Oh Chaotic Dust,
While that relationship was to last a while longer, you couldn’t tell your girlfriend what was going on in your head. Friends were also too risky, so you chose to tell a half-truth to someone you thought may be able to help.
A large living room, awkwardly sat on the sofa. The pastor at your church thinks this is just a routine catch-up, but you have an agenda. Six years on, he still doesn’t know either. You chat away and eventually allude to wanting to speak to someone about events in your past. You daren’t say it’s to do with you, so you talk about an ex instead and some of what she went through (other people’s dark secrets are so much easier to tell). You say you’d like to talk to someone in order to process it. He smiles warmly and says “of course,” starts talking about someone he can put you in contact with, an ex-doctor turned Christian counsellor, but you’re already filling up with hope and relief (plus fighting off the ever-present OCD demons).
That was your first step, Chaotic Dust. It was tiny: tiny, tiny, tiny. But don’t despise small beginnings. That tiny step led to other steps: some bigger, some even smaller, but each one a step nonetheless. Look at it for a moment. In that first step you didn’t say “OCD” (you didn’t and wouldn’t know it was OCD for a couple more years). You didn’t say anything about what you were struggling with, just that you wanted to talk to someone.
People often think the first step has to be this outpouring of thought and experience to someone, or that it only happens in the thunder and the rain. Your first step was a fraud and a sham. You were pretending to need help for something else. It was yours though, the same way everyone’s first step is, and as such that first step can be whatever a person wants it to be; as big or as small, as revealing or as guarded, as true or as false as they want it to be.
The cliche is that the first step is “admitting you need help” or saying “I need help.” But first steps can be smaller than that. An easier phrase is, “I think I’d like to talk to someone.” Requiring people to say “need” can turn people off the idea. Stigma is complex, and deconstructing the unhelpful practices rampant in society is about making mental health help as accessible as possible. You didn’t say “need.” That step would have been too big for you. But you found another, smaller step, and you took that. You should be proud of that. You should be proud of every step, as everyone with mental illness should be.
Of course, in many ways that first step was a step in the wrong direction. You would take up your pastor’s offer of help (and to be fair to him, he played his part well) and find yourself beginning a therapy of sorts. For you, church and Christianity were the supports of your upbringing. Mental health was tied into faith (Rock and redeemer. Rock and redeemer. Rock and redeemer). So it made sense to have therapy with someone who understood all that. You still think that’s important, but the next few months would show you that it can also be catastrophic; an experience that, far from saving you, would stall (and perhaps even set back) your recovery by years.
Onwards, to religious therapy.