Part II: My Doubting Mind
Making peace with chronic anxiety
This is the second half of last week’s essay on growing up in a “cult-adjacent” offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren – including how this upbringing sowed the seeds for a lifetime of anxiety. If you’ve experienced any countercultural, anti-materialist, and separatist religious group, you’ll likely find a lot here to relate to. Buckle up and get ready to revisit the King James Bible!
Above: The opposite of my experience with the Bible, really.
Like many adults raised in high-control groups, I found myself drawn to specific kinds of work – the kind that often came with a clear hierarchy and a purpose that has little to do with, say, the production of a product. For instance, I joined the military. I then worked in public education before moving on to international education. I worked in think tanks. I worked in academia. Even now, I struggle to transition laterally into the world of business because I find it just so boring to work for the sole purpose of . . . making money from clients.
As you might’ve guessed, I was and remain very comfortable with authoritarian systems. It’s not that I enjoy them, but a system that imposes a great many boundaries is very familiar – and thus comfortable – to someone raised in a strict, rule-based order. I’m a professional wallflower. I’ll follow your rules and fade into my surroundings until you don’t notice me. Then, I’ll do whatever I want (my coworkers in the military were astounded at what I could get away with. What can I say? I had a lot of practice quietly doing what I wanted when everyone was looking elsewhere).
Yet I notice that these tendencies impose natural limits on self-expression. The world of business, it could be said, prioritizes self-expression in ways that are more direct than in the world of education. Deeply hierarchical or authoritarian systems inherently impose order through the negation of individuality and in a manner not unlike that enacted by my parents’ belief system. After all, Christianity locates humanity at the very bottom of a spiritual order.
There’s a funny thing that happens when you’re raised to anchor your value and sense of self to God. Once you stop believing in God as a reference point for your daily life, you’re left with . . . yourself. But who are you?
What might my life have been like if I’d developed a robust sense of self? What if I’d:
followed my heart? This would’ve forced me to think about what I wanted for myself – an innately egocentric act that instils recognition of one’s own desires as an authentic source for direction.
was true to myself? I likely would’ve had higher expectations regarding how others treated me, particularly in a job context.1
believed in myself? Perhaps I would’ve sourced my sense of purpose in my own existence, in my own sense of being, as opposed to what I did for a living.
valued my own understanding of truth? This would have demanded the sort of emotional honesty that cultivates richer relationships.
based decisions on what made me happy? Instead, I carefully weighed my own happiness against competing needs, such as a sense of security or companionship. Guess which one won? Spoiler: Not happiness.
My inability to honour a sense of self was partly due to ignorance, but overwhelmingly out of fear. “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” says Galatians 6:7-8. “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting”. I feared my own self as a source of eternal damnation long before I ever became aware that I could actually rely on my own intuition to navigate life.
Looking back on how I navigated my adult life, I can see that I repeatedly reconstructed the architecture of my childhood. Even when I wasn’t part of a system that monopolized far too much of my personal life, I would create my own elaborate one. As a teenager, I’d drag myself out of bed at 6 AM for some sport practice or, if out of season, simply to work out. I took university coursework all summer long even in high school, often going directly from class to my minimum wage job(s). While doing my doctorate, I would wake up at 4 AM each weekday morning as this was the only time I had to write; I was the primary caregiver for my infant son and the sole breadwinner. Whatever the situation, I had self-discipline and I would maintain that discipline over time. In retrospect, I was continuing to subjugate the flesh. I would’ve felt entirely at home in an order of self-flagellating monks.
It was not until I turned 40 that I gave myself permission to stop working around the clock. To stop pursuing academic degrees and training and job titles. To simply . . . stop. It isn’t surprising that the way I cope with anxiety is through exercise, whether walking or home workouts or group classes or Muay Thai, that can take up a significant part of my day. I tell myself that I do it for me but clearly, I am not yet comfortable with the idea of assigning my value to who I am rather than what I do. I see this, too, among others raised in high-control belief systems that naturally emphasize performance: we may not be able to acquire eternal salvation through our good works, but we know we’ll be judged by them one way or another. What we do is who we are. “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them”, says Matthew 7:20.
I wonder, too, at the specific brand of hellfire and brimstone I was exposed to before I could walk. My father’s favourite verse, the one that predicated his conversion and subsequent pivot from his burgeoning career as a drug dealer (one he’d return to at a much later stage in life), was “he, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy” (Proverbs 29:1). I have not cracked open the pages of a King James Bible in a solid 15 to 20 years, yet I know this verse like the back of my hand. It means that a man who fails repeatedly to heed a warning from God is a man who will be destroyed forever.
