I am so glad you got help. I spent years in religious spaces denying the anxiety I struggled with and thought I just wasn’t faithful enough for Jesus to give me relief. After all, the Bible tells you not to be anxious about anything, and to lay all your anxieties on him and they will be relieved if you just believe. I spent so many years beating myself up before I ended up in the ER twice in a 2 week period in the Fall of 2019 for what turned out to be severe panic attacks. My husband looked at me and very lovingly but directly said “It’s time for you to get some help & quit trying to do this all yourself”. It clearly wasn’t working. I started with therapy and a year into that realized I needed some more help, and I ranked in the highest category for anxiety when my GP had me do the in office test. I’ve been on an SSRi for over 2 years, and it’s not perfect and has had to be tweaked a time or two, but has definitely taken the edge off. I’ve also worked through a lot of unprocessed trauma and been able to trace back to where the hyper vigilance and OCD like behavior started and how the religious dogma with a very emotionally traumatic home life growing up exasperated so many of my behaviors & symptoms. It’s been very eye opening and I finally have the tools and healing, along with the medication & dietary knowledge, and importance of movement and breathing exercises to help me each day. Stay patient but diligent and know you’re not alone ♥️
Thank you! Religious spaces are SO good at either having us not believe / recognize our own anxiety, or blame ourselves for it - because of what you said about be anxious for nothing, etc!
Whew that sounds like a tough way to come to the realization you needed help, but I'm so glad you got there. And that you've done such great work through therapy and tracing the hypervigilance, OCD type symptoms!
I'm curious where my journey will continue to lead, and I really like knowing I'm, and we're!, not alone!
I'm so sorry you suffered for so long, and so glad you're feeling better! The power of medication is truly amazing, and I identify as a medication evangelist. I've seen it make so much difference for so many people. And like you, I have many patients who don't want to try it, and many others who are in different stages of their journeys with medication. I often think of generations past who didn't have access to medication. They didn't have the opportunity to feel better, for the most part, but we do. I'd like to reach back and give medication to my great-grandmother, who died in what passed for a mental health facility in her day; to my grandmother, who suffered such debilitating anxiety that she couldn't ride in a car; to my mother, whose untreated anxiety drove her in ways large and small. I'm thankful for the trazodone I've been on for many years, which will be pried out of my cold, dead hand. Yep . . . I think medication is what I hoped and prayed for Jesus to feel like.
Thank you so much ❤️ I encourage my clients to seek medication if they're interested...but doing it myself was a whole new step! I too come from a lineage of anxious women. I doubt I can save my already anxious daughter from it but I can try and mitigate the impact! I'm grateful for the scientific and med advances that allow us to experience the world in such a different way -- my mind is just boggled. Haha I'm glad to know that trazodone is working so well for you!
Oof there is so much truth in that statement of "medication is what I hoped and prayed for Jesus to feel like." Then we feel terribly guilty when Jesus doesn't work that way for us...
Phew, sooo relatable. I’ve been learning so much about religious OCD from DL & Aly too! It makes me so mad when I think about how these traits are rewarded in evangelical spaces. And so glad your meds are working well 👏🏽
So true that the traits are rewarded in those spaces, as both DL and Aly have pointed out repeatedly! Thank you I'm really grateful they're working so far too!
Apr 21, 2023·edited Apr 21, 2023Liked by Christine Greenwald
Oh yes! I relate sooo much to what you wrote here: "I was an ineffective evangelist, too shy to tell my peers about Jesus and therefore complicit in sending them to hell." And going from the too-shy-to-evangelize guilt to the not-a-good-enough-social-justice-warrior guilt.
Thank you for sharing your experience with medication and I am so happy to hear that you've found relief so far! I saw a post the other day on OCD that said, "What if evidence-based mental health treatment is the answer to prayer you've been waiting for?" (I'm not even sure I believe in prayer anymore, but I agree proper treatment feels like a better answer to prayer than anything else I've experienced).
Haha the conservative evangelical to progressive SJW evangelical pipeline is real!!
Amen (in whatever way we take that) to evidence-based mental health treatment being the answer to prayer! And yes, I'm really glad your blog exists and I suspect it won't be the last time I link! :)
Christine, thank you for sharing so openly about your struggles and about finding and taking the meds that help you. Being a mom, especially a mom with post partum depression, may be the toughest job in the world. You are an admirable woman for all the humanness and wisdom you share here to help all of us, your readers, gain from your experience. Here's a hug for all you do: 🤗
Thank you, Chuck! And this seems perhaps simple but feels like such a revelation: that it is indeed harder to be a mom when you have PPD! Gosh, I'll take the hug and offer myself one as well! I'm so glad you're here and have been for this evolving journey.
