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 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). 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.
Comments
16 responses to “[Mental Illness at Church] A Personal Story”
I can relate to a lot of your journey. Scrupulosity is a BEAR but I really can testify of the healing power of Christ.
For me, the golden nugget has been the 12-step world. I’m a lifer.
Thank you for sharing some of your story.
Thanks for sharing Mary! Looking forward to reading more. God bless you!
I have a daughter with some mental illness issues and that, mixed with the church/religion stuff, really sucks for her. I am thrilled that she is comfortable talking to me about what she is dealing with and like you say, I just dont get it…BUT… she knows that I love her unconditionally and want to be there for her. IMO all those who deal with mental illness in life are saved just like those who die before age 8.
Mary, this is very powerful. Thank you for sharing; these are things I needed to hear. I look forward to the additional posts on this topic.
Thank you for sharing your tender thoughts and feelings – always a scary process, but it can be helpful to all of us.
First of all I take issue with your ridiculous idea that no one would ever ask a child abused by their parents why they were abused. I was sexually abused and I got asked that one hell of a lot. There was an assumption that I had seduced my father. Even church leaders assumed that somehow it had to be my fault. If you doubt that, go read the idiotic talk by Richard Scott from 1992.
Oh, and I was also bullied at school and by far the worst abuse was the sexual abuse. You trust your parents far more than the stupid kids at school, so that betrayal of trust is huge compared to anything kids at school can do to you. But I also don’t want to try to build a hierarchy of suffering, because for some children bullying by peers can be more traumatic than other children who are sexually abused. Some of it depends on the length of bullying or the support from home and other adults around you, plus the child’s own strengths and weaknesses. By kid brother was bullied by peers and that damaged him more than the sexual abuse from his LDS scout leader. So, it varies. So, please do NOT try to establish a hierarchy of abuse by siting a study that says one thing when I can site you several studies that say neglect for boys and sexual abuse for girls seem to be most damaging. After all my years as a social worker, those studies are slanted to try to establish a hierarchy of suffering. It depends too much on other circumstances and type of abuse is less important than those other factors in how much damage the child suffers.
Now I’ll go back and read the rest of your post. I just had to have my screaming fit about your stupid assumption that other forms of child abused do not lead to victim blame. Our society is just too good at victim blaming. We specialize in blaming victims.
Anna, thank you for your response. I am so, so sorry for what you went through and am so sorry that my statement was so thoughtless. Thank you for correcting me. I will edit that part.
Being loved unconditionally is everything!
I am so glad you found something that helps so much! That is such a blessing.
I struggle with BPD, I don’t mind saying, and on certain days which “dark” me is in charge, it can be very difficult to feel love in any respect and just as hard to give it out. During these times I can be extremely misanthropic and have a distrust of God. But on days when “light” me or really me normally I know God is Love, and Love is ultimate. If it where not for this truth I don’t think I would be around, I can tell you that much.
Anyways, thank you for sharing and your vulnerability. A lot of this resonated with me.
Mary, thanks you for telling your story and about your religious confusion. You are right that in some ways God, or rather human concept of God is split between a God who loves us deeply and unconditionally, and this other image of a God who needs us to be perfect before he can even stand us. Unfortunatly President Nelson preaches that God’s love for us is *not unconditional*, so he is talking and teaching about this judgemental and perfectionistic God who only loves us if we are perfect.
I didn’t have visions or any strong feeling of being loved, but I have had verbal answers from a God who loves unconditionally. So, yeah, I have an issue with President Nelson and his idea of a God who doesn’t love us until we earn it. Like you, the pat answers from the church just didn’t work for me and I decided that I was hopelessly broken. Trying to get help with the spiritual issues was hard because my professional counselors would refer me to my “clergy” and Mormon clergy are untrained and unqualified and really had no concept of why the pat answers were not answers. In fact, my bishops were likely to blame me, if not for the abuse itself, then for not being over it already. But I had not been given a chance to get over it, and they were just making things worse by blaming me for being broken. So much of your story is mine also.
I have never had the guts it takes to share as much as you have to anyone who still believes in the church. People still assume I am broken because church answers didn’t fix the problems of abuse, but made it worse. I had to more or less find God away from the church and then fix my image of God away from a judgmental and abusive father, and fix my image of me into someone God didn’t hate. So, supper thanks for sharing and I owe you a bit of apology for my first post. I do understand that you have probably had to fight to have the damage from bullying taken seriously. That was what you were really doing, was saying that bullying is damaging and please don’t underestimate the damage. Anything that makes a child feel worthless is devastating. It really doesn’t matter if it is bullying at school, neglect from parents, abuse from parents, abuse from anybody. I wish people could stop blaming the victim and just accept that these things can be so emotionally and spiritually damaging and healing takes more than a pat on the head and some cliche about God’s love, and that forcing “forgiveness” is not the answer because forgiving the person who taught us to hate ourselves doesn’t fix that we hate ourselves. And blaming us doesn’t help but makes it worse. People don’t get that you cannot shame someone into loving themselves, but have to love them into seeing that love exists.
