Browsing Tag

mental illness

Theology

"How to Win Over Depression" review: 192-211

Thankfully, I think we only have this week and next week and then we’ll be done with this book. One of my biggest complaints today is that this book wasn’t edited– only proofread. There’s not a lot of development to this book, and Tim has a tendency to repeat himself. This chapter– “Ten Steps to Victory Over Depression”– barely contributes anything new to the book.

A few interesting things happen, though. In a previous post I’d mentioned that Tim’s language surrounding his “self-pity” concept echoes how evangelicals typically talk about “bitterness.” However, in this chapter, he just comes right out and says it:

By gaining the ability from Him to forgive her parents, she removed the root of bitterness that had immobilized her for years. (193)

He spends a lot of time talking about bitterness in this chapter– all of the examples he gives are people he thinks of as “bitter,” but, once again, he completely and totally ignores the realities that abuse victims have to face every day. Infuriatingly, he even dismisses one woman’s experience as being imaginary. This woman says that her mother “smothered and dominated” her “every decision,” but Tim overrides that opinion and says her mother was just a struggling single mom who got a little over-protective and she’s just imagining her problems because some guy who took a psychology class told her she had them (200).

I’m not even shitting you. This woman came to him, described an extremely controlling home environment, and Tim says she made it up. I cannot even imagine the re-victimization and trauma that he has put these people through. He has an extremely misogynistic opinion of women: this chapter included examples of five women who were 1) vain, 2) a bad mother, 3) liars, 4) gossips, and 5) nags. He even praised a HR executive for basing his hiring decisions on the submissiveness and gentility of the men’s wives (203)!

The book might have gone flying a few times today, especially when I got to this:

If the individual is aware of your resentment or bitterness, apologize personally if possible or by mail. Admittedly, this is a very difficult gesture, but it is essential for emotional stability. (199)

Oh. My. God. Oh my god.

If I were being counseled by Tim, he’d tell me that I must contact my rapist and apologize to him or I’ll never have emotional stability and “spiritual maturity” (198). This shit is fucking dangerous. I go out of my way to make sure that he can’t find me. I don’t have my location anywhere– not on Facebook, not on Twitter, not on LinkedIn. I don’t connect any of my accounts to my phone number, no matter how much Google and Facebook pester me about it. I ask people who take pictures of me not to tag the location on Facebook. I not only blocked him on every platform I have, I also blocked everyone he knows. I maintain this blocking religiously. I have cut off contact with friends because they were still mutuals with him.

And Tim would tell me I’d have to undo all of that. Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln.

But, the biggest problem with this chapter is that he emphasizes, once again, that all anyone really has to do to overcome depression is give thanks. If we just inculcate a “spirit of thanksgiving” and maintain a “thankful heart,” then everything will be fine and our depression will go away.

Except that’s just plain not true.

When my rapist ended our engagement three months before the wedding, one of the things he told me (besides “I can’t trust that you’ll be a submissive wife”) is that I am a “persistently negative person.” Believing my rapist to be a better judge of my character than I was, I made it my New Year’s Resolution to find something every day to be thankful for, no matter how small or big. I did this publicly; every day I would post a status update that began with “happiness is” and then finished it with something like “snickerdoodle coffee!” or “buying another bookcase!” or “being accepted to grad school!”

That year was the worst depression I’ve ever had.

This past winter was a struggle because of depression, as well. But Handsome could tell you that at the end of every day when I would be laying in his arms while we watched Gilmore Girls, drinking tea, that I would look up at him and say something about how blessed my life is, about how grateful I am for my life with him, that there were so many moments in my life to be thankful for– even in the midst of gut-wrenching despair and grief. I have never ceased being thankful, mostly for the small things. Vanilla beans and carmelized onions and buttermilk pancakes. Munchkin games. Moonlit strolls in the woods. Soft pine needles. Ocean spray. Swimming pools. Pride parades.

I’m still depressed, though. It’s getting better now that summer is here, finally (thankssomuch seasonal affective disorder), but all through this winter I was thankful, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t change how my body and mind responded to the darkness.