This post made so sad and mad about how unhealthy and unhelpful the church space is for those with anxiety and depression and many other struggles. I have struggled on and off with anxiety all my life, i was always a shy kid. I have spent a lot of time on knowing myself and I came to understand I was an introvert and highly sensitive. This has made such a difference to my quality of life as I've added in boundaries and respected my natural tendencies. I've spent so many years trying to be an extrovert, pushing myself to speak from the front, evangelise etc the things my church valued and what I thought God wanted. I have found mindfulness and yoga ( both eyes a little suspiciously within the church) to be wonderful and healing for me. I'm so glad you are finding a pathway that helps you. We definitely need more healthy conversations about mental health and all the ways to support and help it
Yes, the church / evangelical space is NOT made for people like us (but is really skilled at making us feel terrible about ourselves!). Haha, the things that end up being so helpful, like mindfulness and yoga (and psychiatric medication!), were indeed viewed so skeptically by the church!
Medication, for me, has literally been a life saver. I put it off as long as possible, but finally felt I had no other choice, and I might as well give it a shot. I'm so glad I did.
I still struggle with feeling that I SHOULD be anxious and depressed, but it's not as bad as it once was.
One thing that really bothers me now is my family, especially my sisters. We all struggle with mental health in very similar ways, and we all grew up in a "depression is just failure to trust God" culture. While one sister is starting to come out of that horrible belief, the other is firmly entrenched. I hate seeing them in pain when I know what would help, at least to some extent. But no one responds well to pressure, so I simply talk positively about my experience with meds and counseling when the opportunity arises and shut up when it doesn't. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I'm glad you gave it a shot and it worked out! Pretty fascinating, this feeling that we "should" be anxious and depressed -- there's some pretty psychodynamic (a therapy modality) explanations that might shed insight! Anyway, your sisters. That's hard! I think what you're doing is great! Another thing I try with people (like in sessions) is just to get curious about what all they feel is the barrier. Theology? Afraid of foreign substance in their body? Afraid they'll be lifelong users then? And then flesh out their answers - hopefully getting to the place where they realize it's not as bad / drastic as they'd made it out to be. Just my thoughts, since you asked! I hope they find the healing they need!
This is the first time I’ve heard of moral scrupulosity, and after looking it up, I now have a name for my obsessions and anxieties around hurting people’s feelings, correctly doing my taxes, tipping the right amount in the right situations, following pandemic rules, etc. I’m just coming out of a high stress period where these thoughts have been in overdrive. Medication has helped me manage my anxiety for 20 years, but what really helps is time away from work. I just took 3 days of vacation to recover from multiple family visits including a funeral. I did nothing but organize paperwork for 3 days and I feel calmer going into the weekend. That’s sufficient for now, but I have no problem taking extended time off if the anxiety gets too high. I’ve taken month-long sick leaves a few times, and have taken several leaves of absence to reset completely when needed. I’m fortunate to have the financial ability to do this, but it’s also my ability to take time off that has made it possible to hold a financially rewarding job in the first place. Anyway, anxiety is no fun, but it does build a certain resilience when you are constantly living outside your comfort zone. 😉
I appreciate you sharing about this and giving us space to ruminate on the topic.
I'm not a stranger to depression meds, and haven't had qualms using them for an extended period, but I only somewhat recently realized that perhaps my approach to just toughing out anxiety may not be the healthiest thing / only possible approach. I have a loved one who has been helped by them, but I guess I just had a narrow frame for what it can treat, due to that being my only knowledge/exposure. After a serious episode of dissociation once last year, I was prescribed an anti-anxiety med, but was reserving it for similar caliber situations. Then, today anxiety caught me by surprise and kept escalating, so I finally availed myself of it, and I can attest it has been helpful.
I suppose this isn't quite the same as what you were describing in your experience, but nevertheless, I'm grateful for such tools and the relief of not being stuck in my old way of handling anxiety I had in my evangelical days: just being harder and harder on myself and denying the reality of what I was feeling, to no real relief (and significant harm even when it did 'work').