My father loved fire and brimstone. It was fear of eternal damnation that pushed him into the arms of faith. When pushed again by his children many years later to explain his descent into various forms of addiction and the trail of white and not-so-white collar crime and inevitable entanglements with the legal system that followed, he offered up another proverb: “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). The truth is my father never left the faith behind; he simply stopped performing it on any level.
When my parents were ex-communicated from the assemblies for their separation and eventual divorce, they were shunned. This meant they lost the community that had encircled them in their youth and brought to their lives a measure of stability neither had ever known. My father lost the partners he’d gone into business with, the networks and connections, the respect for his intellect, and the stature he’d earned in that community. My mother lost the friends and mentors she’d had since she was 18 years old. My siblings and I lost the sum total of the peer group we’d been raised in.
I suspect that, like me, my father spent those years in the assemblies wondering if he was failing to heed a reproof. Had he missed some warning? Was his destruction imminent? I think that rather than wait for his destruction at the hand of God, my father decided to enact it here on Earth. And he did, brilliantly.
For my part, I continued to see every major and minor life decision as an existential one. If I made the wrong choice, failure would swallow me up like Hell or the Lake of Fire. It would be epic, much like when my parents dropped out of the upper middle class into poverty and never recovered. So, I agonized over my choices (what’s a little pain now compared to the agony of the Lake of Fire?). And when I made them, I lived in fear of failure. And to preclude that failure, I worked so hard. I put my nose to the grindstone and endured. Like our spiritual cousins the Mennonites, I laboured for some future payoff that never seemed to come to fruition in this lifetime.
I carry no real grudges against God for imposing the rigidity of His will on my childhood. I believe that when we confront death, everyone should have someone to pray to if only to not feel alone.2 But there it is: the vision of life my faith seeded in me is that without God, we are truly alone. I imagine this view is widely shared among those who have emerged from under the thumb of any religious organization. Is it any wonder, then, that we struggle to trust others, to communicate openly with partners, to act without thinking and thinking and thinking again? Whether consciously or unconsciously, we manifest our most deeply-held beliefs.
My anxiety manifests as a hard knot in my throat. Once it appears, I struggle to speak and I certainly can’t eat. Ironically, it sends me back to childhood when I was voiceless in my too-large family and silent alongside all the other women in the assembly. When my anxiety is severe, it puts me in a state of, shall we say, failure to thrive. Above all, it makes me doubt. I doubt my capacity to assess a situation accurately. I doubt my ability to identify other people’s emotions, let alone my own. I doubt my perspective. I doubt my choices and even my ability to make good ones at all. I doubt the desire that anyone might have to share my life. I doubt my self-worth.
But my therapist reminds me that I have the ability to overcome my anxiety. The magic wand that’ll dissipate this sensation in my throat is actually expressing my emotions as they arise. You might call this simply living in the present rather than the past or the future. I’ve tried it a few times and can confirm that it works. It turns out that telling someone they’ve hurt you when you feel hurt, or that you’re angry when you feel angry, validates the existence of that emotion. In so doing, it sets off a chain of validation: your heart matters. You can believe in yourself. Your emotional state, your happiness, is inherently valuable – not just to yourself, but to others as well. You can trust yourself.
Such an experience is a deeply human one, one that affirms the nature of our shared humanity. We, as humans, have value simply by being, by feeling, by living. And because we share this value, because we share our human experience, we are not alone. We can reach out and connect with someone else through our emotions. We can forge connections with people who are not like us at all. We may differ in our nationalities, our languages, our ethnicities, our cultures, our histories, and our religious persuasions, but a belief in our intrinsic value as humans pushes us to look past those differences and locate the humanity in others. We can reach across space and even time, forging connections through the experiences of other humans.
Perhaps God is there, too – not the God I no longer believe in, but in a Divine thread that connects us all to one another. So pick up the thread, I tell myself as my anxiety rises in the back of my throat. Pick up the thread, ground yourself, and speak.
Read more about indecision and repression at:
I once held a titled position of an intern nature (read: unpaid) at a think tank for over a year. Dear reader, I spent my afternoons there after finishing my full-time job. I worked there during two whole summers. I did not get paid. I did it for the addition to my resume, but this is madness.
I have struggled with how to expose my child to the idea of God minus the miserable theology that accompanies Him. After all, familiarity with Christianity is critical to understanding Western Civilization – its literature, art, architecture, ad nauseam. But I’ll be damned to the Lake of Fire before I let him hear about his evil nature before he’s old enough to think critically about it.
This is the first piece of yours that I read and I just loved it. I relate to so much of what you’ve shared. I hope you’ll consider joining us at SisterWild 🥰. https://open.substack.com/pub/thesisterwild?r=3r4ibm&utm_medium=ios