Three Things To Remember When You’re Walking Toward Healing

I was in college when I saw my first therapist. I vividly remember the fear and humiliation of filling out the intake forms in the front office.

Did I hear voices?
Had I tried to hurt myself or others in the past six months?
Was I avoiding social situations? Did I experience a racing heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, or tight chest?

Tears streamed down my face. Maybe I wasn’t having heart attacks after all.

I nervously answered the questions hoping no one else in the office was looking over my shoulder; hoping no one else would know how broken I was. I began to wonder how I had ended up there. I knew mental illness ran rampant in my extended family and I would have given anything not to be handed that diagnosis.

But I was ready to be made well. And healing happens when we are finally ready to be made well.

Photo Credit: Christopher Michel, Creative Commons

The journey I started that day in counseling has been the most liberating, exhausting and healing path I could have chosen for myself. It gave me a chance to answer the biblical call to “choose life, that you might live.”

These are a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. You Must Name It

As a young, naive college student who loved Jesus, I assumed that any form of mental illness or emotional imbalance could and should be healed through Christ alone. I’m not sure when the thought formed, but I grew to believe it as truth:

If I prayed hard enough, believed in faith for my healing, spent enough time in God’s presence, and served others well enough—I wouldn’t have panic attacks and I would experience full healing.

But two years after I graduated college, I was still wrestling with panic attacks, extreme ADD and mild obsessive compulsive disorder that no amount of therapy, changes in diet, working out, prayer or time spent with Jesus had taken away. In fact, I realized I had been dealing with these things since I was a little girl.

For so long everyone had written it off by saying I was “an artist” “emotional” or a “sensitive soul.” No one, including me, wanted to call it what it was: mental illness. When I finally allowed myself to name it, I was set free to address it.

Naming our broken bits is the first step to finding healing for them.

2. Sometimes Pills Heal

It wasn’t until six years into my therapy journey, after graduating college and getting married, that a therapist in her mid 70’s was brave enough to look me in the eyes and tell me the truth.

“You are sick,” she said, “Just like a diabetic. Just like a cancer patient. You need insulin. You need chemo. You need medicine or you will never fully live.” This lady who loved the Lord and walked with him deeply and intimately knew what I didn’t: sometimes pills heal.

Honestly, I knew people who took pills and I thought they were crazy.

Pridefully, I didn’t want to be like them. Once I came to grips with the fact that I had a mental illness and named it, I wanted to overcome it through my own strength, diligence and spirituality. I was afraid of medicine, afraid of side effects, of my personality changing, of becoming addicted, or someone finding out that my faith hadn’t healed me.

“Your faith,” the counselor said, “Is what will give you the courage to meet the doctors and take the medicines that can make you well.”

I stubbornly sat on her words and wrestled with them for over a year. Then, one day, I woke up and heard the still, small whisper of God’s voice saying, “It’s time.” I summoned the courage to walk into the psychiatrist’s office and take my first pill. It was the most brave decision in my healing journey and I have never been the same.

Thank God for the lady who believed that sometimes God uses pills to heal.

She taught me that going to the places you swore you would never go and taking the steps you dreaded the most are the very things that bring you in alignment with healing.

3. True Healing Requires Work.

Recently my six-year-old daughter fell and got a nasty scrape on her knee. Within a week she had a thick scab that “felt achey” and she wanted to peel it off because it was bothering her so badly.

I stopped her and told her she needed the scab because the wound was healing. She promptly responded, “Well healing hurts and I hate it!!!”

You and me both, kid.

When I was 25-years-old, I assumed my bravery for taking that first pill would be rewarded with instant healing. But here I am, ten years later, still taking medicine. Gladly.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this journey has been the realization that healing hurts and it rarely comes easily. It requires unearthing the past only to lay it to rest; experimenting with medicines until your body finds the type it can tolerate (all the while dragging your mind and body through the mud); leaning into mental, physical and spiritual disciplines that bring you one step closer to wholeness; and a daily decision to fight for your wellness.

In the same way one healthy meal, good workout or lap-band surgery will not ensure health indefinitely, one pill, counseling session or season of mental wellness will not carry a person for a lifetime. If a diabetic has to watch sugar and take insulin for the rest of their lives to manage their disease, why should I expect anything different with my disease?

Sometimes God miraculously redeems, restores and heals in divine ways that seemingly occur over night. But most of my healing hasn’t come that way. Instead, it has come over the long years as I faithfully commit to walk alongside Christ and reclaim who I was created to be in the first place.

The hard work of healing is always with me.

And I like it that way. Never ‘fully arriving’ means I am tethered to a God who keeps me, mindful of a faith that sustains me, diligent to the medicines and practices that save me and aware of my limp which beckons me to daily choose life—that I may live.

It may take you to places you never imagined, naming demons you dreaded, on a longer journey than you ever expected, but it is here in the healing places, where life abundant begins to spring forth and the broken bits are made whole.