@Vic Rattlehead, Thank you for sharing! The analogy of darkness and light is such a powerful one for BPD. It is amazing how far just a little hope can carry us.
@Anna, Thank you for your follow up. It is true that most of my life I have felt that I have to “justify” being traumatized, but your comment made me realize that in accepting and acting on that narrative I am helping to reinforce an already harmful, sometimes deadly, environment in which all victims of abuse and trauma may feel they need to justify theirs as well, and that the responsibility is on them to “prove” that what happened to them was wrong, and exactly how wrong on some kind of scale. That is absolutely the last thing I would ever want and I feel sick (literally I felt like I was going to throw up) at the realization that by believing I had to justify my trauma I was participating in something harmful to people who are already suffering. That hadn’t even occurred to me. So seriously, thank you!
Thank you for sharing your experience. You are right, in order to try and make our own lives make sense humans so often attack instead of being open to the people who don’t fit into our box, and the repercussions on those people are devastating. It sounds like you are creating space where you are able to learn to trust yourself and God’s unconditional love for you and all their children and are using that to bless others! Thanks again for sharing.
My daughter was horribly bullied at church by LDS young women. Nothing was done to stop it, and it led to a suicide attempt. Surely, the church can and must do better to protect its youth from bullying at church activities.
Mary, thank you for this and I look forward to reading more.
I get the need to justify bullying as a cause for PTSD, because too many people still think of bullying as a normal part of childhood–which helps make mental illness a normal part of adulthood. I was surprised some years ago when my youngest’s school wouldn’t do anything about bullying despite the research Mary cites, and we had to pull him out of that school. The Church’s youth protection training is pretty clear about having zero tolerance for bullying.
“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”
Yes, this is one of the adversary’s most effective lies: You can’t feel peace, you can’t feel safe, you can’t feel clean, you can’t feel unconditional love, because if you do you’ll get complacent, won’t try hard enough, and won’t be good enough. It all comes back to thinking of the gospel as a self-improvement program rather than a way to open ourselves to being “wrought upon and cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost” and experience the “mighty change of heart.” Think through the great conversion stories in the Book of Mormon: the new converts first cry for mercy, then receive forgiveness of their sins and peace of conscience which sweeps away all their guilt and fear, and then they change their lives. In the long run, love and gratitude are far better motivators than guilt and fear.
Wonderful post, Mary. I suffer from pretty-much everything on your list. I too was bullied at school and come from a home that was broken to pieces–multiple divorces, sexual abuse, etc.
When I finally hit the wall of depression 20+ years ago I started stripping things out of my life that I no longer had the strength to maintain. And now I live like a hermit in my own home–rarely venturing out into the world. My ward is super supportive–the young men administer the sacrament to me — and others in my family who have similar difficulties to mine — in my living room.
At any rate, my reason for sharing some of my experience is to highlight a marvelous little thing that has happened over the last few years. And that is, now that I’m restricted by real limitations — and I mean limitations that I cannot deny — I can approach the throne of Deity with a little more confidence. I know that he knows that I can’t do much more than I’m doing with my life–and that has a way of getting the “scrupulosity” monkey off my back.
And now the gospel is sweeter than ever. The Lord answers my prayers–he is truly meek and lowly in heart. And best of all, over the last while a hope in Christ has dawned on me like the daystar that Peter speaks of.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. I had to read it in bits and pieces because it hit close to my own pain. I was bullied from age 9 to 16 by the other youth at church to the point where I was having anxiety attacks every Sunday that I had to hide because anxiety as a real thing didn’t yet exist so I thought something was just wrong with me. The whole thing was traumatic and changed who I was a person. I thought it was my fault because the adults acted as if it was my fault, regularly putting me into positions that allowed the other kids to mistreat me.
It took me years and years to find the God that loved me. The God I knew was the one of authority who saw me as the weird kid from the weird family that no one (especially the ‘in crowd’ families that held all the authority positions in the ward) liked. Because the church was presented as being a sort of God in my life, I saw no distinction and thus I was a failure no matter what I did because I could never earn the love of ‘authority’ (meaning bishops and leaders and teachers and all the other people who taught me the ‘logic’ of how church/child relationships work. These people also being the parents/family/friends of the kids who bullied me).
To find God, I had to let go of the entire concept of authority and instead focus on Grace. For me, Grace is where fulfillment, spirit, completeness, God’s desire to know me, my love for God and my neighbor exist. Authority is about social-climbing and ego and holding ungiven power over others. (I fully recognize not everyone with power in the church behaves badly.)
I know others see it differently and I can accept that. The power of grace is so intense in my life that trying to over-ride it or ever influence it with church authority isn’t worth it. So I let it go.
Wow, I am so amazed by the comments! Thank you all so much for sharing these experiences and what you have learned!