“Are you with me?” I would anxiously inquire of God. Behind the question was the question of whether God did, or whether he even could, affirm me. I knew I was going to heaven, but my paradigm of reality would hardly permit me to believe that he could be pleased with me. I and my church were too routinely letting him down to be worthy of approval. What indeed does God require of a man? Of a weak man? Of a flawed Church? How might I acquire any sense of accomplishment or affirmation in regions of responsibility which seem to demand so much more that I ever can offer? I might begin a series of blogs on Christian responsibility with an illustration of the topic’s importance to me and discussion of my mental illness’s interaction with my sense of responsibility.
A person’s worldview inevitably shapes their sense of responsibility which in turn influences how they determine their value to the world or to any relevant authority. Christianity provides a worldview which celebrates hope. The way it is presented in some circles, however, provides a worldview that is profoundly tragic. Consider also, that each person’s perception of any worldview is unique. One Christian may have mentally schemed Christianity as adjoined with a sad fatalism. The person carries an idiosyncratic faith system because of their unique experience and the particular collection of assumptions they have married to their Christianity, probably unintentionally. I, for example, report that Christianity felt at times more like a prison than an opportunity. It was always true to me – and it had the power to depress me.
In a later blog I’ll outline the tenets of my depressing Christianity and what I’m calling my “Scarcity Paradigm.” Here, however, I simply want to declare that one’s worldview mutually influences one’s mental health. This has been my experience, at least. I’m a few steps removed from the paradigm I belonged to for many years, and my mental health has ascended into a space that is comparatively blissful. For me at least, there’s an obvious connection between worldview assumptions and mental health.
For myself and others with anxiety, the condition is highly social and relational. Social “triggers” have huge power to affect one’s experience of reality. For me, I always felt in danger. I was hugely threatened by anyone’s disapproval; toxic self-talk was an unescapable swarm. I was on the alert at all times. I hardly feel disingenuous using these superlatives; the experience was nearly constant for many years. People had fangs. I knew on one level that people didn’t mean to hurt me and that they weren’t dangerous – but I experienced them as dangerous. My sense of self was too immediately vulnerable to feel safe with people. It was inflamed, if you will, like a sore throat or tendonitis. I accredit this vulnerability of my self-concept partly to my worldview, but note also that in turn influenced my worldview.
Raised on the Christian mission-field, I couldn’t help but absorb a certain value system (notably, however, my siblings did not experience things in the same way nor do all missionary kids). It seemed to me was essentially and eternally important to “reach” people for God. This involved telling the gospel and being a good representation of Christ to them by living virtuously. Convincing people to accept Jesus was a work worth giving up all else for. I believed by implication that people would not be reached if I didn’t do a good job of sharing the gospel and of representing God to the world. Ministry and a life of discipleship were together a necessary Christian performance in the endeavour to reach as many people as possible. Anything less then excellence would potentially be losing God someone.
I operated with this assumption. It was at times paralyzing and at other times feverishly compelling. An associated assumption is that God’s reach was limited and that he needed Christians to extend it for him. Some deeply saddening observations followed from this: Firstly, the Church did not seem to be doing a very good job – in fact most Christians were pathetically faulted – and therefore were actively losing God people that he would have wanted to reach. I observed secondly that most people had not accepted Christ. God wanted no one to perish but he had lost most people. This was partly the fault of the Church who had not been as effective as God needed them to be. Many had perished who could have been saved had Christians been more effective.
I belonged to this story. I internalized the narrative. I was hardly effective. I was deeply ashamed, for example, that I never learned the language of the people group that my parents were ministering to. I was ashamed also that I had little desire and no courage to go out and “reach” the people by trying to connect with them. I just wanted play video games in our house, and maybe read and garden. I knew, however, that God needed me to be a good Christian so that the people would be impacted, so I gave up my Gameboy to my brothers so that I could try to be more effective. I hardly knew what I was supposed to do; I simply had a sense that I wasn’t doing it.
Try as I might to make up for my lack of courage, I was most often scared and disconnected. My ostracization from the village kids – though realistically not my fault – I took as a personal failure. By the metric of success offered by my worldview, I was pretty pathetic. Already struggling with self-esteem for other very basic reasons (e.g. not fitting in), I now also berated myself with this evaluation: I was routinely failing God.
