Accepting the Losses of Mental Affliction
How to deal with the loss of time and other harms caused by mental afflictions
We accept that suffering from some mental affliction will be painful and challenging. Even if you’ve never personally experienced this, you have images of those who suffer curled up, crying, stuck in bed, or with pained expressions on their faces. But what doesn’t get acknowledged enough is the dramatic consequences of suffering from a mental affliction, the toll it takes on relationships, the time it robs you of, the opportunities it takes from you. Yes, it can be terrible to deal with the mental and bodily experience of depression or anxiety or other ailments. But the fallout from those experiences can be a second suffering. And often it adds a layer of depression and despair to whatever suffering you already feel, as you sense that your life is slipping away from you.
I have felt this acutely. Time with my family and friends gone because OCD has hoovered up my attention with fantastical anxieties which seemed realier and more important than reality. Opportunities to write and speak gone because I couldn’t communicate coherently.
When you look back on your losses, you come to realize that there are moments with people you love that you missed because of your affliction, and you will never get those moments back. And you have to live with that. How do you live with that? There were opportunities which you would have enjoyed, and you can never get those back. There were relationships strained, and although you can apologize, you can never give back what they gave to you (more on that here). The losses of mental affliction can be severe. And if we are not careful, even after entering a period of healing, you may slide into despair over what you lost. So how do you keep from losing hope? How can you see God’s hand working through your losses? How can you learn to accept the losses of mental affliction?