Good for you, letting yourself take the help today (meds) when you needed it! Turns out toughing it out is way overrated. (FWIW, I originally wanted to give birth without pain meds and my mind vastly changed midway through that experience, which sort of helped change my mind about accepting the help of modern medicine in general!). Hooray for giving up being harder on harder on ourselves!
I'm so glad that the meds have been helping, Christine!
My reply isn't directly about anxiety but I'm going to go on a tangent anyway. :-) You say, "Feeling this way was how I was supposed to feel." I definitely relate! Before I had my first child, I had lots of aspirations about what kind of life I wanted to have, and how involved I'd be in my community, and generous with my time, and able to serve the poor. When I got pregnant I got so tired I couldn't attend church small group and then when F was born I quickly burned out of trying to be involved in a local community organization. I've now generally decided not to hold myself to all my standards of sacrificial love because I find myself growing resentful when I'm not getting enough sleep or rest because of trying to help others.
I feel relatively comfortable accepting the idea that I can't live up to all the ideals I have for myself, but it does still bother me that I don't feel able to be as generous and community-centric and environmentally-responsible as I feel people ought to be. I've had friends tell me that I have a Catholic-like guilt complex, but at the present, it feels more internally aligned to live in the tension that I do have ideals but the limits on my time and abilities mean I can't really meet them. I think my thoughts may continue to shift on this, and perhaps in some future I might see my ideals as dysfunctional, but for now it feels important to me to have a sense of how I wish life could be and how I think people ought to treat each other so I can try to incrementally move towards those ideals.
Oh gosh, same!!! So many aspirations for how I'd live my life... then came children. lolz. My counseling program taught us that resentment is a sign that our boundaries are being violated, and to pay attention to that feeling!
I do still hope, like you're saying, to move more towards my ideals one day -- whichever ones I end up keeping, I suppose. I appreciate the tension that you're holding there in yourself, and I feel it too!
Yes! I definitely feel more able to give genuinely when I pay attention to where resentment is forming. And I hear you on the ideals still evolving! =)
I am so glad you got help. I spent years in religious spaces denying the anxiety I struggled with and thought I just wasn’t faithful enough for Jesus to give me relief. After all, the Bible tells you not to be anxious about anything, and to lay all your anxieties on him and they will be relieved if you just believe. I spent so many years beating myself up before I ended up in the ER twice in a 2 week period in the Fall of 2019 for what turned out to be severe panic attacks. My husband looked at me and very lovingly but directly said “It’s time for you to get some help & quit trying to do this all yourself”. It clearly wasn’t working. I started with therapy and a year into that realized I needed some more help, and I ranked in the highest category for anxiety when my GP had me do the in office test. I’ve been on an SSRi for over 2 years, and it’s not perfect and has had to be tweaked a time or two, but has definitely taken the edge off. I’ve also worked through a lot of unprocessed trauma and been able to trace back to where the hyper vigilance and OCD like behavior started and how the religious dogma with a very emotionally traumatic home life growing up exasperated so many of my behaviors & symptoms. It’s been very eye opening and I finally have the tools and healing, along with the medication & dietary knowledge, and importance of movement and breathing exercises to help me each day. Stay patient but diligent and know you’re not alone ♥️
Thank you! Religious spaces are SO good at either having us not believe / recognize our own anxiety, or blame ourselves for it - because of what you said about be anxious for nothing, etc!
Whew that sounds like a tough way to come to the realization you needed help, but I'm so glad you got there. And that you've done such great work through therapy and tracing the hypervigilance, OCD type symptoms!
I'm curious where my journey will continue to lead, and I really like knowing I'm, and we're!, not alone!
I'm so sorry you suffered for so long, and so glad you're feeling better! The power of medication is truly amazing, and I identify as a medication evangelist. I've seen it make so much difference for so many people. And like you, I have many patients who don't want to try it, and many others who are in different stages of their journeys with medication. I often think of generations past who didn't have access to medication. They didn't have the opportunity to feel better, for the most part, but we do. I'd like to reach back and give medication to my great-grandmother, who died in what passed for a mental health facility in her day; to my grandmother, who suffered such debilitating anxiety that she couldn't ride in a car; to my mother, whose untreated anxiety drove her in ways large and small. I'm thankful for the trazodone I've been on for many years, which will be pried out of my cold, dead hand. Yep . . . I think medication is what I hoped and prayed for Jesus to feel like.