I think if I was ever Tim’s patient and I tried to take him seriously, I probably would have died.

~~~~~~~~~

In much happier news– remember the poll I did before I started How to Win Over Depression and Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love was neck-and-neck with Tim’s book? Well, a good friend, Dani Kelley, decided to take on her own review series. Redeeming Love was one of her favorite books as a teen and young woman, so I’m very much interested in her perspective on the book now that she’s come out of purity culture and fundamentalist Christianity. I didn’t read it until after I was already a feminist and critical of purity culture, so I think Dani’s take on things will be more valuable than mine.

My plan is to cross-post her review series every Monday starting July 6th, and I’ll be reading along with her and adding some of my own thoughts. Comments will be closed on those posts so that we can keep the engagement in one place on her blog (which is fantastic and y’all should be reading it if you’re not already).

June 22, 2015 by
Social Issues, Theology

"How to Win Over Depression" review: 137-159

Books like this make it almost impossible for me to believe that there’s any meaningful difference between fundamentalism and more mainstream evangelicalism. Theologically there’s no real difference that I’ve ever been able to find, and all the differences I can find are surface trappings. In my view, fundamentalism and evangelicalism are on a sliding scale of how much modern culture they’re willing to adapt; fundamentalists are just stuck in the 60s while evangelicals are stuck in the 90s.

None of that really matters, though, when people like Tim quote from Bill Gothard for five pages and describe him as “phenomenally successful” (141) and “wise” (148). And yes, I mean that Bill Gothard. The man who’s been accused by several dozen women and minors of sexually harassing or sexually assaulting them, the man who is responsible for teachings like “the sin of bitterness is worse than the sin of rape.” Tim raves about him and spends most of this chapter regurgitating information found in Bill’s “basic seminars.”

Another observation: so far, in each of the books I’ve reviewed (with the exception of Zimzum of Love), there comes a part when the white supremacy and classism of many American Christians becomes blindingly apparent. The classism comes screaming out of this chapter:

She always looks her best wherever she goes; she is not overdressed but extremely attractive. She chooses her clothes and accessories with care and and exudes the confidence that always exemplifies a dynamic Christian. (139)

A porter will approach an individual and address him politely and with dignity, whereas he will speak to another with quiet disrespect. Through these contrasting treatments, I have judged that the man who exudes self-confidence and self-acceptance is extended respect by others. You can observe similar episodes in a restaurant as the waiter approaches his customers. (140)

After twenty-five years of dealing with people I do not find that vocational triumphs provide lasting self-acceptance. Instead, many individuals would willingly relinquish the fortune earned during their lifetime if the could reclaim the failure experienced … (143)

There is nothing new about ghettos; we have always had them. They are simply larger today because of our increased population and more conspicuous because of recent national attention. (146)

He connects success and self-confidence to wealth and power over and over again, and because Tim is a financially successful white man, he’s able to ignore the role that economic disparity plays in how people are treated by society.

Example:  a friend an I walked into a West Elm a little while ago, spiffed up a bit for a trip into the city. We walked around the store, looking for something she needed and if were weren’t completely ignored by the staff, we were openly sneered at. A few minutes after we entered, a pair of women walked in who reeked of money. The employees fawned all over them. They walked out without buying anything, while my friend bought what she’d been looking for.

Ordinarily I’m a self-confident person, but it’s extremely difficult for me to portray that when I’m in a place that’s only supposed to be accessed by the wealthy. Recently I was able to score a deal for a super swanky hotel, but checking in made me feel like an imposter. There’s always a part of me that thinks they’re going to know I’m not wealthy, that I don’t belong, and they’re going to call security to throw the riffraff out.

I’d also like to point out that we made the ghettos. They didn’t just appear; they’re not just a normal, if unfortunate, part of our capitalistic society. Our economic policies made them.

~~~~~~~~~

This chapter is titled “Depression and Your Self-Image,” and while there are some basic things I could agree with him about the general population (negative self-talk is a thing, and we should learn to stop that), he tries to take things that can be true of mentally healthy people and apply them to people who are struggling with worthlessness and/or intrusive thoughts.

His solution also has a two-fold problem. While he seemingly spends most of this chapter preaching the benefits of incubating a positive self-image and learning self-acceptance, he asserts repeatedly that self-acceptance is only possible through religion. He doesn’t actually want people to love themselves, he wants them to feel validated by his version of Jesus. People who get all their feelings of value, love, and acceptance through their religion are not actually practicing self-acceptance.

This could be extremely dangerous for a depressed person. If they accept Tim’s idea– “I will feel worthwhile and loved if I become a Christian!”– they could very well accept Tim’s version of Christianity, which is extremely focused on deciding who’s “in” and who’s “out.” A depressed person trying to feel validated by their faith could end up with a religion-induced sense of scrupulosity.

The other half of the problem is what Tim teaches about human nature:

[A doctor] went on to explain that during his internship in a mental institution, he found that “ninety-five percent of the patients were there because of religiously induced guilt complexes.”

“Doctor, you couldn’t be more in error,” I [said], “People feel guilty because they are guilty!”

To a depressed person, this sentence says all those feelings you have about being a disgusting, worthless, vile, waste of human trash? Well, they’re right! You are a vile waste of human trash! That is not something a depressed person needs “confirmed” for them. Our brains are already screaming that.

Tim tries to mitigate the damaging effects of this concept by talking about how “forgiveness” is readily available to anyone who asks. Sure, we might be nothing more than waste, but God is oh-so-ready to forgive us for being worthless wretches! And once we’re forgiven, Jesus will love us, and we’ll have the magical ability to pray and imagine our depression away!

