And that is the ultimate deliverance from suffering—the realization that we can be better people because of it. The spiritual journey from emotional pain to inner peace entails a transformation of our personalities, from being someone weakened by suffering to someone honed by it. Yes, we must look at the darkness within ourselves, and forgive others for the darkness that we see within them, in order to experience the miracle of love that only forgiveness brings. Yet in so doing we emerge victorious. We reintegrate the dissociated pieces of personality that lay submerged within the dark caves of fear into which they had been cast by the ego mind. Slowly, perhaps, but surely, we are led by God to emerge at last into the light of our true selves.
And within that light, endless miracles abound. For miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. We grow less imprisoned by our fears as we release them to thoughts of love. No longer in denial about our issues, we atone and learn to forgive ourselves. No longer blaming others, we are able to forgive them. We experience a childlike surrender into the arms of God, an experience of cosmic re-parenting from which we grow at last into the adults we were meant to be. The ego would have us cower in a state of endless infantilization and victimhood. God would have us stand up tall, the mantle of grace and power and victory around us. This is the greatest story, the story of all stories, and it is the story of every one of us.
THREE
The Case Against Numbness
The lovely young woman who sat before me seemed bewildered, but she was looking for answers. Miranda had been diagnosed with a depressive disorder and was taking several medications simultaneously. I asked her whether she would share a bit of her story so I could understand why.
In listening to her, I heard of a journey much like that of many young people in their twenties doing the admittedly difficult work of trying to figure out who they are. While I wouldn’t say it sounded like she’d had anything near a wonderful childhood, she didn’t report having had any symptoms that seemed particularly outlandish. I was stunned, then, by her psychiatric diagnosis. She’d been labeled with multiple varieties of depression plus, on top of that, an anxiety disorder.
I asked her more questions to see if maybe there were some dramatic issues she’d left out of her account. She reported some family drama, but nothing that sounded too unusual or insurmountable.
What did I hear when I listened to this young woman? I heard a woman trying desperately to mature, to figure out her life and what she was supposed to be doing with it, to find her place in the universe and her identity as a woman.
Growing up is messy; becoming who we are is difficult; and the work of personal transformation can be some of the hardest work we ever do. But it is not work to be avoided. In Miranda, I saw a person in spiritual crisis, to be sure, but not every spiritual crisis is rightly deemed a “disorder.” Sometimes sadness is simply human.
Much to my surprise, her doctors had told her to expect to be on medication for the rest of her life. This seemed unbelievable to me. For more than thirty years, I’ve had the privilege of counseling people who are going through extreme and seriously traumatic situations. Some have been aided in their healing by the use of pharmaceuticals, and some have not. But something has changed over the past few years. These days, I meet more people whose issues aren’t extreme but who nonetheless have been prescribed medication and even told by their doctors and therapists that they may have to be medicated for the foreseeable future, if not forever.
Being human is not a disease. It is full of trials, to be sure, and sometimes those trials are painful. But a knee-jerk pathologizing of emotional pain is a dysfunctional reaction to the experience of being human.
Grief and sadness can be part of a transformational process, one that should not be automatically labeled negative. Difficult emotions are at times appropriate; they can be exactly what we need to experience in order to truly heal, grow, and get to the other side of our suffering with meaningful lessons learned.
In no way is this meant to minimize emotional suffering, or to cast doubt on its debilitating effects. But there are various ways to interpret the source of depression, its meaning, and the best way for dealing with it. Seen through a spiritual lens, depression is the inevitable result of seeing ourselves as separate from the rest of the universe. It is a crisis of the soul.
Yes, it can be painful to face the landscapes of our lives—to remember our childhoods and realize how different they were from how they should have been; to experience the betrayal of friends and loved ones; to reconcile gaps between how we behaved in certain situations and how we later feel we should have behaved; to survive the loss of meaningful work and loving relationships; to endure the abandonment of lovers and spouses; to grieve the death of those we cherished, and so forth.
But such suffering is not transformed by avoiding it or by numbing it. It is transformed when we breathe it in fully, surrendering our minds to the miraculous process by which self-realization and enlightenment emerge from the darkness of our suffering.
In listening to Miranda, I realized that no one had ever suggested any of this to her before. She had never been shown any real reason to hope that a life beyond her sadness was possible without medical intervention. She was trained to see herself as a victim of her condition. And there is something going on here that is a comment on our society today. Seeing deep sadness as a disease, and therefore as something always to be avoided, is an insidious way of trying to avoid that which we most need to address. When we’re sad, our task is to deal with the reason for the sadness—not just the sadness itself. I did not see Miranda as sick; I saw her as seeking.
To reduce most depression to mere brain chemistry or psychological dynamics is to rob it of its deeper meaning and thus the redemptive potential of its healing. There is a transformational alchemy to the journey out of suffering, sometimes described more powerfully in spiritual than in psychotherapeutic or biological terms. The epidemic of depression we are seeing today should be seen for what it really is: a collective cry for the healing of our hearts.
