depression

Is Change a Bad Word?

/ Nicole Bartell / 1 Comment

In 2011, my word for that year was “change”. I can still remember driving to work that January morning, talking to Father about what word He would give me to represent the coming year and hearing that word spoken to my heart. I was NOT happy! Firstly, I felt that I had already gone through a great deal of hard, life-altering changes the previous couple of years, and I dreaded there being more. I avoided, as much as possible at that point in my life, the pain of living in reality. I was still in so much denial, and I truly wanted to escape the reality of my situation, frequently at any cost. The desire to avoid reality drove me back to the past hang-ups and habits of control, food, and pornography in an attempt to shove the pain back into a box where I didn’t have to deal with it. Later that year, something happened that changed our family drastically. I couldn’t escape it. The burnt husk of what remained was a constant reminder that my life had altered. I was also trying to help an eight year old figure out how to navigate this new reality. This was the catalyst that drove me to take my very first steps toward recovery. I sought help. I began to see the high, impenetrable wall I had built around my heart to keep people out and to keep me safe from harm. I also began to realize that the wall I had erected for my protection also locked in all my pain and darkness, and that I wasn’t allowing the Healer to access any of it so I was stuck with it. Opening the gate allowed Jesus and His light in, but it also let all that pain I had barricaded within begin to pour out. I was overwhelmed. It was hard for me to cling to the Scripture Father had given me that year to go with the dreaded word “change”:

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.“ Isaiah 43:2 NIV

It felt exactly like a flood, and I was certain I would drown. At that time, I was trying to work through it on my own. My counselor had moved, and in my codependency I didn’t want to burden anyone else with my problems. The darkness was so great during this time that I often contemplated suicide, just so the pain would end. I couldn’t seem to stuff it back down. It demanded to finally be acknowledged. I made the choice to go on anti-depressants because I didn’t want to leave my still young child. The pills took the edge off, enough that I could somewhat function, but I was still in a lot of emotional agony, so my acting out increased in an attempt to shove it all back down. That continued for the next few years until Father finally led me to Celebrate Recovery where I learned that I didn’t need to go through it alone, but that the only way I could truly be free of it was to to walk through it.

I could not have imagined back in 2011 all the changes that lay before me. However, change became a little less scary over time. As I learned to accept the things I couldn’t change and sought courage to change what I could (me), and as I learned to stay in the moment, one day at a time, “change” became easier to bear. I’m no longer dealing with it on my own. Besides my sponsor, mentors, and a supportive accountability team, recovery brought another change in my life. I became even closer to my Father. He began to show me what a good and perfect Dad looked like, and I learned I could trust where He led. Psalm 27:10 (LB) says, “Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close.” I came to experience just how true that is. 

That being said, my initial reaction to change on the horizon is still fear. Change isn’t bad, not if I am following my heavenly Dad, but it still means some discomfort. Change fundamentally means that things will be different, whether it be in circumstances, people, or even me. But growth means change, and I want to continue to grow in recovery, in my relationships with God, myself, and others, and in my awareness of my calling. I’ve heard many times that if you pray for patience, God will put you in situations where you get to practice it. I’m finding that to be true about a lot of things. If I want to grow, He is going to allow my faith and my recovery to be stretched so that I can begin to practice, growing organically into this new area. I think back on my son learning to do new things: walking, math, reading (which as a dyslexic was especially difficult for him). Each of those things presented him with a new and often uncomfortable challenge. As his parent, it was my job to support and encourage him to keep practicing, knowing that as he practiced, he would get better until he could do it well. I didn’t berate him every time he failed. I realized he was still learning. When he mastered one thing, the next challenge would come: from walking to running to riding a bike, from addition to multiplication to algebra, from phonics (which he struggled with) to trying multiple new things until we finally figured out he needed to read and hear it at the same time, and the even harder things of life such as learning to heal and trust again after being hurt and abandoned. Father used this picture to show me how He wanted to love and support and encourage me through the scary transitions I’m still making toward growth in this life. He’s my Good Dad, encouraging me to get back up and try again. The question was asked in my Bible study this morning, “What changes, if any, are you sensing the Lord leading you toward?” (Lysa TerKeurst, Good Boundaries and Goodbyes). In pondering that question and feeling a little overwhelmed by the answer, this post is what came out as I was journaling. And this is why I record spiritual markers, “stones of remembrance”, to help me to recall Father’s faithfulness in the past to give me courage and strengthen my faith in the present to take the next step moving into my future … whatever changes it may hold.