This is one of the reasons why I disagree with the idea of Imputed Sin. I’ll have to write a whole post out explaining my reasoning for that, but for today, I think it’s enough to stress that this doctrine is inherently harmful, especially to those of us who struggle with depression or other illnesses that try to convince us that we’re useless and worthless.

~~~~~~~~

Final count of examples involving women: 9 out of 12. He describes several of these women as “frigid” (one because she was married to a verbal abuser, although of course he doesn’t say that), and in one case he says that a woman’s trichotillomania was caused by vanity.

Also, I noticed something interesting in this chapter: when talking about how silly depression is, he almost exclusively uses examples of women, but when he starts talking about what a “godly” and “mature” person looks like, he switches to using exclusively male pronouns. Just … an observation.

June 10, 2015 by
Theology

"How to Win Over Depression" review: 88-112

In the two chapters I’m going over today– “The Place of Anger in Depression” and “Self-Pity and Depression”– Tim makes an argument based on commonly held attitudes among evangelicals and fundamentalists. As I’ve talked about in the past, the common understanding in Tim’s circles is that there are “good” emotions and “bad” emotions– and the “bad” ones are sinful. In my experience, there are two emotions in particular that seem to be universally reviled in evangelicalism: anger and self-pity. He is building on that assumption, relying on a typical evangelical’s willingness to accept the claim that all anger and all self-pity is sin. That claim becomes the foundation of his argument that all depression comes from sin, because he believes that everyone who becomes depressed were angry and self-pitying first:

A number of individuals with whom I have shared this [claim that all depressed persons are angry] have challenged me, but on further questioning and closer examination, we established the problem [of anger] without exception. (88)

At last we have come to the primary cause of depression … Of one thing I am certain: if the mental thinking patterns of self-pity is not arrested, the person is hopeless. (97-98)

Tim also does something else: he makes his argument unfalsifiable.

I have repeatedly noted that non-depressed people seem to accept this diagnosis [of self-pity] easily. Even individuals usually prone to depression, when not depressed, seldom argue. It is the depressed themselves who seem to rebel against it. (97)

And with that one sentence Tim does what Christians have been doing for millennia: he sets up his argument with the claim that anyone arguing against him proves him right. If I were to approach Tim with mountains of research and personal stories of how depression and self-pity aren’t automatically connected, he would dismiss me outright with “of course you would say that: you’re depressed.”

It amuses (and infuriates) me how people like Tim claim to take the Bible so seriously and yet are completely willing to ignore anything that doesn’t support the argument of the moment. For one thing, Tim says that anger is always sinful (93), and he quotes Ephesians 4:30-32 to support that, arguing that those verses teach that anger always “grieves the Holy Spirit” (92). Except it’s bitterly ironic that he passed over verse 26 to get to there. In case you need a reminder, Ephesians 4:26 says “Be angry and sin not.” That does seem to imply that it’s at least possible to be angry without sinning.

The fact that the rest of the passage includes things like “wrath” when God themself is often described as “wrathful” punches gigantic holes in Tim’s argument, but he desperately needs Christians to skip over the parts of the Bible that don’t agree with him; without that, he can’t rhetorically link anger and sin with depression.

But all of the above isn’t even my biggest problem with this chapter. My biggest problem is that he is incredibly formulaic in his approach to this problem (93-96), and in order to be this reductionist he has to but on blinders as big as barns. People are not formulaic. Problems like depression and mental health aren’t formulaic and simple (an argument he anticipates on 98, calling it an “excuse of the intellectual”).

There are many things that I am angry about. Some of the anger is appropriate, some of it misdirected, and it’s my job as a human being to wrestle with that. Anger isn’t always the correct response, but sometimes it is. Sometimes there are money-changers in the temple. One of the things that I am angry about is the fact that there is so much abuse and violence in the world, and I am utterly confident in the assertion that abuse and oppression make God angry, too.

~~~~~~~~~~

Hopefully I’ve already established why linking depression with self-pity is wrong– and hopefully that’s obvious as the noses on our collective faces. However, Tim doesn’t even have a consistent definition of what he considers to be self-pity. To most of us, when we hear “self-pity,” we think of someone who sees themselves strictly as the victim of other people or of circumstance and absolutely refuses to take any steps whatsoever that could help improve their life or emotional well-being.

That is Reason #1 that “self-pity” doesn’t fit as a description for people who are depressed: we rarely see ourselves that way. If anything, it’s the exact opposite; the bone-deep conviction that we are worthless tells us on the daily that we are the ones responsible for everything being so miserable– not other people, and not circumstance.

However, Tim only works with that definition half the time. The rest of the time he confuses it with things like entitlement:

One brilliant but depressed scholar I know holds a Ph.D. and has developed a world-renowned reputation. He had as a young man offered great promise and was expected by those in his field to excel. Having a problem marriage, he drifted into serious patterns of hostility toward his wife. These, in turn, caused him to indulge in the habit of self-pity, which demotivated him. After years of such thinking, he came in for counseling. Having written few articles and never finishing a book, this brilliant man had wasted the creativity potential of a lifetime. Naturally he blamed his wife instead of himself. “If it hadn’t been for that woman, I could have realized my potential.” (102)

On the surface, this seems to fit “self-pity”– the man in this story blames his wife for his failures. However, that’s because Tim doesn’t acknowledge the realities of abuse or abusers, and he skips right over the red flags. I believe that this man had a huge entitlement complex– he believed he deserved to have everything he wanted, and like every other abuser on the planet felt entitled in his relationship with his wife. When his wife turned out to be a human being, he resented her for not living up to his expectations. She was supposed to help him be this accomplished scholar– she didn’t, so it’s all her fault.

The fact that Tim never once acknowledges that abuse can play a part in causing depression crops up over and over again. He tells a story of a young woman who wanted to be a virgin when she got married, but had sex with her husband before their wedding. Tim had this to say:

Self-justification is a natural defense mechanism against self-condemnation, of course, so it was easier to blame him than share the responsibility. Before long her hostility produced self-pity, and finally she became depressed. (103)

If you’ve been around here for long, you should recognize what’s happening there. A woman came to him angry and upset that she and her husband had sex– “blaming” him for taking her virginity. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a woman to willingly consent to sex and then be upset about it later, but those women don’t usually refuse to acknowledge their part in it. Considering that this was the 60s, I’d bet the moon that this young woman experienced some form of sexual coercion– and it’s possible she was raped.