Thank you so much ❤️ I encourage my clients to seek medication if they're interested...but doing it myself was a whole new step! I too come from a lineage of anxious women. I doubt I can save my already anxious daughter from it but I can try and mitigate the impact! I'm grateful for the scientific and med advances that allow us to experience the world in such a different way -- my mind is just boggled. Haha I'm glad to know that trazodone is working so well for you!
Oof there is so much truth in that statement of "medication is what I hoped and prayed for Jesus to feel like." Then we feel terribly guilty when Jesus doesn't work that way for us...
Phew, sooo relatable. I’ve been learning so much about religious OCD from DL & Aly too! It makes me so mad when I think about how these traits are rewarded in evangelical spaces. And so glad your meds are working well 👏🏽
So true that the traits are rewarded in those spaces, as both DL and Aly have pointed out repeatedly! Thank you I'm really grateful they're working so far too!
Well, this was relatable. I'm on an antidepressant too, and it has been life-changing. Cheers to continued healing!
Cheers to continued healing, and the miracles of modern medicine!
Oh yes! I relate sooo much to what you wrote here: "I was an ineffective evangelist, too shy to tell my peers about Jesus and therefore complicit in sending them to hell." And going from the too-shy-to-evangelize guilt to the not-a-good-enough-social-justice-warrior guilt.
Thank you for sharing your experience with medication and I am so happy to hear that you've found relief so far! I saw a post the other day on OCD that said, "What if evidence-based mental health treatment is the answer to prayer you've been waiting for?" (I'm not even sure I believe in prayer anymore, but I agree proper treatment feels like a better answer to prayer than anything else I've experienced).
Also, thanks for linking to my post on OCD!
Haha the conservative evangelical to progressive SJW evangelical pipeline is real!!
Amen (in whatever way we take that) to evidence-based mental health treatment being the answer to prayer! And yes, I'm really glad your blog exists and I suspect it won't be the last time I link! :)
Christine, thank you for sharing so openly about your struggles and about finding and taking the meds that help you. Being a mom, especially a mom with post partum depression, may be the toughest job in the world. You are an admirable woman for all the humanness and wisdom you share here to help all of us, your readers, gain from your experience. Here's a hug for all you do: 🤗
Thank you, Chuck! And this seems perhaps simple but feels like such a revelation: that it is indeed harder to be a mom when you have PPD! Gosh, I'll take the hug and offer myself one as well! I'm so glad you're here and have been for this evolving journey.
This post made so sad and mad about how unhealthy and unhelpful the church space is for those with anxiety and depression and many other struggles. I have struggled on and off with anxiety all my life, i was always a shy kid. I have spent a lot of time on knowing myself and I came to understand I was an introvert and highly sensitive. This has made such a difference to my quality of life as I've added in boundaries and respected my natural tendencies. I've spent so many years trying to be an extrovert, pushing myself to speak from the front, evangelise etc the things my church valued and what I thought God wanted. I have found mindfulness and yoga ( both eyes a little suspiciously within the church) to be wonderful and healing for me. I'm so glad you are finding a pathway that helps you. We definitely need more healthy conversations about mental health and all the ways to support and help it
Yes, the church / evangelical space is NOT made for people like us (but is really skilled at making us feel terrible about ourselves!). Haha, the things that end up being so helpful, like mindfulness and yoga (and psychiatric medication!), were indeed viewed so skeptically by the church!
Medication, for me, has literally been a life saver. I put it off as long as possible, but finally felt I had no other choice, and I might as well give it a shot. I'm so glad I did.
I still struggle with feeling that I SHOULD be anxious and depressed, but it's not as bad as it once was.
One thing that really bothers me now is my family, especially my sisters. We all struggle with mental health in very similar ways, and we all grew up in a "depression is just failure to trust God" culture. While one sister is starting to come out of that horrible belief, the other is firmly entrenched. I hate seeing them in pain when I know what would help, at least to some extent. But no one responds well to pressure, so I simply talk positively about my experience with meds and counseling when the opportunity arises and shut up when it doesn't. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I'm glad you gave it a shot and it worked out! Pretty fascinating, this feeling that we "should" be anxious and depressed -- there's some pretty psychodynamic (a therapy modality) explanations that might shed insight! Anyway, your sisters. That's hard! I think what you're doing is great! Another thing I try with people (like in sessions) is just to get curious about what all they feel is the barrier. Theology? Afraid of foreign substance in their body? Afraid they'll be lifelong users then? And then flesh out their answers - hopefully getting to the place where they realize it's not as bad / drastic as they'd made it out to be. Just my thoughts, since you asked! I hope they find the healing they need!