LETTING SADNESS IN
Many years ago, I was Miranda. I was bewildered, lost, and in terrible pain. I cannot imagine where I would be today if the professionals who helped me through my difficulties had told me that I was permanently damaged, as opposed to simply going through a very rough time. At one point I spent a year in tears, but no one threw a bunch of labels at me that would twist my self-perception forever.
During that time, in fact, a friend said to me, “You won’t believe this now, Marianne, but one day you will look back on this as having been a good year.” I have never forgotten that, because over the years I’ve come to see the truth in her comment. I now see that period as having been a painful but necessary part of my journey to a functional adulthood. Depression can be a sacred initiation into the journey of enlightenment.
I’ve always felt that that difficult time in my life was when I became most human. Among other things, it awoke in me a heightened awareness of the pain of others in a way I had not realized before. As the shattered pieces of my own psyche slowly began to come back together, I started wondering whether other people had ever suffered as much as I had, whether anyone else had ever felt such pain.
And what broke through to me very clearly was that, yes, of course they had. Everyone suffers. I had simply been too involved with myself to notice. Never having felt my own pain on such a level, I had no idea what suffering really meant; nor did it ever occur to me that other people feel it too.
Something happens when you realize that if other people have suffered even a fraction as much as you, then they deserve all the compassion you could ever show them and all the effort you could ever make to help them ease their pain.
Such suffering, in all of us, is the result of an excruciating breach between a life of love and life as we have made it. That breach is the cause of all suffering, and closing it is the end to all pain. The breach between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and each o
ther, is the same breach. In closing one, we close the other. Learning how to do this is a spiritual journey.
This journey is a path of self-actualization. In having the courage to face our suffering—to endure it, to learn from it, to process it, to transcend it—we often find keys to living our lives in the most powerful way. As there is mastery in learning how to play the piano or perform any skill, there is mastery in learning how to live life well. And learning how to navigate life’s most turbulent moments is simply part of the journey. Few people emerge from the human experience unscathed. Yet we can often gain miraculous insights from our sadness, and avoiding the pain is avoiding the gain.
DRUGS AND THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Emotional pain is not just a psychological issue; it is a spiritual issue. Depression may or may not be a disease of the brain, but it is definitely a disease of the soul. It isn’t something to simply dump in the hands of medical or traditional psychotherapeutic professionals to handle, for how can someone who doesn’t recognize the soul be expected to heal it?
The soul, theoretically, is the purview of religion. But in today’s society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair—and for understandable reasons. In most ways organized religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, then at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission.
Modern psychotherapy has taken up some of the slack, and yet it too fails to deliver when it doesn’t acknowledge the soul work necessary to heal our emotional pain. The psychotherapeutic profession has now turned to the pharmaceutical industry to compensate for its frequent lack of effectiveness, yet the pharmaceutical industry lacks the ability to do much more about our sadness than to numb it.
In the past few years, the medical profession has appropriated the topic of depression, separating the words “sadness” and “depression” in an artificial way that serves no one but the pharmaceutical industry. The idea that a clear line separates the two is a manipulative construct used more to sell medication than to treat a problem. People now talk about “clinical depression” as though there’s a blood test to verify it, when in fact there is no such thing. Screening for clinical depression amounts to completing a questionnaire.
Clearly, sometimes people need to seek whatever help they can get, pharmaceutical or otherwise. And treating some mental illnesses—such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—with psychotherapeutic drugs can save lives. But although in some cases the use of psychotherapeutic drugs can arguably be a positive, even life-saving regimen, today there is an epidemic of casual antidepressant use that most assuredly is not.
According to many experts, clinical depression is being alarmingly overdiagnosed and overtreated. People are offered antidepressants these days—and grab them most readily—as though taking them is no bigger deal than eating a bag of candy. Hundreds of thousands of people simply mention to their healthcare provider once or twice that times have been rough lately and then find themselves with a medical prescription shoved into their hands.
“Perhaps you should be on medication” has become the most common, casual of suggestions, without any serious conversation about exactly what that means. The suggestion comes from doctors, yes, but also from concerned friends and family and media advertising. From seemingly everywhere, we are bombarded by the proposition of happier living through chemistry.
Not everyone going through a rough time—even a very rough time—is mentally ill. It’s important not to minimize mental health issues, of course, but it’s equally important not to pathologize normal human suffering. The truth is, life can be hard. Growing up is hard, but it’s not a mental illness. Divorce is hard, but it’s not a mental illness. Grieving the death of a loved one is hard, but it’s not a mental illness. If anything should be seen as mental illness, it’s the suggestion that all deep suffering is a mental illness.
Some people would argue that any questioning of antidepressant use shows insensitivity toward mental health issues and even ignorance of the need for such medication to help reduce suicide risk. Yet many times people who were on antidepressants have committed suicide, and only in very small print is the known link between certain antidepressant use and suicidal ideation made clear. In some cases—particularly teenagers and young adults—antidepressants can do more to increase the risk of suicide than to decrease it.