Later on we get this:

One depressed woman spent most of her time in the counseling room dissecting her husband … Knowing the counselee’s husband as I did, fully aware that he was surly, inconsiderate and unkind … I proceeded to explain that the greater her problem, the greater her grace … Instantly the woman snapped, “I’d rather have a kind husband than the grace!” (106)

Her husband wasn’t even kind. That is basic introductory-level human decency, but Tim doesn’t even address the reality that her husband is an jerk, but instead insists that God will use his behavior to “instruct” her.

The reason why Tim can’t address or acknowledge abuse as a cause for depression is that he knows that it would make his theory monstrous. Saying that we need to “count it all joy” and that “trials” are the way we “grow up spiritually and emotionally” (106) turns into something horrific when you say it to a child that’s had bones broken by their father or a woman raped by her husband. “You need to count your rape for all joy because that’s how you’ll mature” is a horrific nightmare of an argument, and he knows it.

May 11, 2015 by
Theology

"How to Win Over Depression" review: 49-87

Before we really get into it, I would like to do a brief compare and contrast between what the medical community says and what Tim says about the possible causes for depression.

This list is collated from the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health, and WebMD:

  1. Genetics/biology/brain chemistry/hormones
  2. Abuse or trauma
  3. Some medications
  4. Major events (death, birth, unemployment …)
  5. Substance abuse
  6. Serious illness

This is the list Tim gives us:

  1. Disappointment
  2. Lack of self-esteem
  3. Discontentment and envy
  4. Apathy
  5. Serious illness
  6. Biology
  7. Having a baby
  8. Being a workaholic
  9. Rejection
  10. Inadequate life goals

I don’t think I need to point out to you the reasons why these differences are significant.

What I would like to do now is highlight some of the claims that Tim makes in this chapter about these supposed “causes.” He’s building up to what he feels is a critical point, that all depression is a “spiritual” problem and is thus a “sin” problem. He does this by beating the crap out of his reader in sections like this:

One of the most common sources of disappointment in life is people … If love for ourselves is greater than love of the individual who insults us, we will take offense, become displeased, and progress quickly along the road to discouragement– the first stage of depression. If the hurt or insult is contemplated and nursed long enough, it will produce vexation and ultimately despair.

If you grew up in an environment remotely like what I did, you’ll recognize this: it’s a reprimand against bitterness. Tim spends two pages (49-50) arguing that the leading cause for depression is selfishness and bitterness. Depressed people, he says, are primarily people who got insulted and refused to let go of it. We refused to forgive. So we got depressed.

He doesn’t specifically address people who are refusing to “let go” of the “insult” of being abused. Yet.

Buried in the middle of cause No. 4 is “feminism”:

The modern emphasis on women’s lib and careerism for women will seriously compound this problem [of feeling “trapped in housework]. When I asked one woman, “What do you do?” she replied rather sadly, “Oh, I’m just a housewife and mother!” With this attitude growing rapidly today, we can expect depression to increase … Faulty mental values inevitably lead to depression.

With one of those “faulty mental values” being “feminism.” I’m not going to sit here and ignore all the times that some feminists have made women who choose unemployment feel inadequate and devalued for making that decision (a choice, I should note, that is only possible for middle-class families). However, this is a book written in 1974, when pretty much all of American culture expected women to deal with a horrific amount of nonsense. I’ve seen Mad Men.

Also, this statement reminded me very strongly of Mary Kassian and Nancy Leigh DeMoss’ claim that feminism leads to depression (well, they used the term “soul sickness” and said that feminism is “the way of death”), a claim they made in 2013.

Here’s a few more ways that Tim bludgeons his readers so he can later convince them that their depression is a sin:

If, for example, ample time for [the new mother’s] vitality and energy to return has passed but her depression has not departed, she is probably indulging self-pitying thoughts. (56)

One self-pitying woman used to wail, “I have nothing to look forward to.” Obviously she was spending too much time thinking about herself. (58)

Right. That’s the reason. Not biological or hormonal factors. Or maybe because she’s telling the truth about not having anything to look forward to. It’s because she’s throwing a big fat pity party and she just needs to get over herself. That last one is especially infuriating because I often feel that way, and it’s a big confusing jumble because I simultaneously love and hate my life.

Reasons why I love my life:

I have an awesome community of people who love me.
My job is fulfilling.
I live on the beach.
My life with my partner is incredible.
Comic books.
Good food.
Naps.
My cat adores me.

Reasons why I hate my life and have nothing to look forward to:

I. Cannot. Sit. Down. Because of a tailbone.
I will always and forever be in pain. Always. Forever.
I will have excruciating periods until menopause, which doesn’t seem much better.
I will never be able to eat apple pie.
I am a rape victim and my rapist will likely never see a day in prison.
For good measure, most rapists will never face justice.
I will probably struggle with anxiety and depression for the rest of my life.
I have to go outside and that consistently means being screamed at.
My brain, because of a lifetime of abuse, is pretty broken.

