Who of you by worrying ...
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I'm not sure if this belongs in Purgatory but let's give it a go ...
In the Gospels there are several exhortations not to 'worry'. It doesn't add any more days to our lives, Christ says. It's not a sensible response.
'What's the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile,' as the old WW1 song had it. Those fellas had plenty to worry about.
The question is. How to stop?
I'm worried about the elder Gamaliette. I want a quick fix solution but there isn't one. Whiskey won't help.
I've just hacked off a well meaning counsellor friend by dismissing a mindfulness course she recommended as 'psycho-bollocks.'
Shades of poor @Thunderbunk's reaction over on the 'coincidences' thread when spiritual direction was being dissed.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not against counselling nor mindfulness meditation per se - although I'm not much given to meditative practices per se orher than brooding or mithering about things.
But how do we stop worrying? You can't just turn it off like a tap.
In the Gospels there are several exhortations not to 'worry'. It doesn't add any more days to our lives, Christ says. It's not a sensible response.
'What's the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile,' as the old WW1 song had it. Those fellas had plenty to worry about.
The question is. How to stop?
I'm worried about the elder Gamaliette. I want a quick fix solution but there isn't one. Whiskey won't help.
I've just hacked off a well meaning counsellor friend by dismissing a mindfulness course she recommended as 'psycho-bollocks.'
Shades of poor @Thunderbunk's reaction over on the 'coincidences' thread when spiritual direction was being dissed.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not against counselling nor mindfulness meditation per se - although I'm not much given to meditative practices per se orher than brooding or mithering about things.
But how do we stop worrying? You can't just turn it off like a tap.
Comments
You are right to say that we can’t turn it off, nor should we without working out whether there is anything we can do or say which might make a difference. But once we have done that, all we can do is to pray and to try to give the burden to God in trust, hope and love.
I am not a counsellor or therapist: the benefits of mindfulness courses have been clinically proven, but it is not for everyone (it worked for my anxiety and depression). If worrying is giving you serious problems then you need advice on therapies from a specialist - there are other alternatives for anxiety that may be helpful. Since I am not a therapist I won’t make suggestions, but you might want to have a look at the NHS website to see if the pointers there are helpful.
On a more everyday basis, some level of worrying seems to be normal. I haven’t found a cure for that. I take a walk or run sometimes to ‘clear my head’, and also find prayer or meditation to be helpful.
I'm reminded of my own estrangement as a young person from my mother who was also grieving the loss of a family member and couldn't seem to respect the boundaries I was setting with her. My intense anxiety rubbed up against her obliviousness and only distance defused the tensions. Time helped, but I do wonder if the suggestion from the friend who knows you IRL of a little more self-awareness (mindfulness) might not be helpful at some point.
Generally speaking, if you want to change something - you will need to do something differently. So if you discount options because they are not what you normally do, you are going to limit your options quite drastically.
From where do you get the idea that the amount of worrying you're doing is abnormal or undesirable?
Presumably @Gamma Gamaliel is motivates by Jesus' admonition not to worry.
It's a strange one though - it's not something one has direct conscious control over, or there wouldn't be a whole area of psychology given over to the study and treatment of anxiety.
I dunno; when I read this bit of the gospels it almost feels like Jesus thinking aloud about anxiety and trying to convince himself it's irrational as a self-help talking therapy. It's not like you can reason or pep-talk people out of anxiety as a straight reading as an instruction would imply.
Freebie article.
With respect, any therapeutic intervention can be (ab)used to help people adapt to difficult conditions caused by structural inequality or corporate stress. Look at the boom in antidepressant prescriptions, for example.
The problem with mindfulness is that it got (ab)used by corporate programs - they can’t prescribe drugs to help people cope with the rotten conditions they impose, so they use mindfulness, exercise passes, etc. That is a failing of corporations, not mindfulness. The author of that Guardian article is a professor of management, after all, and not a psychologist.
I think people should make up their minds about what helps them with the advice of appropriate specialists.
But there is also an important point about not clinicalising everyday stress and worry, and thinking about how we support each other with that. Therapy requires a specialist, Care is something we can all provide.
My reaction has usually been something like…
If you are Wile E Coyote being crushed by a huge boulder, there comes a point at which a course on ‘How To Cope With Being Under A Boulder’ is of no use, and you just need someone to lift the flippin’ boulder.
That’s not to dismiss things like mindfulness or indeed CBT - they can be helpful but they aren’t a magic bullet.
