I can use to try and describe it seem cheap and superficial. I can only say it was greater than anything I could ever have imagined. This is an extremely sacred event for me, and I won’t share the details now, except this one vital fact—God’s love is far, far beyond what we can even begin to dare to hope.

But while I carried in me an awareness of the love of God that kept me alive, I also still carried the trauma of what had happened to me, and what it had taught me about myself. I became deeply confused. There were so many other people who had suffered far worse than I had, and there were people who had died from their despair. Why didn’t God intervene for them with visions? I was confused by the unfairness of a God who showed so much love, but then seemed to be giving preference. And I also knew I didn’t deserve preference. The conclusion I came to was that I must have to earn my experience. That perhaps I had the vision when others didn’t because I was so much worse than them, and God was giving me a chance to become good enough to earn the future possibility of the love I had experienced.

Along with severe PTSD from my trauma I developed intense scrupulosity—a form of OCD that focuses on religious exactness. And it is a hellish combination. I concluded the earning meant that I had to be perfect. This was reinforced by what I had learned from the abuse, that I was worthless and disgusting and wasn’t nearly good enough to actually have deserved this revelation. It was also reinforced by a lot of what I was learning from church. (To clarify, not for one moment do I believe that anyone at church was intentionally teaching what I learned, and would be horrified if they knew what I was concluding. I know this is not everyone’s experience from church, this was my special, personal hell.) I learned that God’s love for us is manifested by his resolute determination to make us “better”, and that he even loves us so much he’ll torture us to get us there (we don’t call it torture, we call it trials, but in my experience it was truly torture). I learned that humility meant perpetual self-effacement and self-fault finding and constantly keeping track of our failings so that we can repent. But also that God isn’t able to truly forgive sins, but can only punish them, but will punish the innocent one instead of us if we prove ourselves worthy of it. And as a woman there was an added element that there is something almost holy about girls and even grown women lacking confidence. Like it’s sweet and cute and pleasing to God for women in particular to be insecure. I learned that God saw doubt and questions as signs of faithlessness and that if we didn’t set them aside God could not help and protect us. And I learned that if I didn’t understand and experience this as love I was out of tune with the spirit.

But at same time I had begun a deeply personal and vivid relationship with my Heavenly Parents. I found that far from being annoyed at being asked to reveal things, I have a Heavenly Mother and Father who are eager to reveal things. They delight in my questions and want me to understand them. They are impatient to truly and deeply and fully forgive so that I won’t have to feel trapped into seeing and experiencing a world coated in a lens of my own badness, but could instead be free to let them love me and teach me and see the divinity in myself and all around me without having to fight it under some misguided belief that it keeps me humble. I found a Heavenly family who love passionately, irrevocably, unconditionally, and completely, and who look upon all their children with gladness.

These two God’s were at constant odds within me. I couldn’t fully believe in either, because they were both so real to me, but were constantly fighting each other. One taught me to hate myself, and reinforced and kept alive all my worst pains and traumas. He kept me constantly second guessing myself and running trying to catch the carrot that was always just out of reach, while using a stick to get me to run faster, all for my “own good”. But no matter how hard I tried, it was always just out of reach and it was always my fault I couldn’t catch it. This was a God whose love and hopes for my future happiness felt like an unbearable burden, and who would punish me for stumbling under it. And I desperately, DEPSERATLY, wanted to prove myself to this God because I was so afraid of disappointing him; I was so afraid of making him angry.

But all the while there was this other God—who just loved me. And they (I say they because this God was my Heavenly Mother and Father and Savior) loved me in the way I needed to be loved, and they asked for nothing in return. And I never felt like I needed to prove myself to this God, I just wanted to be with them. I craved their presence and at the same time feared it because it just seemed too good to be true. But I wanted to be with that God. I wanted to walk with them and talk with them and be like them because their love felt like freedom; it felt like being whole, the love of these Heavenly Parents and brother who loved me so, so profoundly.  But to do that I didn’t just have to trust them, I had to trust myself. And I couldn’t. Everywhere I looked people seemed to be telling me I was wrong, that I couldn’t trust a God like that because I’d stop trying to be good. That I pleased God by being self-dismissive and insecure and not enough and always, always striving to be “better”.

This cognitive dissonance became more and more unbearable. I began to be crushed under the weight of trying to reconcile these irreconcilable God’s who could not both be worshipped but who both required it. And sometimes people would try to tell me how they could be mashed together and that I was thinking too much but for me they just couldn’t, (and believe me I tried). I lived in this limbo of never knowing how to choose between the voice telling me that it is wrong to trust myself, and the one telling me that I should. I had no one to turn to for help because I didn’t understand what was happening, and the people I did try to ask for help didn’t either, and they couldn’t understand why the pat answers of rote theology weren’t working for me. Where was my faith?! And so I came to the conclusion I was broken, constantly swinging between hope and overwhelming despair.

This is a little bit of my genesis story. Over the years I have also spent a significant amount of time helping and supporting others with mental illness—things like OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder, suicidal levels of depression, anxiety/panic attacks, PTSD, and Bipolar Disorder to name a few. I have experienced for myself and have helped people who are experiencing the deepest, profoundest darkness imaginable, and not for moments or days, but for years.

Without question church and religion can be helpful through these times. There are doctrinal teachings that are masterful at bringing hope to the hopeless. And frankly there were times for me when my scrupulous obsession with pleasing God was literally the only thing that kept me alive. And is is also true that a compassionless reading of religion can make the experience of mental illness incalculably harder. Over the next few weeks in these posts we will discuss first some of those difficulties. The pressure to always be happy, to be grateful. The pressure to see God’s hand in everything that happens to you. Our obsession with agency and the naïve belief that our agency over ourselves is always absolute. During times of health these teachings can be powerful, and there are times during mental illness they can help as well. And there are times when these teachings can be actively harmful, solidifying an already unimaginable darkness, leaving the person feeling helpless, alone, and faithless.

And we will also discuss the ways that the gospel succors the broken. The hope that it can bring—but only when allowed to move freely through a lens of empathy that can be extremely difficult for those who have never experienced mental illness. I hope that these posts will be raw and honest, to pull the curtain back on something millions of people struggle with. And I hope they will give comfort and support to all those struggling with mental illness—both the people who are ill and their loved ones and communities. In some ways my childhood vision of Christ has been ongoing, particularly in the revelation of God through the afflicted. And my hope is to see a church where Christ’s admonition to comfort those who stand in need of comfort, to mourn with those who mourn, will take on new meaning to all of us. That we will no longer see these as injunctions for spiritual living, but more clearly for what they are—directions to sacred space; guiding us to the places where heaven and earth meet, which are so often also the places where light and darkness touch.