One common refrain I often hear is that “depression is a chemical imbalance.” And this often precedes the suggestion that as a chemical condition, depression “requires medication”—though we might question who it is who’s doing the requiring. Oncologists don’t say chemotherapy is “required,” even if they say it is their recommended course of treatment. It might be true that depression is often accompanied by changes in brain chemistry, but that should not automatically be seen as a reason for pharmaceutical intervention. Love, forgiveness, compassion, and prayer cause physiological changes as well. Meditation, for instance, has been shown to alter neurocircuitry and brain wave activity. The automatic assumption that pharmaceuticals are necessary to treat depression is starting to receive the pushback it deserves.
The faux compassion of multibillion-dollar ad campaigns—not just for one antidepressant, mind you, but for that second one you should take on top of that first one (never mind those little risks, such as liver failure!)—is enough to alarm anyone not taking antidepressants. For instance, Abilify (aripiprazole)—currently one of the top-selling prescription drugs in the United States—is classified as an antipsychotic drug. Drug companies now market medicine to the general population that theoretically should be reserved for the very small portion of people with serious mental illness.
Over the past few decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed, particularly among those who have never actually been diagnosed with major mental disorders. Never have Americans been more seriously challenged to think for ourselves. We are becoming psychologically numbed when instead we should be psychologically awakened.
A pharmaceutical-psychotherapeutic-industrial complex now amounts to a sophisticated corporate drug ring, turning intense human suffering into a multibillion-dollar profit center. Moody today? Here’s a mood stabilizer. Sort of feeling all over the place? You could be borderline, you know. Can’t sleep? This could be depression; let’s try some medication. Your mother died? Let’s double your dose for a while. And the very worst one, the almost criminal marketing pitch masquerading as helpfulness and applied particularly irresponsibly in the lives of our young: You should expect to be on these for the rest of your life.
The current trend of easy pill popping lest we shed a tear or two is both psychologically and spiritually unhealthy. It amounts to a societally sanctioned avoidance that keeps us infantilized, emotionally immature, and lacking the skills we need to deal effectively with the critical issues of adult life. It obstructs our capacity for discernment, for perspective, and for real understanding. Most importantly, in separating ourselves from our own pain, we desensitize ourselves to the pain of others; for if I become numb to my own pain, then I am more likely to become numb to yours. And that, in turn, will then cause more pain.
A common justification for casual antidepressant use is that “it takes the edge off” while someone is doing the psychological work. But more often than not, being with the edge until the edge is smoothed out actually is the work. Many people are helped by antidepressants today, and for those for whom that is true then I am very glad. But for those who are going through difficult periods of life that are by definition depressing but need not be viewed in pathological terms, there is another way.
RECLAIMING OUR SOULS
The soul is eternally whole and complete in God. An overexternalized worldview separates us from our souls, thus causing us to suffer; and only by reclaiming our souls can we end our suffering. This reclamation of our souls isn’t a process of pouring light over the darkness; rather, it is a process of bringing the darkness to light. We
must excavate our internal darkness—our barriers to love—for only then can we release them. And none of this necessarily feels good when it’s happening.
But in avoiding our sadness we avoid our lives. Learning from our sadness can bear great fruit, and avoiding it can have hidden costs. Our choice is between feeling the sharp pains of self-discovery or enduring the dull ache of unconsciousness that will last for the rest of our lives. Suppressing our pain isn’t ending our pain; it’s simply displacing it.
The avoidance of sadness decreases our capacity to learn from it. For how can we deeply understand what we have failed to deeply look at? Sometimes it’s in the midst of our tears that we come to understand a situation more fully. Even a happy life can have sad days, and sadness is sometimes simply a sign of growth. It doesn’t serve any of us to cast a cheap yellow smiley face over almost everything, as though being sad is simply wrong. Just as storms have a function in nature, they have a function within the psyche as well. Just as babies who are never exposed to any germs can fail to develop the antibodies they need, people who avoid the fullness of their suffering fail to develop the emotional skills they need to deal with it.
In recognizing the spiritual meaning of our sadness, we find the appropriate place to put it—in our psyches, and in our lives. We come to realize the ways we have separated ourselves from love, from each other, and thus from the peace of God. Knowing this, the true source of our pain, we can then correct the problem on the level where the problem lies.
The “me first” attitude that pervades our society is the source of our epidemic of unhappiness, and collectively changing that attitude is its healing. A society whose entire social and economic system fosters separation from ourselves, from each other, and from the earth on which we live is a society that guarantees suffering. An insane world is telling people who can’t align with it that they are crazy. Yet finding a way for people to become more easily functional within a dysfunctional society is not a healing of our despair; it’s a perverse way of making that despair deeper.
Tears to Triumph Page 4