I found the NHS link helpful, @Doublethink and will pursue some of those ideas.
My 'psycho-bollocks' WhatsApp comment was a knee-jerk over-reaction to my counsellor friend's well-intentioned response with a link to something that would probably be helpful but was couched in terms I found off-putting.
I have an unfortunate propensity to strike keys first and think afterwards. Whiskey didn't help.
I suppose I felt as @Gill H described, Wile E Coyote wanting someone to shift the boulder not send a video or mindfulness exercise on how to endure being squashed by a big boulder.
I do tend to beat myself up over things. Counsellors and clergy have told me that.
I've been exasperated by my daughter's behaviour- she has ADHD and has had a lot of stressful things to deal with - but also tend to 'blame' myself for some of it. We've had a big bereavement, her Gran, my mother in law, and lots of other stuff to contend with.
I'm sure we will work things out eventually, we have done so in the past. But it's all raw at the moment.
FWIW I am not generally dismissive or 'against' therapies and strategies or mindfulness techniques and so on. I did have some counselling following redundancy a good while back and when I was in a very low place. It worked wonders.
Since then, though, for whatever reason, I've been reluctant to try it again. At my daughters' insistence I eventually agreed to have some bereavement counselling a few years after my wife died. The counsellor and my daughters thought it made a difference but I can't say I did.
@KarlLB is right when he says I've been wondering about the Gospel injunction not to worry. In some hyper-charismatic circles 'worry' is seen as almost sinful. You aren't trusting God sufficiently.
A priest has exhorted me to guard against guilt, but without any practical guidance as to how to actually do that.
I think it is something I need to address but have little idea where to start.
When I had a major anxiety crisis 2 years ago (by anxiety crisis, I mean things like believing the crack in my study wall meant the house was going to fall down) I contacted my local NHS psychological services who were offering courses of low grade CBT over the phone, which I found very helpful. To maintain my mental health I use the Calm app and do their daily meditation but when I had my crisis I was also doing their sleep meditations for my insomnia. I also have a weekly yoga class and make sure I go out for a daily walk outside.
You need to find what is right for you but I would not dismiss approaches like CBT or mindfulness.
Jesus starts that particular bit of the Sermon on the Mount with:
Then, after the examples of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, he says:
And he finishes with:
I don’t think Jesus is talking at all here about worry or anxiousness over strained or broken relationships. (And what he says elsewhere indicates that he does think we should care about strained or broken relationships.) Rather, it seems to me that he’s saying we shouldn’t worry about our own survival. That’s what food and clothing and shelter are about—survival.
This seems to me to be a riff on Matthew 16:24–25:
They’re both ways of telling us not to focus of self-preservation. Rather, we find life by focusing on the kingdom of God. As Paul says, “the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 14:17) And I’m pretty confident that concern for strained and broken relationships falls squarely within the “peace” that is the kingdom of God.
I'm sure my relationship with my daughter will improve and that this is a temporary blip, although we do have run-ins from time to time. This one has been exacerbated by grief. She's missing her Gran and it's also very close to the fifth anniversary of her mother's death.
I'm not dismissing CBT or mindfulness techniques and I'm sure they can help. We've not had the funeral yet. Once that's out of the way I think we can get back to some semblance of normality.
Quite apart from anything else and the emotional side, caring for my old mother in law occupied a lot of our time and tended to shape our weekly and daily routines.
I think the "Fear not" and "Do not worry" things are partly there not so much because they are commands we can actually carry out, but rather because that sort of command super strongly implies there's no need to worry. First because the whole matter is ultimately in God's hands, and he will work out everything (ultimately) for our good--of course the rub is that the pre-ultimately matters a great deal to us, and we haven't any guarantees there. Still, having the assurance that the story of the universe ends in joy rather than in tragedy is worth something.
Second, because it does point out the useless of worry itself--by which I mean any sort of fretting and concern that goes beyond what is necessary to get you to take proper actions. So if I'm worried about my husband's health and chivy him to the doctor, that amount of worry is proper and sensible; but the worry that continues when I can do no more is just causing me pain (and probably leading me to be a pain in the ass to my family).
That matters to me because there are times when I catch myself feeling guilty because I should be worrying more -- you know the kind of thing, "How can you laugh when your mother is dying" or "Why aren't you more concerned about the climate crisis" or whatever. When I feel obliged to summon up negative feelings (or intensify them) because it feels like the proper thing to do.