I was going to get to heaven, that was sure, but I’d be a disappointment. My eternal security was by grace through faith but my usefulness to God was not. That was up to me; and I was not enough. My sadness amplified when I would grow up and find deep systemic issues, ridiculous prejudices, and internecine politics in the Church. These failures also became part of my story, more ways by which the Church was falling far short of what it needed to be to reach as many people as possible. We must be reaching an unfortunately small percentage of those we should be reaching.
For a decade and a half, I asked God to forgive me most days out of a sense of shame. By the effectiveness metric of my worldview, I was worthy of disapproval. I was told that God loved me – and received some beautiful, relieving interjections of that truth – but on the whole, I felt unworthy of love and didn’t have the capacity to receive it. When it was given, affirmation didn’t stick. I couldn’t believe it. My internal affirmation cup had massive holes because of my perception of things. I thus lived in a perpetual deficit of experienced affirmation. My lived experience was hellish, even when circumstances were relatively OK.
My worldview created a dark lens through which I saw and experienced the world. Again, people had teeth and were dangerous. This is because even very small things that people did had the power to confirm for me that I was a failure. I needed almost constant approval to maintain any level assurance and self-confidence – thus I lived with a necessary perfectionism (I submit that perfectionism, while arrogance on the one hand, is also partly an attempt to transcend a wounded self-concept). I was very nice and high achieving. I had a broken social boundary system because I could be nothing less than heroic for others, lest I be ashamed. I flirted with burnout since high school because performance had become the drug of my self-esteem. My excellence was the prison I needed. I was exhausted because God needed me to be better. I was unable to rest while I rescued myself from toxic self-talk by social excellence and perfectionism in various regions of performance.
In my most recent breakdown, it was crushing to realize quite profoundly the vanity and self-perpetuating absurdity of the way I was living. The internal mechanisms by which I attempted to secure affirmation and self-assurance had harmed me for a long time and deprived me of the capacity to accept and present who I truly am. The worldview assumptions I carried guaranteed that I experienced myself and my world as a tragic story. This was truly a sickness of mind and the atmosphere in which fever pitch anxiety and dark depression could thrive.
The depression and anxiety, of course, were also influenced by chemical, social, and situational factors. They were not only the products of a worldview. They actually had some power to generate the negative assumptions of my worldview or at least push my worldview in a dark direction. Mental illness was like a pair of sunglasses I couldn’t take off which made even daytime look like night. It affected the way I experienced relationships, as I’ve noted, and the way that I evaluated my life. Mental illness compelled me to interpret my life’s events, world events, even all of history in a fatalistic and unfortunate way. Interestingly, it also affected the way I read scripture – it would highlight that which seemed to validate my hyper-responsibility and sense of failure and deficit. I would not have admitted at the time, but I couldn’t help but project that God was as distressed and anxious as I was.
I know that mental illness influenced my perception of reality largely because I now am living without a vast swath of the anxiety and depression I used to swim in. I have a new vantage point with which to evaluate my old worldview. The change is so distinct that I have come to call my prior condition my “old mind.” I could not know how strongly mental illness influenced my perception of reality without having emerged from a great deal of it. There’s much that a fish cannot learn about water unless it spends some time in the air. There was much that I could never know about my “old mind” without having stepped outside of it. I read the same words in scripture and don’t get the same anxious compulsion and sense of shame. I say the same prayers and have a sense now that God is pleased to hear them rather than disappointed that I hadn’t said them yet or said enough of them. The most prominent of changes: I look up and see a confident, capable, invested God rather than the anxious, distressed, disappointed God that I had previously projected he must be.
In a further blog I’ll outline in more detail the “scarcity paradigm” I used to live with. In another I’ll describe tenets of what has become my “certainty paradigm.” For now, I observe that harmful worldview assumptions can degrade one’s mental health and I observe that mental illness, however it develops, can shift one’s worldview into dark spaces. I wouldn’t be able to articulate this without having experienced a significant amount of healing. When you’re in the battle, you don’t have a bird’s eye view of it; you just fight, and pray between the assaults.