Heed the Warning!

/ Nicole Bartell / Leave a comment

One of the earliest things I learned in recovery was the need to FEEL my feelings. I had spent so many years, pushing them down, denying them, even being told that my feelings will lie to me and I shouldn’t listen to them (anyone else get that message from the church?). My first sponsor explained it to me, as she had learned from one of her many mentors, that my feelings are like the instrument panel on my car’s dashboard. If one of them is on, it means there is something wrong, and I need to explore to find out what the problem may be. Perhaps it is something simple. My bright yellow triangle with an exclamation point is currently lit on my Highlander. I’m not particularly worried because I know it is telling me that it is time for an oil change. It prepared me for it the last couple of weeks by reminding me that maintenance would be required soon. It is reliable and constant….every 5000 miles (because I ALWAYS reach that before five months!). But if that light came on suddenly with no preemptive warning, it could mean any number of things are wrong with my car from something as simple as my air filter needing to be replaced to something REALLY serious….thousands of dollars worth of serious. As she explained it to me, to ignore that light and not show curiosity as to the source of what caused it to come on is what we call “denial”. I am, in essence, pretending the light doesn’t matter. And I had learned for many years to do the same with my emotions. I shut them down. I ignored them. I medicated them. Anything to pretend they weren’t there. And most of the time, I was successful…for awhile. Until the dark reaches of the night when insomnia set in, and I found myself all alone with the whispers of my psyche reminding me there was PAIN!!!! “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” Is it any wonder that there are so many who give up the fight in the middle of the night, when it is difficult to quiet the voices with noise or busyness or friends. The nights are long and seemingly endless. That is where most of my suicidal thoughts hit me the hardest when I was deep in depression.

When I was working through my first step study in Celebrate Recovery, I was digging deep into my past and answering the questions about my hurts, my beliefs about myself and about God, my parents, and the “family secret”. My sponsor encouraged me to be as honest as I could, that I would get out of the step study what I was willing to put into it. And she told me about the instrument panel thing. My emotions, she told me, are not lying to me, they are actually telling me the truth about what I believe. Now, I may believe a lie (or a number of them), but my emotions are honest about what I feel about that belief. For me, that was the sense of unworthiness, not being good enough, having to be perfect in order to deserve love and acceptance. I believed that I was a waste of space, and that I couldn’t do anything right. And I hated myself above anything and everyone else. I literally thought I deserved to die. I believed I was unlovable. Because of that anguishing belief, I truly FELT there was no way God could REALLY love me. And that belief was truly soul crushing. I had felt the weight of my father’s emotional abuse, my mother’s neglect and inability to connect with me or protect me. I had experienced bullying and rejection so severe that it just reinforced all those early beliefs, that everyone (including me) would have been better off if I had never been born. That was the “truth” that my emotions were telling me, and that I had wanted to escape from as long as I could remember. Emptiness. Worthlessness.

A funny thing happened as I started actually taking the time to look at these emotions and the beliefs that drove them. I started to bring them to Jesus and let Him look at them. And for the first time, I started asking Him if they were true and really listened to the answer. He assured me that they were not only lies from the pit of hell, but that even if no one else wanted me: HE DID!!! There were so many precious things that He communicated to me during this time that I have shared with only a few, but the main thing I came away from that very first step study with was that I was truly LOVED by God. Not only was I loved, but I was wanted. I was precious to Him. He began to show me all the ways He had shown up in my life, in large and small ways, long before I ever knew Him. There were terrible things that were done to me, but He still came in hidden ways that I had not been able to see under the weight of the lies and the blinders my pain had put on me. People He put in my life to be a salve against the cruelties of others. People who were the hands and feet of Jesus long before I acknowledged who He was. As I came to realize and accept this truth in place of the lies, the miraculous happened. I suddenly found myself FREE of depression. I had been depressed at some level or another my entire aware life. But all of that was GONE! I was free of the heavy, heavy weight that had crippled me for so many years. Bob Hamp says that the opposite of depression is not happiness but rather expression. When we DEPRESS what we feel, we are actually turning all those emotions inward as weapons against ourself. Anger at what was done to me was transformed into self loathing. I believed I was the problem. There was something intrinsically wrong with ME. Everything was my fault, and the one person I couldn’t escape was myself. So I suppressed. I dissociated. I denied. But expressing, getting out the feelings, speaking or writing them down, allowed them to come into the light. And The Light, Jesus, was able to shine truth on them.

