Reflections On Wellness
After two years of pandemic life, it feels easy to focus on what is going wrong in the world. “I’ve got a runny nose this morning: is it allergies or the plague?” is a thought I’ve had many times of late. That pervasive sense of needing to question our safety is exhausting. Maybe we’re feeling like nothing is going “right” and all the places where we seek solace are crumbling. Sometimes there is a discernible cause such as the death of a loved one or rejection from a school we applied to, but other times the cause of our “unwellness” seems less clear. Difficult seasons are part of life and that’s okay, but they sure get exhausting after a while.
Mental health is a concept we often define very vaguely. In fact, if we held a survey, I’d expect we’d find as many different definitions as people we asked. We often think about health as “the absence of disease,” but I’m sure if we take a moment, we can easily recall times when although we may have been in good physical condition, we did not feel “well.” This suggests that wellness is something that transcends our bodily state. We experience varying degrees of health in our relationships, occupations, emotions, thoughts, spiritual lives, environment, and community. Dysfunction in any of those areas can lead to experiences of unhealth. Maybe it comes from a lack of fulfillment or a traumatic experience has resulted in a feeling of being unsafe. Regardless of the how or why, unwellness is reflective of our life in a broken world. We often find ourselves unable to live authentically in light of our identity as being made in the Image of God.
The late great psychologist Carl Rogers wrote much about authenticity. For Rogers, living healthily is determined, in large part, by congruence between a persons’ real and ideal selves. People naturally want to improve and grow, but there is a counterforce, the drive toward entropy. Rogers would call this tension “incongruence,” but for Christians, maybe it’s more helpful to use language describing the Imago Dei coming into conflict with the sin and decay we experience. This dissonance leads to experiences of woundedness that can result in what we would consider to be “mental illness.” Each of us has hurts we carry: some of those wounds will be healed during our lives, while some may have to wait until the Coming of the Kingdom. Furthermore, some might not be wounds at all; for instance, if a person who uses a wheelchair can freely access buildings with ramps, but not one with stairs, is the person “disabled” or is the building causing their disability? Likewise, are isolating experiences of mental illness alienating in themselves or do they isolate because the rest of us aren’t equipped to care for that person?
Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how individuals function within communities. Nobody exists as an island; we all owe our existence to someone else. And yet, in our culture, we often feel a need to function as though individuality is all that matters. Each of us puts on a performance as a means of protecting ourselves from vulnerability. We manage the narrative of how we want others to see us. This may sound deceitful, but it is a typical human coping mechanism that we use to protect ourselves from difficult feelings. However, the process becomes destructive when we confuse the performance with reality. The reality is that we are fragile. When our self-image becomes distorted, it becomes more difficult to see ourselves the way God does. It can lead to feelings of depression, anxiety, or behaviors that close us off from community as a means of self-protection. When one member of the body of Christ suffers, all members suffer with it; so too, when one member is cared for, so are all others. If the alienation that comes with mental illness wounds a member of our community, we are all made poorer by their absence.
Mental Health has become a buzzword in our culture. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what it refers to. And I’m not here to set the record straight. I went through the training; I have the counseling license; I could go on for pages explaining various theories and practices to help us better conceptualize mental challenges and manage anxiety. And, for many, those are helpful exercises. I can give my “expert” opinion, but at the end of the day, I’m just a guy who’s read some books. I don’t know what is best for you nor do I have any desire to pretend to be Jesus for anyone. Therein lies the trap I’ve seen many Christians and counselors fall into, myself included. I don’t say that to disparage myself or cast doubt on the practice of counseling, but rather, to offer up everything written here with a degree of fear and trembling. This is not a comprehensive description of issues around mental health but a starting point for awareness and discussion. And, hopefully, a space to acknowledge the experiences of those experiencing loneliness, dissonance, weariness, and grief. My prayer would be that Sanctuary Counseling Group would be able to continue to live into the spirit of gentleness necessary to care for those struggling with mental illness, with eyes to see beneath performance, woundedness, and acts of self-preservation to their true identity as beautifully nuanced creations made in God’s image.
