Oh Chaotic Dust,
Remember what the Christian counsellor told you? He told you the intrusive thoughts were some form of spiritual or demonic attack. Seriously. He looked at you, caring and sombre, and told you the intrusive thoughts of hurting yourself and others were a demonic attack. He told you the answer was prayer. What, exactly, did he think you’d been doing all this time? Praying was one of the few tactics you had stuck with: over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.
Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.
Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.
He didn’t just say prayer, though. He also said that you needed to talk and discuss your past and current anxieties: all those other cliches. Years later you’ll realise the ridiculousness of his take on your situation. Then you’ll grow angry – really, deeply angry – and rightly so. Then you’ll become sad that you were failed so monumentally, that you opened up to someone who styled themselves as someone who could (who would) help, and received nothing. There’ll also be times you laugh at it. You were told it was a demonic attack. There is, in the right light, something horrifyingly funny about that.
Later in your life a professional will diagnose you as most likely having OCD after a brief phone call in which you only alluded to your symptoms. But that Christian counsellor, with far more information, got it catastrophically wrong.
Ultimately, you’ll probably always have mixed feelings towards those sessions and that Christian counsellor. Telling him was certainly a needed step, but telling him was on you. The botched response was on him. That botched response would go on to cause not just more mental problems for you, but also a deep mistrust of the church. It would, and maybe always will be, a block between you and organised religion.
But go back, go back, go back to that first time you heard it called a “spiritual attack”. What did you make of it then? You believed it. As shocking a truth as that is to you now, you believed it. Growing up in church, the vague notion of a “spiritual attack” was something you knew of. So you took his word that more “therapy” sessions and praying would do the trick. At the time, at least, it didn’t do you any harm, and so you kept going, perhaps because of your upbringing or perhaps because of the desperation of your condition.
Even now, years of OCD, depression and other mental health struggles later, even having stood up in churches to talk about OCD, you don’t really know if religions always get mental health wrong. Certainly, in your own experience you were let down by an organisation that told you it would always be there for you. For some people, being told their mental health was to do with demons would have been devastating, with horrific consequences. For others, it may help. Perhaps if you had done things a little differently the prayer and the talking would have done the trick for you too.
It’s easy to take cheap shots at religions these days, especially over something like mental health, and especially when you’ve been let down. But most of those critiques aren’t nuanced enough (though, to be fair, when is anything on the internet ever nuanced?), and it wasn’t a religion that let you down (question of God letting you down saved for another time), it was one man; a man who really did want to help, but who just wasn’t up to the task.
Ideologies are important and, for your part, you didn’t go to the NHS or a therapist, you went to where you were taught to go: the church. It’s easy to then blame the church, and it’s hard to take responsibility for your actions and choices yourself, but responsibility you must take. No one gets better by blaming their mental health on others, or by making others solely responsible for healing them. As scary as it is, that’s on you.