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| Image credit: David Craig Taylor, Creative Commons |
There's a book by George MacDonald called The Princess and the Goblin where a princess named Irene is told to follow a magical thread to find a benevolent enchantress whom she loves. It leads her through a mine infested with goblins who want to kill her, and through thin passages blocked with rocks where she has to claw her way through. She is the only one who can see the enchantress, and the only person willing to help her constantly questions whether the journey is worth it, because he can't see the enchantress nor the thread.
She struggles on in some ways very much alone, and even seemingly abandoned by the enchantress, except for that thin, wandering thread.
She struggles on in some ways very much alone, and even seemingly abandoned by the enchantress, except for that thin, wandering thread.
I've written before about my struggle with Obsession Compulsion Disorder and scruples. I promised in that post that I would write about how OCD impacted my relationship with my then-fiance.
That day has come (a year later...sorry guys).
How I managed to move past it and how I continue to heal is a part of my life that I honestly struggle to understand and that I'm still trying to sort out, especially since much of the help I received, and was largely dependent on, came from a source that turned out to be less than stellar.
One thing I do know is that the "Jesus I Trust in You" prayer got me through a lot of it.
Scrupulosity, or an obsession with religious observance and morality, can be hard to understand or see as a problem, especially for those who consider themselves religiously observant. In a nutshell, those struggling with the disorder struggle constantly with the feeling that they have offended God, fixate on even the smallest details and minutiae of religious practice, and have a certainty that they are going to go to hell if they commit even the slightest 'sin'. When you have it, your religious practice is a constant source of stress, never a source of comfort.
In my particular case, it manifested in several different ways, but the one that caused me the most distress was a preoccupation with my vocation. I had recently gotten engaged, and my mind was trying its darnedest to convince me that I should break the engagement and investigate religious life. Everyone around me whose judgement I trusted was telling me that it seemed that I was called to marriage, but the doubt still ate away at me, to the point that I was experiencing frequent panic attacks and constant anxiety.
I ultimately decided that I had to ignore the constant nagging voice and the "what ifs" and choose to believe that the people in my life telling me I was called to marriage were sent by God and reflected His will for my life. When the doubts would come, I would say "Jesus I trust in you" over and over.
"I trust that you'd send me someone who knows me who would say otherwise if you were calling me to religious life."
"I trust that this is the way that I'm supposed to go, and who I'm supposed to be with."
It's important to note that I didn't have any emotional release during all this. This prayer didn't give me much mental relief or even a sense of peace. My anxiety still buzzed constantly in my head like a thousand mosquitoes.
The thoughts didn't change, my anxiety didn't change, just my conscious reactions to them. I actually still had those thoughts, right up to the moment I said my vows on the altar (and they were strong...I spent the first half of the wedding mass seriously wondering if God wanted me to stand up and call the whole thing off). I didn't really begin to heal and move on from my mental illness, to feel some sense of 'normal', until I entered therapy a couple months after I got married.
Even when God is helping us out, He often doesn't tell us. Depending on God's mercy in that situation, rather than "double checking" I was following the "right" vocation by leaving to discern a religious vocation, wasn't a reassuring or peace filled thing.
It was a terrifying leap in the dark.
And it wasn't rewarded right away with any sense of peace-- it was just something that I had to do, and had to struggle to do, again and again and again.
With hindsight and some distance, I can finally see that God was working in my life during that time. I have absolutely no regrets about marrying my husband, and finally free of the majority of my anxiety, I can clearly see God's hand in how we met and the circumstances that surrounded us when we dated (the fact that I was in a long-distance relationship with my husband in college probably saved me from a very, VERY bad situation with another man, one that I didn't escape completely unscathed and that a friend of mine became enmeshed in...but that's a subject for a future post).
And I'm finally getting to a point in my faith life, five years after I married my husband, where I'm actually experiencing prayer and my relationship with God as a source of consolation, rather than an extreme source of stress and confusion.
But at the time, God's mercy wasn't a refuge to hide in so much as a thin lifeline to grasp while the storm still very much raged around me and a chasm opened up underneath me. God's love isn't always a warm comforting glow as much as a direction you head as you walk through the valley of death.
There might be moments of comfort or insight along the way.
Then again, there might not.
That day has come (a year later...sorry guys).
How I managed to move past it and how I continue to heal is a part of my life that I honestly struggle to understand and that I'm still trying to sort out, especially since much of the help I received, and was largely dependent on, came from a source that turned out to be less than stellar.
One thing I do know is that the "Jesus I Trust in You" prayer got me through a lot of it.
Scrupulosity, or an obsession with religious observance and morality, can be hard to understand or see as a problem, especially for those who consider themselves religiously observant. In a nutshell, those struggling with the disorder struggle constantly with the feeling that they have offended God, fixate on even the smallest details and minutiae of religious practice, and have a certainty that they are going to go to hell if they commit even the slightest 'sin'. When you have it, your religious practice is a constant source of stress, never a source of comfort.
In my particular case, it manifested in several different ways, but the one that caused me the most distress was a preoccupation with my vocation. I had recently gotten engaged, and my mind was trying its darnedest to convince me that I should break the engagement and investigate religious life. Everyone around me whose judgement I trusted was telling me that it seemed that I was called to marriage, but the doubt still ate away at me, to the point that I was experiencing frequent panic attacks and constant anxiety.
I ultimately decided that I had to ignore the constant nagging voice and the "what ifs" and choose to believe that the people in my life telling me I was called to marriage were sent by God and reflected His will for my life. When the doubts would come, I would say "Jesus I trust in you" over and over.
"I trust that you'd send me someone who knows me who would say otherwise if you were calling me to religious life."
"I trust that this is the way that I'm supposed to go, and who I'm supposed to be with."
It's important to note that I didn't have any emotional release during all this. This prayer didn't give me much mental relief or even a sense of peace. My anxiety still buzzed constantly in my head like a thousand mosquitoes.
The thoughts didn't change, my anxiety didn't change, just my conscious reactions to them. I actually still had those thoughts, right up to the moment I said my vows on the altar (and they were strong...I spent the first half of the wedding mass seriously wondering if God wanted me to stand up and call the whole thing off). I didn't really begin to heal and move on from my mental illness, to feel some sense of 'normal', until I entered therapy a couple months after I got married.
Even when God is helping us out, He often doesn't tell us. Depending on God's mercy in that situation, rather than "double checking" I was following the "right" vocation by leaving to discern a religious vocation, wasn't a reassuring or peace filled thing.
It was a terrifying leap in the dark.
And it wasn't rewarded right away with any sense of peace-- it was just something that I had to do, and had to struggle to do, again and again and again.
With hindsight and some distance, I can finally see that God was working in my life during that time. I have absolutely no regrets about marrying my husband, and finally free of the majority of my anxiety, I can clearly see God's hand in how we met and the circumstances that surrounded us when we dated (the fact that I was in a long-distance relationship with my husband in college probably saved me from a very, VERY bad situation with another man, one that I didn't escape completely unscathed and that a friend of mine became enmeshed in...but that's a subject for a future post).
And I'm finally getting to a point in my faith life, five years after I married my husband, where I'm actually experiencing prayer and my relationship with God as a source of consolation, rather than an extreme source of stress and confusion.
But at the time, God's mercy wasn't a refuge to hide in so much as a thin lifeline to grasp while the storm still very much raged around me and a chasm opened up underneath me. God's love isn't always a warm comforting glow as much as a direction you head as you walk through the valley of death.
There might be moments of comfort or insight along the way.
Then again, there might not.
Hugs and Continued Prayers.
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