If Tim ever dared to look me in the eye and tell me that I’m a “self-pitying woman” who thinks about herself too much, I will … Well. I’d probably do something violent.

~~~~~~~~~

The chapter “is there a cure for depression” doesn’t need that much breaking down. He spends pages 60-71 misrepresenting therapy and medication, telling us a bunch of horror stories and ripping the words of psychiatrists out of context (Dr. Mortimer Ostow said that medication and therapy have to work together in order to truly help depressed patients, but Tim makes him say that medication is useless and terrifying on page 62).

He even conflates all depression medication with amphetamines and “diet pills” (in case you’re curious, yes that was a woman used in another example). I’m not a drug expert, but even the briefest and most cursory glance at Google told me this isn’t true– and wasn’t true in the 70s. The horror story he gives about therapy is about a woman who was– according to him– somehow forced into have sex with four different men and getting pregnant (70).

The rest of the chapter– 71-87– is a “Gospel” presentation. He says that depression “emanates from the God-vacuum within them” (79) and that no unbeliever can experience “abiding joy or have power to control those weaker parts of his nature” (80). Y’know, because depression only happens in weak people. The bulk of his argument is devoted to the “God-vacuum” and the “God-void” but which is more commonly known in evangelical parlance as “The God-Shaped Hole.”

I don’t have to break this down for you, because these people already have:

Atheism and Yearning by Greta Christina
When Beliefs are Too Big to Fail by Neil Carter

Tim uses that “God-shaped-hole” theory to argue that “Until an individual has access to the spiritual resources … he is incapable of coping with these primary causes of depression.” That argument should horrify and disgust us, but to people like Tim, it makes a certain sort of elegant and simple sense. He believes that depression– which he unfailingly describes as self-pity or bitterness- is a sin. Sin can only be solved, redeemed, “fixed” by Jesus. Therefore, the only way to treat depression is to become a Christian.

And book goes flying: #2.

May 6, 2015 by
Theology

Introduction to the Review Series: "How to Win Over Depression"

The poll I put up last week had Francine River’s Redeeming Love and Tim LaHaye’s How to Win Over Depression neck-and-neck almost the entire time. At the very end Redeeming Love won out by a few votes, but I’d already decided to work on Tim’s book instead. Also, I’m reading through Why Does He Do That? by Bancroft in preparation for another series I’ll be doing sometime soon, and I don’t think I can handle reading about Michael Hosea being both an abuser and a rapist in the context of a book that glorifies it.

The copy of Tim’s book that I have is the original edition published in 1974. There’s an updated and revised edition he put out in 1996, but I’ve seen a copy of the book and the changes seem to be unsubstantial– for example, in the opening illustration the woman is “attractive” and in her mid-thirties in the 1974 version, but both descriptors are removed in the 1996 edition. For this reason I’m going to be paying less attention to the specific language he uses (which he may have changed) and focus more on the big-picture problems.

How to Win Over Depression has been an extremely influential book in conservative Christian circles– in some cases, this book or books like it are the only education a pastor receives about depression, and since it echoes the common cultural myths about mental illness it’s received as reliable information.

For a glimpse of how people typically respond:

I read this book years ago and it was the key to winning over depression. Excellent book. Since then I have bought several to give to others to help them learn how to manage depression and conquer it. It’s an awesome teaching and I recommend it to everyone. [from Christian Book, September 2008]

When I picked this book up at a library, I figured it would be like all the other unhelpful books on depression I had read. However, the book was amazing! This book literally changed my life! I had been suffering from depression for 6 years and tried therapy, hypnosis, anti-depressants and had a struggling relationship with the Lord … The book opened my eyes to that fact that my self-pity was a sin and the root of my depression. The book showed me how to beat the depression by giving me details on how to change my thinking. I have been relatively depression free since reading this book. Try reading this book, it might change your life too! [from Amazon, February 2000]

This book really ministered to me when I was in the depths of my depression. I even bought a few to give away. Looking through the book now, I really wish I had taken it more seriously and heeded the advice in it sooner. My only complaint is I didn’t really care for the chapter that lists common cures for depression, such as antidepressants because it needs to be updated and reiterated that abiding in Christ and walking in the Spirit is the only true cure for depression. [from Goodreads, March 2008]

After experiencing depression for over 20 years, I was given a copy of this book by my pastor. One reading is all it took to cure me of depression. I’ve gone through many tough times since reading it and though I have been down at times, I have never experienced depression. Faith in God and the Bible were the keys for me as well as the great writing skills and wisdom of Tim LaHaye. If you believe it, you’ll live it. [from Barnes & Noble, July 2003]

Negative reviews exist, although I think it’s important to note that most of those reviews seem to come from non-Christians who are primarily reacting to the “Christian” views– it was unusual for someone to criticize the ideas he presents, shrugging them off as being “not for them.” This is one of the reasons why I think it’s important for someone like me to critique this book– I’m a Christian, and capable of separating out the parts of this book that are truly Christlike and the things that are a result of Tim’s … misunderstandings.

It’s about 240 pages long and split into 20 segments, so I’m going to do my best to cover two chapters each week, since I’m not super interested in spending half of this year on it. We’ll see how it goes, though. I might need to step away from it some weeks, and I’ll do my best to put up a review of a book I think y’all should read (for example, Rachel Held Evans’ new book, Searching for Sunday, comes out next Tuesday and it’s definitely her best book yet– and I’m going to put of a review of it next week so you know exactly how awesome it is).

