Explainer

Creed

Mental Health

Trauma

17 May 2023

5 min read

Lamenting the losses in life

There are paths through the thicket of loss that mental illness causes. Rachael Newham explores lament.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A Victorian fisherwoman sits on a beached boat, shoulder slumped.

But O For the Touch of a Vanished Hand, 1888, Walter Langley. The title is taken from the Tennyson poem 'Break Break Break'.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

I am lost. I feel utterly bewildered by my surroundings and my head is beginning to spin under the strip lighting. There are people all around me, but I can’t find my bearings. This place should be familiar, it’s somewhere I’ve been a hundred times before, but I feel the panic rise as I try to find my way.

Before I had known exactly where things were, how to navigate the aisles and reach the things I needed with ease, but in the months I’ve been away, things have changed and I cannot face the thought of finding my way around the new arrangement, so I turn on my heel and leave empty-handed.

I haven’t been away on holiday or gone on a work trip, I’ve been locked inside my own head doing battle with my own mind in the shadowlands of mental illness. Stable now, with the crisis averted, I am trying to rebuild and yet the Co-op rearranging my local store has served as a stark reminder that things have changed in me and around me.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it.

This is the where the conversation about mental health awareness falls silent; the reality of the losses mental illness stacks up like Jenga blocks while you aren’t looking. Serious mental illness doesn’t just take your mind; it takes your ability to enjoy the people you love, the work you find fulfilling, the gloriously mundane school run and the life you once almost took for granted.

And there is no funeral to grieve what you’ve lost, no ‘closure’ as you’re still living it, no five-step process to ‘get over it’. There is simply the loss and the life you’re trying to rebuild.

This loss must be grieved. I would argue that all losses must be grieved if we are to learn to live with them. It is as Michael Rosen’s childhood classic “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” reminds us as the family go on their adventure and encounter the winds and sticky mud: “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, oh no! You’ve got to go through it”.

We simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate.

It’s perhaps something the ancient faiths and traditions understood better than we do where there are rituals for grief; whether it be Jewish communities sitting Shi’vah or the Irish keening their songs of mourning, they acknowledge the enormity of grief and the need for communities to come together to process it.

Where the loss is more personal, we can seem to lose access to the healing found in community traditions. When the loss is because of illnesses still so misunderstood and stigmatised, these processes and traditions can feel even further away, still.

And yet.

There are paths through the thicket of loss. William Worden, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association speaks of four tasks of mourning which include accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to the world afresh and finally finding enduring connection. These tasks were designed with bereavement in mind, but they seem to me to speak to losses in the broadest sense and I have found them to be true in mental illness.

In the Bible we find this prophet Nehemiah, who is tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the Israelites exile in Babylon. They’ve returned home, but home doesn’t look like they imagined to, the place they longed for no longer exists, and they have to accept before they can begin to grieve what has passed. Author Marya Hornbacher writes that

“managing mental illness is mostly about acceptance- of the things you can’t do, and the things you must”

and I see it every day - perhaps you do too - as I take the medication and get the sleep that’s required for some kind of equilibrium to be maintained

Nehemiah grieves and weeps over the city for an estimated four months; but there is no set timescale for such things, we simply have to let it have its way with us until the raw pain has faded into an ache we can tolerate. In the Christian tradition this is called lament; it’s grief directed at God, bringing the pain before him in a way that acknowledges the twin realities of God’s goodness and our grief’s greatness. It is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is the gift of honesty. We do not need to put on our Sunday best for God, but can come in our brokenness and mess knowing that we will not be abandoned to it.

And then we begin to adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in. We test the boundaries of what we can do as anyone in recovery does. There is a slow almost imperceptible move towards more of life; a trip to the local shop much like I did during that disorientating visit to the co-op, a visit from a friend or a phone call answered, long avoided. Nehemiah returns to his work for the King - but even then the King asks him why he’s looking so sad. We need not rush in with fake smiles before grief has finished with us, but be honest with those around us - and with God.

We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church.

The fourth task is that of finding connection. For some it will be found in their friendships, others in their faith communities or peer-led community groups. Whichever way it happens it’s how life grows again around and alongside the loss. Worden I think meant it as a way to continue the connection with a lost loved one, but in the story of Nehemiah we see it as the Israelites first come together to rebuild the wall and then to celebrate it. We cannot lament our losses without finding a community to be a part of; whether that’s your friends, your local community group or your local church, we have to find spaces where we can share ourselves, our stories and know we are not alone. It is perhaps one of our most fundamental needs - it is certainly been mine - to know that I am not alone in my loss and I’m not alone as I survey the wreckage and tentatively begin to rebuild.

Article

Creed

Mental Health

19 February 2024

5 min read

It’s OK to be angry about this, right?

Anger's real gift is the desire for action.

Anthony Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

In a darkened room, a man's angry face is lit as he rests on arms folded tightly around it.

Abhigyan on Unsplash.