We have a pattern in my family's life of getting into huge multi-part crises every three months or so, with a specialty in things that hit the week before Christmas and Easter. I mean, like having a parishioner leave a suicide note on our voicemail PLUS finding out there's been a two car accident involving six people we know PLUS finding an ominous lump in my breast. That sort of thing. And of course I would go to pieces over it.
It was only after about 20 years that I finally noticed that pretty reliably, two weeks later, 90 percent of the mess had cleared itself away without doing long-term damage (except to my nerves). The lump would turn out to be a cyst, the people in the car accident would all mend well, and the parishioner would be on to the next crisis in her never-ending crisis life, but not be dead, anyway... We only had the normal number of permanent horrible events (like deaths of loved ones) compared to other people, even though we had an extraordinary number of crises that threatened that way. And so now I still gnash my teeth, but it's not despair like it used to be? Because it's happened so often.
And the best times are the ones where I'm so exhausted already that I can't worry, I just wave a limp hand at God and say, "I just can't even. You go ahead, I'm having a nap." And generally speaking, he gets on with it while I sleep, veg, whatever.
I wish I could get into that mindset by choice and not by exhaustion.
Trigger warning for survivors. Hosts may want to hide text below.
Living in South Africa is at times like enduring a war zone of unrest, violent crime and gangsterism. When my partner was held up with knife to her throat a few months ago, the incident brought up painful and frightening memories for both of us. I was diagnosed with long-term chronic war-related PTSD in my 30s and incidents of threat or violence bring on recurring bouts of insomnia, hypervigilance, and intrusive memories.
As a child I grew up through a brutal war now known as the Second Chimurenga or Rhodesian bush war. The border town where we lived was bombed and hit with mortar fire, roads were hazardous because of land mines and we travelled to school or to the cities in armed convoys. My brother was killed in counter-insurgency operations, members of my mother's family were tortured and shot. The war divided mixed-race cross-cultural families and that trauma led in part to my mother's later suicide and contributed to my other brother's mental health problems. He is at present a homeless alcoholic in Hawaii and none of us know if he is alive or dead. When I look back all I see sometimes is devastation.
Faith hasn't been easy or even comforting, ever. Without faith though, I don't know I would have been able to carry on and rebuild a life in exile from Zimbabwe. It has helped that my local church is filled with refugees and asylum-seekers, many of whom have lived through more traumatic experiences than myself. I'm lucky too that the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture was set up in Cape Town in 1993 to help those of us in need of counselling and that most counselors were themselves survivors. Sometimes it is enough that somebody simply listens and can bear witness to what remains unspeakable and beyond help.
The lines from Matthew 6 quoted by @NickTamen above have been a guiding principle for me in learning how to let go of the past and just stay in the present day by day: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today."
When she eventually died, our lives had to take a different shape - for years we had planned everything round taking care of her and giving some respite to my grandad. Suddenly we didn't quite know how life should look. And everyone kept telling us 'It's a blessing', which was of course true. But it somehow made me feel I wasn't allowed to grieve.
Combined with taking 3 O-level resits, starting my A-level studies and preparing for my Grade 8 piano exam, it was almost too much for me and I was extremely close to a breakdown at times. I got through it eventually, but I'm sure the additional help available today would have made life a lot easier. Sometimes you just have to listen to yourself and let yourself grieve the way that feels right to you.
I'm all for any psycho-bollocks - or rejection of it - that gets any of us through the day. Or the next five minutes.
Jesus was being aspirational for others, from His own distinctive wiring. Stoic or what.
I can't speak for 'therapy' as a whole but the 'tell me about your childhood' thing is very much a caricature I think.
A caricature of psychoanalysis in particular, I think.
Yes - worrying is concerned with the future, while and dredging over the past is rumination. Both can be connected to anxiety (and can feed each other) though, according to this self-help guide from the NHS.
(IANAT, but I hope it’s OK to mention the above since it’s from a publicly-shared NHS source that’s intended for self help.)
Can you imagine a world where the past repeatedly becomes the present day and the worry is that it will become tomorrow as well?
In any event, I think we can pretty safely assume that by telling us not to worry about we’ll eat or drink or wear, Jesus isn’t telling us to ignore trauma and its effects.
I was going to post similar to this.
I found @Nick Tamen's post helpful and I'm sure I would have found yours the same.
Peace be to all.