Anyway, so why did I pick Tim’s book over some of the others I could have chosen? Well, first … I already owned it (it was one of the “oh, you should totally review this on your blog!” gifts) so I didn’t need to give anyone more money. Second, Tim LaHaye is an important figure in conservative Christian culture. He co-wrote the Left Behind books which made so much money Nicolas Cage himself starred in a film adaptation of them (in my opinion, he should have just stuck with Knowing as his apocalyptic movie). Tim’s also written a bunch of other self-help and Christian-life-advice style books which were also successful in Christian circles.

Here’s to wishing us all luck and endurance. As always, if you’d like to read along and have a book-club-style discussion in the comments, that would be fantastic. Multiple points of view always help.

April 6, 2015 by
Theology

fundamentalism and the emotional spectrum

[content note for discussions of depression, anxiety]

You may have noticed that posts have been a little sporadic over the past few weeks. Part of that has been holiday traveling, but the biggest reason is that I’ve been depressed. It took me a while to fully admit that to myself, so here I am, saying it out loud, in front of all of you.

I’ve mentioned before on my blog that I haven’t often struggled with depression, but at the moment I’m wondering how true that claim is. After years of putting it off, I finally made an appointment with a psychologist and have been able to go a couple of times, and one of the things that has come up is how emotionally stunting my experience with Christian fundamentalism was. In the specific culture I was raised in, any emotion that couldn’t be described using the words “happy,” “joyful,” or “content” wasn’t allowed  (with the exceptions of shame and guilt). Melancholy, sadness, anger, rage, fear — none of those could be expressed by a good and faithful Christian. Christians rejoice in the Lord always. Christians are not given a spirit of fear, but of love and a sound mind.

Because of that, as well as my ISTJ discomfort with emotional expression, I have deeply set problems with handling, responding to, expressing, and processing emotions. That is a statement that doesn’t make a lot of sense to people who know me superficially, as I can come across as wildly emotional and passionate; however, if I’m expressing an emotion in front of people, chances are I’m not feeling it as much as I’m expressing it. I’ve learned a sort of mimicry where I know that people are supposed to react a certain way, but I don’t allow myself to truly experience the emotion that’s on my face. Anytime I actually start to feel something? POOF. I shut down or disappear.

Today I was journaling through some of these thoughts, and I articulated something to myself that feels very, very true: if I was depressed as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, I probably would have felt like I’d finally managed to achieve the Christian fundamentalist’s ideal emotional state for a woman. When I watched The Stepford Wives, one of the things that resonated with me was how completely blank the women were. Sure, they were apparently smiling and cheerful, but we the audience knew it wasn’t real— that they didn’t actually feel anything and had only plastered a programmed smile onto their face. That was the image I had inside of my head of a “good godly Christian woman.” That was what she was like: emotionally empty.

When I’ve experienced depression as an adult (something I only allowed myself to recognize once I could be honest about the trauma I’d experienced. After all, it’s typical for trauma victims to be depressed), my ability to connect to the entire emotional spectrum is broken, and I usually end up defaulting to a numb sort of apathy, a numb sort of sadness, and an impotent form of rage. I feel sad, but it’s sort of … fuzzy and ambiguous. I feel anger, but it doesn’t feel directed at anything or purposeful.

Growing up, all I knew about the emotional spectrum was that women are supposed to be meek, quiet, complacent, and submissive, and I think that, to me, I probably conflated being depressed with being meek. Considering that I constantly struggled with conforming to fundamentalist expectations about being “ladylike,” the fact that I was probably able to achieve it if I was depressed probably got written up as “finally, success!” in my brain.

I am, and always have been, rambunctious and rowdy and sassy, but … not right now. Right now, I do a lot of sitting with my cat. I could be blogging, or playing Skyrim, or doing laundry, or tidying my room, or organizing my closet, or sending out pitches, or working on the article that’s due in January, but … I’m not. And, looking back, there were times when I was a teenager when I could not bring myself to do anything except sit and pretend like I was paying attention to the conversation.

Was I depressed? I’m honestly not sure. My memories aren’t sharp enough to really say. But I think it’s possible.

What I have discovered is that I definitely have struggled with anxiety my entire life. A few weeks ago I was scrolling through tumblr, and I ran across a poem that described the author’s childhood experiences with anxiety, and it hit me like a load of bricks. My brain sputtered, then stopped and just sort of … stared. Wait … what? was all I could think. Feeling like that isn’t normal? I started doing research, and so much of what I read was so true. I didn’t have a name for panic attacks until graduate school, but I realized that I’ve struggled with them my entire life, and suddenly my childhood made so much more sense.

As a teenager, my brain would freak out in the middle of the night and all of a sudden the only thing I could think was oh my God I’m going to die right now. I’m going to die. I’m going to have an aneurysm and die. My throat is closing up– I’m going to die. I must be inexplicably allergic to the detergent on these sheets because I’m going to die. I’m dying. Right now. If I fall asleep I won’t wake up in the morning because I’ll be dead.

Apparently, that’s not something everyone goes through a couple times a week. Who knew.

But, I was so very good at hiding it. I learned how to function even when my brain was wigging out– I covered up the restlessness with cleaning and dusting and vacuuming and, when no was around, with pacing. And when I was going through it I would berate myself. Samantha, stop it this instant. You have not been given the spirit of fear but of a sound mind.

I didn’t know how to tell the difference between worry and anxiety and fear. All I knew was that every single pastor I’d ever heard put worry and anxiety right next to each other in a sentence and said that both were sin. And, because I thought that anxiety was worry and whatever you called it, it was a choice, I never had the opportunity to learn about things like triggers. I never gave myself the chance to understand that extremely intense movies and scenes (especially violent ones) are triggers, or that caffeine is a bad idea because it makes my heart race and that starts me thinking that I’m going to die, or … it goes on. I couldn’t separate out an emotional experience like fear and what I experienced with anxiety.