Just like ignoring that warning light on our dashboard could lead to bigger problems and end up costing us more money than if we just went to get the first thing fixed, so acknowledging our feelings, owning them, bringing them out into the light with a safe person (or people…it just should never be done alone! We need others who see more clearly than we do to be our guides in this) actually begins to fix the core problem that has been spiraling out into other issues that break us down. Our feelings are actually our friends who tell us what is really going on inside, if we are willing to put forth a little courage and see what is going on under the hood.

Celebrate Recovery, even when I don’t feel it

/ Nicole Bartell / Leave a comment

I’ve had enough for today. I am feeling very overwhelmed. Leaning on the knowledge that I go to CR two very specific times…when I want to, and especially when I don’t. I would rather crawl into my bed, pull the covers over my head, and stay there the rest of the day. Maybe sleep until a new day dawns. But instead, I will take a shower. I will brush my teeth. I will get dressed and drive across town where I will rehearse with the praise team. I will sing to my Father because I know He loves me even when I struggle to feel it (thank you, Lauren Daigle, for putting that into a song). I will rest in knowing I am not alone, and I am with people who understand, maybe even some who feel the same. I don’t feel it, but I am doing it anyway.

No More Mask

/ Nicole Bartell / 2 Comments

A few years ago, I was drowning in depression.  I can’t count the number of times I considered taking my own life which only compounded the depression because of the shame that, as a Christian, I should not even consider that, right?  But in that dark hole, all I could think was that I wanted the visceral pain I felt to stop.  I wanted my heart to stop hurting.  All I could see was the pain.  I could barely function, could barely get out of bed and take care of my family.  I tried to hide from the pain; in reading, in food, in anything that would take my mind off it and distract me for even a moment.  But inevitably, that moment came when I had to take a break from those activities, and there the pain would be again, closer than the breath I was trying to drag into my lungs.  It was a physical vise wrapped around me that I could not shake.  I pulled away from everything.  I stopped going to church because I felt guilty.  I stopped singing because I had no song.  I just wanted it all to end.

Then, I received notice that my sister-in-law had taken her life.  This devastated me.  I knew she was struggling because we had talked about it.  To hear that her despair and loneliness had driven her to such an act shook me to the soul.   Sitting at her memorial, hearing my precious niece express her grief and uncertainty why her love for her mother wasn’t enough to keep her there, I looked to my left and saw my baby boy and knew…I NEVER wanted to put him in that situation.  When we came home, I contacted my doctor and started taking anti-depressants. That was the beginning of my recovery journey.

There is this stigma in the church that if you struggle with depression, or any mental health issue, that you don’t have enough faith. This was part of the shame that kept me out of church. I did not feel free to be able to be open about my struggles, either the pain I felt or the coping mechanisms I had developed over my life to self-medicate. I would walk into church and put on a mask that I was okay, I was a “good” Christian. Until I couldn’t hide it anymore. Then, rather than admit my struggles and ask for help, I hid because I did not want to be judged. I did not want to be weighed in the balance of others’ opinions and found wanting.

Coming to Celebrate Recovery a little over a year ago was so renewing for me. It was hard walking through those doors for the first time, and I was absolutely certain there would be no one there that struggled like I did. What I found was a group of people just like me, struggling with pain and desperate to get out of the bondage to coping strategies that never really worked. I found a safe place where I could be myself; fears, failures, warts, and all; and still be loved, be accepted, be understood and supported, even without my mask. This is what I want for the church as a whole.

So, this is me…taking off the mask…daring to be who I am, discovering who God created me to be, and living it out…one day at a time, one moment at a time.