Joe Winter
For the Catholic Herald
The road to negotiate depression and its impact on my life and religious views has been a lifelong one. What follows is a description of my decades-long and continuing evolution, unfolding more each day, as a Christian.
I’ve grown to learn that this journey forms a blueprint that’s also common for other people dealing with depression. I have used what I’ve found to walk several others through this condition – what can be a minefield, or sometimes a figurative field of flowers. In medical terms, it’s called being empathic.
With my own medical condition, Tourette syndrome and associated disorders that include depression, and its many symptoms that can come and go and be unique to an individual, I have often suffered pain where I thought, “If it gets one step worse, it will pass a point and become intolerable.”
I think it is God’s grace that it has never gotten that one bit worse – and that has been crucial to my faith – and understanding and this grace is also present when I get an odd symptom, usually different types of brain pain, that require me to think quickly to come up with a medical solution.
But what becomes of people, including many on the related autism spectrum, who can’t pull a rabbit out of the hat just like that, with something like mind-over-matter or use of their medication? In recent years, I have come to think that God guides them in an own special way, to get them through as well.
Some examples paint the picture. At times when other children were hopeful that a snow day would be coming, I felt a deep sense of despair that my dad, a pipefitter, would be out working in it. An unusual type of strong emotion for a child.
Or when my mom got mad at me, and in response I tore up a drawing I’d done for her, then felt immediate and profound regret and remorse about how she must be feeling. Such things have been common occurrences for me.
Even as a young child, I would lie awake at night giving myself solace in the idea that even though this earth’s life was extremely difficult – insomnia accompanies depression – there was a perfect heaven that awaits us, so buck up.
Does anyone at all suffer from pain that is genuinely intolerable?
When I was a kid, I absolutely loved Christmas. Easter too. After all, it is Christ’s birthday and his Resurrection. I could not get enough of it, and one reason was that I figured even if life here on Earth is overly hard, there is always an afterlife to look toward. Certain activities, scores of them, just had to be done, or it wasn’t a complete holiday. I braved some severe colds in certain years to stare at the top of cathedral spires for comfort.
As I ventured into adulthood, the holiday was still fulfilling, but also became depressing. That’s when I was introduced, in my 40s, to the idea that I have an empathic personality. This was why for so many years, a few key activities and relationships became life-defining.
My life’s quest was now to understand it. I now know why one Christmas I started crying hard as the holiday began to expire, even though there was still joy present. My dad was across the living room, sitting next to the tree, and he just could not understand.
If your mind races like mine, you are probably an empath. Church and even being an usher was something you wanted to do, but still it was hard to sit through.
I’ve always been one of those empaths who could almost break into tears if stepping on a proverbial anthill and pondering the thought of harming any of its residents. Or people. Some days if something bad happened and still would be shrugged off by many others, I’d be consumed anyway.
So many empaths take this to a degree where we relate to others’ pain and seem to feel a bit of the sting ourselves, like that songbird that hits a car’s windshield and still has a slight twitch in its wings in the aftermath. This as a seventh-grader led me to be distraught by the possibility that one was suffering, rushing around in search of an adult to put it out of any leftover misery.
This can drain people emotionally, mentally, spiritually and even physically, and the philosophical ramifications extend to cringing at the idea of anyone’s intolerable pain, to the point where it becomes a frequent source of grief.
I must keep in mind, I need to keep reminding myself, that there needs to be a balance between the needs of the person doing the praying (and our frequent ruminations about discomfort) and the recipients who benefit from the prayer. There always is the danger, for me, of extreme compassion fatigue.
It’s a term that is frequently referred to and thrown around – depression. But what does this actually mean?
More and more, researchers and physicians across many specialties that deal with various parts of the body and brain – and include my own doctors – recognize they must deal with people too empathic for their wellbeing, and the way this manifests itself in different kinds of pain.
Because others too are in pain, and you recognize this more than others, your pain becomes worse in a very real way. And one of the best ways to cope are in religious teachings and extrapolations.
To cut to the chase, I have researched at length, for years, and taken comfort in by using much follow-up theorizing, the ways God has given us built-in sources of medical protection against the most severe pain. This has been my buffer against despair, and spurred my ongoing and lengthy evolution of thought, day by day, year by year, about how he uses his grace to give those with most need some comfort.