This is the first time I’ve heard of moral scrupulosity, and after looking it up, I now have a name for my obsessions and anxieties around hurting people’s feelings, correctly doing my taxes, tipping the right amount in the right situations, following pandemic rules, etc. I’m just coming out of a high stress period where these thoughts have been in overdrive. Medication has helped me manage my anxiety for 20 years, but what really helps is time away from work. I just took 3 days of vacation to recover from multiple family visits including a funeral. I did nothing but organize paperwork for 3 days and I feel calmer going into the weekend. That’s sufficient for now, but I have no problem taking extended time off if the anxiety gets too high. I’ve taken month-long sick leaves a few times, and have taken several leaves of absence to reset completely when needed. I’m fortunate to have the financial ability to do this, but it’s also my ability to take time off that has made it possible to hold a financially rewarding job in the first place. Anyway, anxiety is no fun, but it does build a certain resilience when you are constantly living outside your comfort zone. 😉
I'm glad you now have a name for moral scrupulosity now! That's really great about being able to take the time off and reset.
Ooh I love that reframing of anxiety - building resilience from constantly having to live outside our comfort zone!
I appreciate you sharing about this and giving us space to ruminate on the topic.
I'm not a stranger to depression meds, and haven't had qualms using them for an extended period, but I only somewhat recently realized that perhaps my approach to just toughing out anxiety may not be the healthiest thing / only possible approach. I have a loved one who has been helped by them, but I guess I just had a narrow frame for what it can treat, due to that being my only knowledge/exposure. After a serious episode of dissociation once last year, I was prescribed an anti-anxiety med, but was reserving it for similar caliber situations. Then, today anxiety caught me by surprise and kept escalating, so I finally availed myself of it, and I can attest it has been helpful.
I suppose this isn't quite the same as what you were describing in your experience, but nevertheless, I'm grateful for such tools and the relief of not being stuck in my old way of handling anxiety I had in my evangelical days: just being harder and harder on myself and denying the reality of what I was feeling, to no real relief (and significant harm even when it did 'work').
Good for you, letting yourself take the help today (meds) when you needed it! Turns out toughing it out is way overrated. (FWIW, I originally wanted to give birth without pain meds and my mind vastly changed midway through that experience, which sort of helped change my mind about accepting the help of modern medicine in general!). Hooray for giving up being harder on harder on ourselves!
I'm so glad that the meds have been helping, Christine!
My reply isn't directly about anxiety but I'm going to go on a tangent anyway. :-) You say, "Feeling this way was how I was supposed to feel." I definitely relate! Before I had my first child, I had lots of aspirations about what kind of life I wanted to have, and how involved I'd be in my community, and generous with my time, and able to serve the poor. When I got pregnant I got so tired I couldn't attend church small group and then when F was born I quickly burned out of trying to be involved in a local community organization. I've now generally decided not to hold myself to all my standards of sacrificial love because I find myself growing resentful when I'm not getting enough sleep or rest because of trying to help others.
I feel relatively comfortable accepting the idea that I can't live up to all the ideals I have for myself, but it does still bother me that I don't feel able to be as generous and community-centric and environmentally-responsible as I feel people ought to be. I've had friends tell me that I have a Catholic-like guilt complex, but at the present, it feels more internally aligned to live in the tension that I do have ideals but the limits on my time and abilities mean I can't really meet them. I think my thoughts may continue to shift on this, and perhaps in some future I might see my ideals as dysfunctional, but for now it feels important to me to have a sense of how I wish life could be and how I think people ought to treat each other so I can try to incrementally move towards those ideals.
Oh gosh, same!!! So many aspirations for how I'd live my life... then came children. lolz. My counseling program taught us that resentment is a sign that our boundaries are being violated, and to pay attention to that feeling!
I do still hope, like you're saying, to move more towards my ideals one day -- whichever ones I end up keeping, I suppose. I appreciate the tension that you're holding there in yourself, and I feel it too!
Yes! I definitely feel more able to give genuinely when I pay attention to where resentment is forming. And I hear you on the ideals still evolving! =)