To Change or Not to Change

Disclosure: This is just my story and how I have processed what I have learned. It is not meant to serve as a diagnosis tool in anyway or a commentary on anyone else’s journey.  If you are experience depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts, please contact a medical professional, certified counselor or call the Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255.  

Being diagnosed with depression and anxiety in November 2017 jarred me.  (You can read more about that here and here.) I didn’t see any glaring problems in my life and I thought what I was experiencing was an outside pressure that needed to be removed.  If I could just pinpoint the issue and remove it, then life would return to normal.  I figured a counselor could help pinpoint that issue faster than I could on my own, so the cost benefit analysis worked.  Pay someone to help me, fix the problem, and move on with life.  Super clean.  Super Tidy.  Super efficient.  

For me, choosing a Christian counselor was a non-negotiable.  I couldn’t talk to someone or receive counsel from someone that wasn’t coming from the same foundation of wisdom and truth in Scripture.  

After the first few weeks of sessions and talking through my diagnosis, fear welled inside me.  Three questions beat against my chest. 

First: How did I get to this point? During our first session, he asked me to talk through the basics of my life, schedules and interactions with others.  To recap in a nutshell, I explained that I coped with life in a steam-roll manner.  The tasks that needed to be accomplished drove dictated my time and often my emotions. Life as a military spouse often left me on my own to juggle all my responsibilities.  Combined with a tendency to over-commit and a determination to keep those commitments, my life often felt like a whirlwind with those closest to me sometimes becoming collateral damage. But why, I asked, was my system all of a sudden breaking down? Why couldn’t I muscle through things anymore? 

He explained that for most people life follows this general flow.  This graph is really rough, but maybe you can get the basic idea…

 In our teens and twenties physical strength and ability is increasing. For most people physical stamina and ability begins to plateau in our thirties and early forties. This trend is obvious with one look at any MLB or NFL roster, with people like Tom Brady being the exception, not the rule.  What is also plateauing is our mental capability.  In our twenties we can eat whatever we want, sleep as little as we want and still seem to keep the plates spinning, but eventually for most people that ability tapers off.  We need sleep and sometimes a bigger belt.  

While physical capability is plateauing or decreasing in our thirties and early forties, our life stress is increasing. Again, this is a generalization, but for most people their thirties and early forties is when their work stress is at its highest.  You are past the entry level job, expectations and responsibilities are higher. The pressure of “whatever I’m going to do professionally with my life, I better hurry up and do it” is real.  Kids are growing and need more of our mental energy and our time with school and sports activities.  Parents are aging and need more of our attention.  Financial pressure increases as things like college tuition (times multiple kids) and retirement race toward us.  

At the intersect of this increase of stress and decrease of physical ability is often a jarring episode of plates beginning to fall.  For some, that may look like a mid-life crisis, while for others it may be a subtler tug of discouragement and frustration.  

My second burning question: Is medication the only way out? I didn’t want to take medication.  It is my goal for my family and I to never take medication for any reason anyway.  In some circumstances medication is an amazing gift of the Lord that can save lives. If my child needed a transplant, I would be thankful for modern medical advances and the medications that would make it possible.  However, sometimes medication simply masks symptoms.  If my back hurts, I can take medicine to relieve the pain temporarily without knowing or addressing what is actually causing the pain in the first place. I honestly didn’t know which situation I faced.  Would medication be a necessity or would it simply mask the symptoms of a deeper problem? 

My counselor explained that sometimes medication is a necessity. Imagine trying to teach math to a kid that is starving.  Because of his physical needs, the child would never be able to learn the math concepts until his physical need for food was met.  He explained that sometimes the chemicals in the brain are so out of balance that medication is needed to bring the levels back to a place where talk therapy can even be beneficial.  Things such as genetics, stress, and abuse can all lead to a chemical imbalance in the brain to varying degrees.  He felt strongly though that even when medication is an appropriate measure, talk therapy is vital to uncovering the true causes of the surface symptoms.  We both felt comfortable with me proceeding with talk therapy without medication and would revisit the topic if needed.  

My third burning question: Am I going to be like this forever?  I wanted to know if this was a season I had to work through or would this be a life-long struggle? This time his answer wasn’t as clear cut.  Remember I wanted this to be tidy – fix the problem and hit eject back to normal life.  He explained that I could be one or the other or both.  His words still echo in my heart today. 

“This isn’t something that is going to get better on its own.  It is going to get worse if you don’t deal with it.  You are feeling some of the effects now on yourself and your family, but left uncheck, the consequences will continue to snowball.” 

In his book, Change or Die, Alan Deutschman asserts that when given the choice, 9 out of 10 people don’t change their lifestyles and behaviors, even when their life depends on it.  My husband and I had discussed this concept years earlier while he was in grad school.  I knew the statistics for change and I was scared. I was scared of what would happen to me if I continued down the path of relating and coping with life that I had so carefully constructed.  More than that, I was scared for my kids.  What if the things I thought were tiny, invisible cracks were actually gaping craters that would color how my kids would view life, their mom and most importantly God. 

I knew I had to change.  I wanted to change.  In that moment it wasn’t even so much for me as it was for my kids. So in that moment I committed to doing whatever I needed to do to change.  I would spend the money, spend the time, wade through the deep emotions I would rather ignore, face sin in my heart that I didn’t want to see, all for a chance at real change.