Compound all of that with the typical condemnation of all mental illnesses as “spiritual sin” and you’ve got yourself an interesting environment for a little girl growing up with something she doesn’t know how to identify or control.

Photo by Ryan Melaugh
December 19, 2014 by
Social Issues

learning the words: disorder

mental illness

Today’s guest post is from one of my amazing readers, Airmid. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

Having grown up in a very conservative homeschooling family, I remember certain areas in which it was simply accepted that we were right and everyone else was dead wrong. It was an atmosphere that distrusted everything conventional. Education, medicine, nutrition, politics… we believed most people were wrong. Possibly it was deliberate, possibly they were all just deceived, but either way, the conventional wisdom could never be accepted.

One of the areas where I remember this being most strongly expressed was anything remotely related to psychology. Even Christian psychology was regarded with great suspicion, and not to be trusted because psychology itself could not be trusted. In fact, I remember seeing a commercial—a rarity in and of itself, because it meant the tv was on—for a Catholic hospital advertising a treatment for depression, and the response from my mother was “it’s so sad that they proclaim the name of Jesus but aren’t offering the true solution.”

Contributed to by a number of complicated factors including family tragedies, being very overweight, and probably a genetic predisposition on both sides, I experienced several severe episodes of depression as a teenager. One in particular, lasting a year and a half, is the time I refer to as living in a black hole.

Thing is, I have to assume it was depression then. Even though I had most of the symptoms and almost certainly would have met the criteria for a diagnosis, I don’t know what to call it because I was never allowed to look for help. The message I received, whether intentionally communicated or not, was “You chose this. Yes, tragedy may have happened and you had a right to be sad for awhile, but snap out of it and pull yourself together. Don’t you see the shame you’re causing us? You have no right to be depressed. You’re just angry at God.”

And to a certain extent they had a point. To a certain extent, I was choosing to hang on to the depression. To a certain extent I was angry at God. To a certain extent. I thought it was the only thing that made me me. Looking back, I have to wonder how your child believing depression was her identity and she had to hold onto it or lose herself was not cause for even more serious concern than simply depression in and of itself.

I want to go back to the thought “you have no right to be depressed.” I believed that. I believed I had no right to the name depression and no right to call it a disease outside myself. I believed that I was at fault for being depressed because I “chose” it. Because that was the message I had always received. ADHD and every other behavioral disorder out there? Maybe real. Some of them. Certainly over-diagnosed. Depression? Suck it up and look on the bright side. Anxiety? You’re not trusting God enough. All these disorders weren’t nearly as real as the world was making them out to be. They’re taking sins  slapping a label of “disorder” on them, and suddenly the treatment isn’t discipline or prayer or trying harder and being less selfish, it’s just medication.

In some rare cases, there might be a valid point there, but all it ever did was hurt me. That mindset told me that I could never actually have a disorder. Whether it was intended or not, the message I got was that it was all my fault. Many years later, having been clinically diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and still strongly suspicious of clinical depression as well,  causing my college years to be their own version of hell, I had a conversation with my parents about the possibility of medication for treatment, since I was still a financially dependent college student. In response, my parents told me in the strongest terms imaginable that the idea was unthinkable and not only would they not support me, I would not be allowed in their house if I chose to take anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication. They emphasized that accepting a diagnosis and seeking treatment would make the disorder me. Accepting the version of reality in which I was a person with depression and anxiety would make me identify with the disorders and they would become an inescapable fate.

And in that moment, I realized with utter clarity it was a lie.

Everything I had heard up to that point made the disorder my identity. The only thing to make it separate was naming it. A name set it apart. A name made it other and outside me. A name gave it an identity as something Not Me. And with a name, I could fight it.

Without a disorder, I was fighting an unknowable opponent in the dark. Or worse, fighting myself. With a disorder, strangely, I now have hope. Because something outside of me is something I can fight. Most of all, it’s something I can have hope of beating without destroying myself in the process.

October 28, 2013 by
Theology

the dangers of biblical counseling, part two

falling

[This is part two in a series. You can read part one here.]

Like most teenage girls, I did a smattering of baby sitting. There were only a few families in our fundamentalist church-cult who had young children, and most of the babysitting opportunities went to the pastor’s daughters, but I did, occasionally get my chance. One of the ladies that I baby sat for with any frequency was Laura*. Most of the time, with other families, I baby sat for “date night,” but when I baby sat for Laura it was often in the middle of the day. She would call and ask if I could come over, and then she would go out. Sometimes, she would work on getting house work done while I watched the kids. Other times, she would go into her bedroom and shut the door for a few hours.

She never asked the pastor’s daughters to baby sit. I didn’t really understand why, but I loved her kids so I never asked.

One afternoon she was visiting with my mom while I entertained the kids in the living room, and I overheard snatches of their conversation. It was the first time I’d ever heard the term bi-polar, and I had no idea what it meant. From context, I understood it to be some sort of mental . . . thing. I didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about things like disability or illness. She had gone to the leader of our cult about her struggles, and he had told her to go off her medication. I remember that she started to cry at this point, telling my mom that she had gone off her medication, but it had made everything so much harder. She didn’t know how to cope, and she wanted to go back on her meds– she asked my mom what she should do. She was confused, distraught– she wanted to do the “right thing,” but she didn’t really think that her bi-polar disorder was sin in her life she hadn’t dealt with. She’d been divorced and re-married– was God punishing her for that?

