Reaching Out Amidst OCD and Depression: Tuesday Lenten Reflection I

I have comorbid depression and obssessive compulsive disorder. I write this, not as a bid for particular sympathy – everyone has crosses – but to help give an idea of the loneliness that Henri Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out, can speak to. Of course – and very fortunately – most won’t know these experiences with such intensity as I. But I am convinced that the kind of things I experience with these issues is different from the experience of others in degree rather than kind. Even the healthiest of people know times when anxiety and sadness detach them from others – we can expect no less in a fallen world. But I shall leave applicability and analogue to the discernment of each reader. For now, my purpose is to outline my experience with the inner ache that is loneliness, and to explain how Nouwen’s text has helped address that.

But what have these disorders to do with loneliness? Well, to begin, depression is more a matter of feeling internally dead than feeling internally sad – sadness implies the hope of movement – and so one in the depth of the deepest depression has all the affable interpersonal skills of a corpse. Do you know what the corpse most recently buried in your local graveyard is thinking? No, because it is dead. This, if not exactly the ontological reality of the person in depression, is precisely how the depressed person feels, and it is intensely lonely. If some of us seem overly drawn to the darker and more gothic parts of the world, it is at least in part because of the prospect that the medieval dance of death is not in fact categorically morbid, but rather the expression of a hope born of loneliness – that someday perhaps even the death we know so intimately will experience the miracle of being able to join in the community of dance, alive.

This loneliness is further amplified by my experience of OCD, which deals in obsessions and compulsions. Compulsions are what we do to neutralize the anxiety of obssessions, irrational fears that some part of us recognizes as irrational, but that another part cannot stop worrying about. The key to fighting it is finding ways not to give in to the cycle of obsessions and compulsions, whether this involves medication, cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure therapy, or some combination of these – and it is an intensely lonely prospect.

When asked how we are doing or what we are thinking, the answer is complicated. Generally it is easiest to gloss over the problem and not mention it, but even when one does, well-meaning people often try to fix the thing we are irrationally worrying about, or reassure us that it is not something to worry about – seeking reassurance from others can in fact become a neutralizing compulsion. How does one tell someone that it is not the what we are worrying about that matters, but the how – the tortuous cycle – and moreover that for proper care it needs to be acknowledged even while entanglement in it must be avoided? Like others, and sometimes even more than others, we have the deep desire to connect with friends, family, and lovers in the depth of our being – but this is a difficult and often unattempted enterprise when it can be so difficult to tell the difference between one’s inner self and the OCD that fogs it.

Further, relationally inflected OCD often involves deep fear of hurting the people one most loves and values, and so one symptom can be avoidance of and distancing oneself from precisely those people; whereas such behaviour is usually interpreted as an expression of dislike or rejection in typical society, it can be an attempt to protect the ones we love from an imaginary predator in our minds – an explanation perhaps of why I feel some of the most pastorally meaningful texts I have encountered have been written by Joss Whedon. Though the creatures in my head are imaginary, and though part of me knows that, I know experientially the constant fear of slipping that is the essence of vampire love. And it is a lonely dance, one in which we pay so much attention to the potential disasters we may be to others that we forget we are in fact dancing with others – or, when we are reminded, we shut them out as a means of protecting them. And thus is the stage set for my crucial encounter with Nouwen’s Reaching Out last year.

As someone in these situations, I know altogether too well the experience that Nouwen so accurately describes, of an interior loneliness so suffocating that one seeks external distraction from it as much as available energy will allow, and, even in those rare moments when one begins to be at home in oneself, keeps it at arm’s length in a hermetically sealed safe in one’s chest. But what really struck me was Nouwen’s counterintuitive approach to dealing with it. Rather than treating it as a mere symptom to be simply fixed by bravery in reaching out, Nouwen suggests that loneliness is within all of us, and it will not go away this side of heaven – and the attempt to fill it with other things and persons merely ends in misuse of these things, and unhealthy relationships with these people. So Nouwen suggests that, far from fleeing this loneliness, ignoring it, or eliminating it, our first business is walking directly into it and making our homes there. Much as the desert fathers made it their business to fight their own demons and proclivities by proceeding into the desert, so our business must be to proceed into the loneliness of our heart and make it our home – Nouwen describes this as transforming loneliness into solitude, and suggests it not only as a personal matter, but one affecting entire communities. According to Nouwen, the dynamics of relationships depend on an inner solitude kept apart in one’s heart that can then paradoxically be a space of hospitality to share with others. Violating the sanctity of this inner space or letting it remain mere loneliness and running from it merely exacerbates the loneliness rather than transforming it into a positive haven of solitude that allows us to share authentically in community. To cultivate community, we must live within and from out of our own solitude.

No, I of course can’t say that when I encountered this idea of Nouwen’s I was suddenly changed and found a way out of depression and OCD – those unfortunately are companions likely to share my journey for life. What I can say though is that the discovery of this marked me, and I consider awareness of the transformation of loneliness into solitude a particularly effective tool for recognizing and making room for grace within the loneliness that every fibre of my body wants to shun. When I walk through the valley of the shadow of my heart, there are the distracting demons of OCD and the death that is depression. But also, with the desert mothers and fathers and the help of thinkers like Nouwen, I know that this place even with all its terrors belongs to God before it belongs to the devils; and their alienating wiles merely skid across the surface of a loneliness that is but the husk of a deep, abiding solitude blessed by God.

 
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