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Depression AND Anxiety: The Two-Headed Beast If I were to go back in time and chat with my younger self, the “childhood me” would say I struggled with depression. I have bitten my nails as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until my “twenty-somethings”, that my sadness started to feel like a pushing, pulling, accusing motor of anxiety. Perhaps anxiety had been lying dormant in my child brain until self-awareness led me to say out loud, “I think I struggle with anxiety!” Anxiety, for me at least, would rear its ugly head more at night or in any social situation and would present like a driving beat mixed with a cold sweat and a consistent imaginary audience judging and criticizing everything I did. Enter “The Two-Headed Beast”. This beast is clever: it presents one way then it rears yet another ugly head. A bout of depression commonly fuels anxious feeling or vise versa. How does one wage a two-front war? By understanding and taming the beast. Understanding the beast: Anecdotally, depression is, for some, a weight so heavy it becomes impossible to carry, characterized by overwhelming darkness and sorrow. For others, its unexplained tearfulness, mental and emotional exhaustion, desiring to sleep for days on end, and not something easily pushed back. I have used anger to try to defend against depression and to try to power through the vulnerability that came with it. I thought I had conquered it, but the beast was awake and it was taking names. On the other hand, anxiety becomes the driving beat composed of accusations and questions, distracting thoughts, and pressure in the chest. To some, anxiety can feel like the beast is pushing them toward their grave while suffocating them at the same time. With depression, a lot of my clients feel unfit to re-enter community until their darkness passes. A feeling of “who would know what to do with me and the weight of my sadness?” and isolation is quite common. At the same time, anxiety can be more socially acceptable because society drives a “we’re all so busy” mentality. Society says it’s semi-positive to get stuff done, to have lots things to do with no time to do it. This works until it all the sudden doesn’t. When depression and anxiety operate in simpatico it becomes a negative feedback loop that is not easily broken leading to a place called “stuck”. Taming the beast(s). 1. The Devil you know... Many things in this world are broken. Simple examples like the Costco gas station lines, any Chick Fila on a Saturday, self-checkout lines, etc. The two-headed beast lies not just in human and systemic brokenness but also with Satan aka “The prince of the Power of the air” (Eph 2.2) Peter warns us in 5:8 to “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” One of the most helpful books on the Enemy is The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis which illustrates the mentoring relationship between Screwtape (a demon) and his nephew Wormword as he learns how to tempt a human being (also born again Christians) in the best way. Screwtape’s advice is sly, it is seductive, guiding his nephew on just how hard to push, because if he pushes too hard, then it would the alert the human of his existence and the nonsensicalness of his lies: Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible...” or Here are some other insights: Like a good chess player he is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.” He has become more a Lie than a Liar a personified self-contradiction” C.S. Lewis 2. Know your story: I am big into genograms, genograms reflect family systems and patterns of interactions, I have learned how depression and anxiety have impacted my family relationships and attachment, and it’s a pretty incredible light bulb moment. It might be worth doing a little digging to find out about the family relationships and mental illness in your family of origin and older generations. While mental illness has become less taboo, and more of a socially acceptable subject to discuss. Also, it’s worthwhile to consider meta-emotion, your feelings about your feelings. How were you taught to feel? Were their right and wrong feelings? Were feelings something that were tolerable for members of your family to discuss or were they more of a secret for each to keep to themselves? So imagine if from an early age you had not been allowed to express negative emotions or there was the implication of discouraging them as to not burden others? How long have you gone with stuffing and ignoring complex feelings? Depending on your answer, this is indicative of a backlog. 3. Know your Maker and his Word: When I realized that God, my maker and Savior Himself was a man of Sorrows, it got so much easier to approach the throne of Grace. For instance, Isaiah 53:3 “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not”. Your Heavenly Father provided His Son to come to earth to dwell and He didn’t fit in. His own disciples looked at him sideways most of the time. This was Jesus’s life; he was misunderstood and hated a majority of the time by a majority of people. Also, he sympathizes with your weakness and one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He gets us and he has provided the “Spirit, which helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words”. Not one, not two but multiple groans which defined means “denoting a deep inarticulate sound conveying pain, despair OR denoting a [...] sound made by an object under pressure” 4. Knowing your triggers I have a lot of clients who will come to my office beating themselves up for feeling anxious and depressed, as if Christianity and hardship and struggle were mutually exclusive. We behave as if Christianity were neat and tidy, but I would argue at the beginning it’s a whole heaping pile of self-awareness. Simply naming, whichever way it presents: “I am depressed”. and/or “I am anxious” immediately gives us great power and is walking in the Light with ourselves, with God and with others. I had toxic relationships and poor boundaries, but the Lord was kind in providing friends and professionals who could point me in right directions to begin naming things for what they were. What if you’re anxiety and/or your depression are a teaching tool? What if those feelings were attempting to tell you something? What if this is providing information? What if it is pushing you to deal with a destructive idol that is failing you and eventually Christ pulling you to Himself? Paul admits in 2 Corinthians 8: Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak then I am strong (9-10). It gives me such an encouragement that Paul pleaded with God and God said no to him too! If you find yourself waging war with these two adversaries and are feeling stuck please feel free to call me at 205-775-7489 or set up an an appointment here on my website.