My mom has never been one for giving advice– she listens, and tries to empower people to make their own decisions. It’s one of the most beautiful things about my mother, that she never gave in to the culture of elder women “teaching” the younger– in reality, giving younger women a legalistic, formulaic list. She listened to Laura, and eventually Laura decided to go back on her meds– for her own sanity.

Laura did go back on her meds. Somehow, the leader of our cult found out about it, and within a matter of weeks Laura and her family were gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My junior year in college I took a class called Educational Psychology– which, I found out later, was only called that so that students who graduated with an education degree could try to get a teaching license. In reality, the focus of the class was only on summarizing the history of educational psychology and giving hundreds of reasons why all the teaching methods based on psychology were hideously, perniciously wrong. Their answer to “psychology in the classroom” was just to mete out more punishments. The only project I had to do for the class was write a paper explaining my “philosophy of classroom discipline.”

The main textbook for the class was, unsurprisingly, Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology. I read it, and to my shame swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. At this point in my life, my mother had decided to seek counseling for depression. They had just moved across the country, and she was still deeply struggling with the ramifications of being viciously attacked in our church-cult for years. She told me this right after I’d finished reading this book, and in a fit of anxiety I told her to make sure she found a biblical counselor, and not to go to someone with a secular degree. They couldn’t help you– they’ll only make the problem worse.

The book’s jacket description is fairly vague, offering a bunch of different questions that are representative of various viewpoints. But, here’s some of the positive reviews from goodreads:

A must read for ANY Christian. It truly explains how psychology has NO business in the church or the lives of Christians and confirms completely that God’s Word alone is sufficient to help us with all of our supposed “mental health” issues. Sin needs to be called sins, not diseases.

I just love that mental health is in quotation marks.

I had to read this book for the first Biblical Counseling class I took, and it really influenced the way I looked at psychology. I had always sort of distrusted much of psychology, but this book opened my eyes to specific ways in which it is unbiblical. It also pointed out areas where it has crept into the church, to our great detriment.

From anecdotal experience and what I’ve been told, this book shows up in a lot of counseling/psychology classes at evangelical colleges, even ones that are more “liberal” than the fundamentalist college I attended. Here’s another review from amazon:

This is an eye-opener. Dr. Ed Bulkley has written a book that should be read and taught in every ministry training school, or church. As a devoted student of God’s word, I have always approached secular psychology with an air caution. Now, I have greater reason and sound documentation to remain cautious.

The overarching theme of the book that is painstakingly clear is that “psychology is unbiblical and dangerous,” and from the fact that most of the reviews were positive, most readers seem to think that this opinion is just fine and dandy. Most of the reviews reflect one simple principle:

The Bible is all we need for life.

This perspective actually has a name: solo scriptura. This theological position is different from the typical Protestant orthodox view of sola scriptura. Solo scriptura is very, very common among fundamentalists. They reject the regula fidei, they reject any notion of the creeds. They have no need to pay attention to the church fathers, or even modern, respected theologians and apologeticists. If they even acknowledge the existence of men like Clement, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Lewis, or Schaeffer, they are as passing references and treated with an extreme amount of suspicion– especially the early church fathers, who are perceived as being “Catholic.” Reason and emotion are swept aside– the only thing the matters is the Bible.

This results in a complete dismissal of the validity of things like mental illness, mental disorders, and depression. These things become nothing more than “sin problems.” Much like Job’s friends, fundamentalists view any sort of mental problem as being strictly a matter of the person not being “right with God.” You’re not really struggling with depression– you’re just bitter. You aren’t ADD– you just weren’t spanked enough as a child. You’re not bi-polar, you lack temperance and are prideful. You just need to get over yourself and learn some self-control. Or, among hardcore fundamentalists, sometimes mental illness (especially schizophrenia) isn’t a matter of sin– you’re demon possessed. Most commonly, you’ve let Satan build a “stronghold” in your life.

I believed all of these things. I pontificated about how ADD and ADHD are over-diagnosed and these kids are just a bunch of stubborn, willful, spoiled rotten brats. I believed that depression was simply a lack of self-control, and if those pansies just sucked it up and dealt with their bad feelings like a grown-up, no one would have a problem. I dismissed things like “chemical imbalances” wholesale. Rolled my eyes at PTSD. Scorned medication as merely a patch on a deeper soul problem.

While I was in the grip of these beliefs, I could not see anything in my life clearly. I struggled with mild panic attacks and depression– but they only confused me. I had no idea what was happening– nausea could stay on me for days, and I lost 30 pounds over the course of a few months. My heart would start to feel like it was about to explode, and even though it frightened me, I had no resources to understand it. All I ever wanted to do was sleep, and it took mountains of effort to even communicate with someone. Just a few words could be exhausting, at times. I felt sick, tired, and achy every single day. I was only suicidal once, but I very dangerously dismissed those thoughts as insignificant. A friend who knew better than me asked me to give her all of my prescription pain relievers– and I did, but I felt silly and idiotic for doing it.

But, I had no idea that these are textbook symptoms of depression. And because I had been robbed of the ability to identify these things, I couldn’t even see that I had a problem. This was just life now.

March 14, 2013 by