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Can depression wire you for resilience?
'Inflection points' in life that lead to growth/How to seek rest for your brain and body
Tamara Hann
30 May
Reflection
We can choose how we approach life, especially during major inflection points - adolescence, midlife, times of loss or trauma. We can ignore the existential questions, and the booting-up of our spiritual awareness. We can medicate with pharmaceuticals that dull the pain of the questions, or with substances that give us a temporary reprieve - or a synthetic version of the transcendence we long for. Or we can open the door to a reshuffling of meaning, to the foundational, felt awareness that we are loved and held and part of it all.
The difficulty with depression is not that it’s incurable (it isn’t), but that it depends on what you believe. The insidious difficulty with it, of course, is that it affects your perception, so what you believe becomes everything; at the same time, it closes down your openness to other data that would change what you believe.
The way out is usually through humility, which might seem contradictory. It needs humility to consider that the way you’re seeing things is wrong, that you’re not the only one hurting from these things, that others have experienced maybe this very thing in the past, and have moved through it, and that there are answers for your particular situation that work - answers that can be applied to you, as they’ve been applied to many and worked. It requires the loss of the idea that you are alone, unique in all of this, and hopelessly damned, scarred, or unfairly dealt with - the conviction that nothing can fix this/you, and all you can legitimately do is languish in your hopeless state.
I say this in introduction to what the author I quoted above, a psychologist studying depression and spirituality, found when she and her team Dr. Miller and her team investigated what happens to young adults who’ve experienced depression in the past (in this case, major depression). Their ‘discovery’ was that strong spirituality protects against the harshest effects of depression and trauma experiences, and provides a way to use them as catalysts for growth. (Something the religious have always known, but which psychologists have to rediscover, having rejected God as a profession).
Because suffering is unavoidable in this life, how do we prepare ourselves for future periods when it will come to us again? How do we make it ‘okay’?
In a religious sense, we know that the answer is, ”Through the atonement and sanctifying power of Jesus Christ.” What Dr. Miller and her team rediscovered in their investigations adds connections and reasons that I think help make that knowledge more practical. Two major findings from their studies were:
First, those who had strong personal spirituality at age twenty-six (this is the age at which they sought data, partly because young adulthood is a crucial time for an ‘inflection point’ of experiencing deep existential distress) were two and a half times more likely to have been depressed in the past.
Second, those who had strong spirituality by age twenty-six were 75 percent protected against a recurrence of major depression for the next ten years.
And for those who were highly spiritual and had gone through major depression in the past, the protective benefit of spirituality against a recurrence of depression was even higher: a striking 90 percent. These were people at familial risk for depression, who’d grown up in households shrouded in a raincloud of depression. When they experienced painful losses, disappointments, or unwanted experiences in their adolescence and early adulthood, they seemed conditioned for a spiritual response. It was as though their sensitivity to and familiarity with mental suffering enhanced their capacity to marshal a deeper spiritual response to life challenges. High-risk people who built spiritual muscle to respond to suffering were protected against the downward spiral the next time sorrow or disappointment came around, because they had cultivated a spiritual response.
‘Cultivating a spiritual response’ is the difference between spiralling from depression into despair and risky behaviour that’s self-sabotaging or dangerous to others and increased resilience in suffering. Because suffering will come. That spiritual response - relying on spiritual answers to hard questions, and especially faith and trust in God, developed through dedication to spiritual practices - makes that huge difference. This is the oil in the wise person’s lamp; the thing that can’t be shared. And one of the things - a major thing - that leads to it is experiencing such suffering in the first place. Spiritual preparedness - a response based on faith, hope, and discipleship - turns these common crisis points into something transcendent; something protective and growth-enabling.
Isn’t that wonderful?
Suffering pulls spiritual awareness forward, building the spiritual core that prepares us for the next time we face suffering. It appeared that grappling with moments of pain and emptiness actually catalysed spiritual formation….
On Instagram
Regulating your nervous system/seeking rest in God
Psychology is kind of a replacement for religion, but it can be a complement to it, if used carefully. One way to do that is to see it as providing an alternative vocabulary for things we know spiritually. Because our minds are finite and mortal, that's quite helpful.
I’ve been following a lady - Jo Hargreaves - on Instagram who posts under The Faith-Filled Therapist. She takes psychology and mindfulness terms and relates them to the scriptures (Protestant-based). I’ve found the connections she makes insightful and accurate, and am going to share one of those here today.
Here’s the original post, if you want to check it out:
Your nervous system becomes dysregulated when you respond in stress mode - ‘fight, flight, or freeze’. That might happen because it reminds your brain of something you’ve experienced before that was dangerous or stressful, because you’re over-tired, or because your nervous system became stuck in this reponse mode in the past.
There are ways to ‘regulate’ it again, some of which I’ve shared before (remember DANCA?). Doing this deliberately and consistently trains your system to respond differently. The interesting thing that Jo Hargreaves does is connect this to finding rest in God. I made a similar connection when reading The 12-Week Mind Workout recently, where the author used this word - rest - for the result of the ‘soothing’ system, which calms the stress response.
In this post, The Faith-Filled Therapist shows how we find rest to our souls through seeking the peace of Jesus Christ. Of course, doing that is about far more than nervous-system regulation, as she says; but this connection is also very helpful to think about.
Have you experienced this result before? Is it something you’d like to apply for the next time you experience the stress response? Or rather, can you think about seeking the peace of Christ as training your nervous system (in part), thus overcoming the mis-training it might have received in the past?
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