Oh Chaotic Dust,
Remember the last religious therapy session? You’ll lose track of how many sessions you had with the Christian counsellor, but the important parts – it’s a spiritual attack, you need to pray and chat and keep doing what you’re doing – are stuck with you. That last session is stuck with you too, because the Christian counsellor didn’t tell you to continue praying with him, or by yourself, or even with trusted friends, but with another member of the church who had been trained to pray over spiritual attacks: some form of spiritual prayer warfare or whatever that was. You don’t know, because you never went.
You never went because opening up to one person had taken everything – as it often does. It took months for you to feel comfortable sharing with that Christian counsellor and now he was ending your sessions and wanted you to open up (and open up pretty much immediately – no first few sessions of mind games and figuring out if this new person would turn you over to the police) to someone else.
He just didn’t get it.
How many others have felt like that? How many times have you felt it? You’ll feel it a lot over the years. You may always feel it, or have moments when you feel it. Moments when people talk about how they love to just sit and listen to music, or read a book, or even just lie down doing nothing. Worst of all, you will always feel it – a sharp, frustrated pang – every time someone says they’re “just a little OCD”.
No, that Christian counsellor, after you had opened up so vulnerably, didn’t get it at all. But you were numb and you were lost and you were still fighting every second of every minute of every hour of every anxious, guilt-ridden, intrusive thought-filled day, so you thanked him kindly and took the contact details of this person/group who would do a deep-cleanse prayer therapy of your soul. As you left that office you knew you would never, ever have the courage to contact them, and neither could you rely on that Christian counsellor again. You had stepped out, you had opened up, you had done the (religious) therapy, and now you were back out alone in the cold, just you and the intrusive thoughts (or demons depending on interpretation).
Would the prayer therapy have worked? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Years of praying and therapy and opening up to people has told you that, no, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Though perhaps the steps of opening up to more people would in itself have helped. More what ifs for the pile.
You’ll remember that walk back after your last Christian therapy session for years. You walked through bustling, sunny streets and a new feeling enveloped you with its cold grey arms. It wasn’t abandonment or loneliness. It was depression. The sun shone and the people laughed and smiled and chatted away and you felt nothing. Hopelessness engulfed you, a numbness like you’d never known before. There was no more therapy. The Christian counsellor had put the ball back in your court, and you just didn’t have it in you to pick it up. You didn’t have the strength to take that next step.
When you walk with a person through similar trials you have to promise that you’ll be with them to help them take the next steps. People don’t need you to heal them or validate them or save them (you’ve tried that before and you know it doesn’t work). People need you alongside them, helping them to take the next step, and then the next one, and so on and so on and so on until they don’t need you there any more. That Christian counsellor thought you didn’t need him anymore, but you did. You did. Because of his actions you believed that the only options were now closed to you. That’s abandonment, and it was going to lead you down ever darker thought patterns.
You reached your university campus and you sat in one of the cafes and you were depressed. There’s a picture in your mind of that moment; other students swelling around you, passing by in blissful ignorance, and you sat there feeling absolutely nothing. Nothing. Nothing.