When is anger appropriate? When we hear of hideous acts of war in civilian villages, shouldn't we be angry? When I read about a shell exploding in a Gaza hospital, I get angry. I do also when something unjust happens to me, or to someone close to me. Some moments seem to call for anger as the right, and perhaps righteous, response.

But I often don't feel very "right" when I'm angry. In fact, I feel a bit out of control, like some other force or energy has taken over my body and my will. This is especially true when my anger leads me to say or do something that is hurtful to someone else.

Is there such a thing as Christian anger? If so, what does it look like? How can anger be the sort of emotive response that deepens, rather than erodes, my connection to God, myself, and others?

It is the act, and especially the amalgamation of acts into habits, that leads to virtue or to vice.

Anger is a passion

The ambiguity of anger stems from its grouping within what Thomas Aquinas, here as usual following Aristotle, calls "the passions." A passion is a creature's reaction to either the loss of something or to a gaining of something. We are passive, or receptive, to this giving or taking. Sickness is a loss of health; sorrow is a lack of happiness. When on the other hand a friend sees me sick or sad and brings me a bowl of soup, I am receptive not only of the soup but of a passion, or a feeling—a receiving rather than a losing in this case— of pleasure.

The passions are morally neutral: we cannot really be praised or blamed for being sad or pleased any more than for being sick. They often do, though, lead to actions, and this is where virtue and vice come into play.

Love, for instance, is a passion: it identifies a desire within me, received through contact with something or someone beyond me. The act that this gives birth to might be virtuous: kindness or affection toward that something or someone. In these cases, the passion becomes the catalyst to the greatest of the theological virtues, caritas, or charity, translating the Greek word "agape", used by St Paul. It may also, however, be vicious, as when my desire leads to me to attack someone whom I perceive to be standing in its way (think “crimes of passion” here). It is the act, and especially the amalgamation of acts into habits, that leads to virtue or to vice.

Anger originates in such a taking or giving. Something or someone is taken from us, and we get angry: something that I perceive—rightly or wrongly—as belonging to or with me. Or perhaps something inappropriate (which literally means "not my property") is given to me which is not mine to have: a false accusation, say, or a punch to the jaw.

When anger leads me to hurt someone as a result of that loss or addition, I commit sin. But sometimes it also leads to virtue. How does this happen?

But this next act, as any parent or teacher knows, is likely not to be the right one. That's because I will be tempted to simply to act, rather than to seek counsel to ensure that I act prudently.

Prudence is the virtue anger needs

The key to understanding how anger about such losses or gains could lead to a virtuous, or let's say a righteous act, is in another virtue - the one Thomas calls prudence. Prudence is the form wisdom takes on within human practices. Its goal is wise action shaped by the particular context in which it is needed. The prudent person knows how to calibrate the next thing she does so that it leads will to the specific end she is pursuing.

This "know how" in turn comes through counsel. I know the next practical step not because I have memorized formulas in right action, but because I can learn from others, past or present, in ways that will instruct me in the art of finding the next right thing.

Prudence is the key to understanding righteous anger because anger is supremely a passion that demands activity. Anger wants action, as the therapists teach us. It pumps blood through my body, it makes my muscles flex and my jaw clench, and so prepares me for some bold and likely aggressive act.

But this next act, as any parent or teacher knows, is likely not to be the right one. That's because I will be tempted to simply act, rather than to seek counsel to ensure that I act prudently. Most likely I will act out of a desire for revenge: to cause equal or greater harm. What I need in that moment is the outside input that can help me shape my act in accordance with reason. This is how, Thomas says, the neutral passion becomes meritorious passion: anger becomes righteous.

Righteous anger has a gift to give

Anger's desire for action is in the end its real gift. Notice how anger and sorrow are different sorts of passions. In sorrow, what is taken from me is joy. I long for the lost joy and am tempted to become even more passive. Depression takes me to the zenith of inactivity. Even getting out of bed or calling a friend feels like too much action.

Anger though is all about action. Yes, to act too brashly, too quickly, to seek revenge on the one whom I perceive to have harmed me. Or even to harm the nearest one to me regardless of their involvement (the sin of kicking a dog or abusing a child). Still: anger calls me to act, and for all its risky unhinged-ness, this is potentially a good thing.

Disordered, which is to say un-counseled by practical wisdom, anger can lead to harm. In these cases we make matters worse by calling our anger righteous: that self-justifying claim may in fact be blinding us to the real price of our next act.

But well-ordered, anger can draw us into deeper community with God, ourselves, and others. First comes the passion itself: I am angry and primed for action. Then comes the seeking of counsel, so that my desire for action can shift from the immediate to the prudently discerned. Finally comes the act itself, which anger was calling for in the beginning, now tempered by practical counsel. In such moments I am enacting a right and righteous anger.

And on those days when a loss or an unwanted gain is enough to make me wish to withdraw from the world of human activity, anger may be just the gift I need.