Evangelicalism was harmful to my mental health

Anxiety and depression have been acquaintances of mine for as long as I can remember (I thought of saying “friends of mine,” given we know each other so well, but I don’t like them, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). As a child, I was eaten by worry that I would be kidnapped, murdered, or kidnapped and murdered, that my family would be raptured and I’d be left behind, and also that eternal afterlives were an actual thing and that maybe I’d be spending mine burning in a fiery pit. As an adult, I was eaten by worry that my husband would get sick of me, my pregnancies would end prematurely, my babies would suddenly die in their sleep, and that I would let everyone down and end up abandoned and loathed. I’ve been suicidal at various points over the years, in high school, at uni, after uni, and then following Hazel’s birth; depression seems to be my brain’s nifty go-to for dealing with all major life changes. I think the reasoning goes something like, “Hey! I know what would make all this overwhelmingness heaps easier! NOT EXISTING!”

I’d had a particularly rough time during Hazel’s pregnancy. After two previous miscarriages I worried I’d never be able to have a second child, and a bleed early on (at which point an ultrasound revealed no heartbeat and I was told I’d miscarried again) didn’t help. Like, at all. I was a ball of stress and fear – both rational and irrational – for 9 months. I also worried that my worry would affect my baby. I’d been told that God had a plan for me, but I knew from relatively recent experience that perhaps said plan involved aborting my embryos, so it didn’t fill me with the comfort intended. (I was also told that my three miscarried babies would be waiting for me in heaven, which I found both disturbing and logistically unlikely.) It was all profoundly unfun.

We then left the church soon after Hazel was born, which meant Alan was suddenly jobless and hoping that someone would give him work to allow him to transition out of ministry and back into engineering. While he applied for positions, a kind church friend offered him a temporary job in their family business, so he started heading out to their warehouse early each morning, leaving me to figure out the parenting-two-children thing on my own. Before, Alan had been working and studying part-time, which meant he’d been around for breakfasts and dinner preparation; now, he was gone for 11 hours every day.

At night-time, I found it difficult to sleep, partly because Hazel snored, and partly because when she stopped snoring I’d freak out that she’d stopped breathing at all. I lay in bed worrying that Alan would never find an engineering job, and that God was upset with us for questioning what we’d been taught. I worried that everyone at our church felt disappointed and betrayed by us now, and that it’d been a mistake to walk away rather than continuing to fight for change from within.

During the days, I felt guilty for not spending as much time with Moses as I had before Hazel came along, and for not spending the kind of one-on-one time with Hazel that I’d been able to spend with Mo when he was her age. With newborn Moses I’d napped when he napped; with newborn Hazel, I spent her naps playing Duplo and throwing balls with Mo, repeatedly reminding him to keep quiet so he wouldn’t wake her. I felt exhausted and incompetent, and ragey over simple things like the fact that I could barely fit in a shower without being urgently needed by one of my children. (I have a photo of Moses on a chair in the hallway outside the bathroom door, having found the best possible position to watch me shower and offer repeated reminders that I needed to fetch him more morning tea ASAP.) I belonged to everyone but me.

I’d been taught for years by that point that motherhood was the peak experience for women – it’s what my body had been especially designed by God to do! – and, despite the fact that I’d begun to challenge this idea, I was still disappointed that I wasn’t finding it as fulfilling as churchy men (and women!) had implied I would. I wondered if this was my punishment for pushing back against the church’s teaching on gender roles; if I could just believe it, everything would feel so much easier for me. Why couldn’t I just believe?!

As time went by, I grew increasingly critical of myself. I was a terrible mother, I decided. I wasn’t wifing well, either; poor Alan had married a dud. I was letting everyone down. I’d failed. God would be disappointed in me. My family would be better off without me. I found caring full-time for my darling, irrational and noisy children both too much and too little; I was simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. I hated it. I hated myself for hating it. And on and on I went, until my brain piped up and said, “Hey! I know what would make all this overwhelmingness easier!”

from here

Once we’d left the church, we were no longer required to follow any denomination’s rules, and I was finally free to decide what I really, truly believed. My deconstruction had been progressing steadily in the background of my life up to that point, against my will, mostly, but I slowly allowed the process to unravel as it should, rather than fighting against each and every step. I picked up each doctrine that made up the structure of my faith, held it, examined it from every angle, and challenged it. I asked myself, “Does this actually make sense?” and “If you didn’t have to, would you agree with this?”

I found that the gender roles I’d been taught by the church (and Western culture) – specifically, that mothering was the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time and that I should give my everything to serving my husband and kids and making their lives easier – were still influencing and shaming me, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I’d already rejected them. It was exactly like that thing where you sign up for a free month of something and then find out, 4-and-a-half months later, that you didn’t properly cancel your subscription and have been paying approximately $14 per month to a company you never intended to pay any money to at all. I realised I had to decide:

1. Do I keep trying to be the wife/mother the church told me I should be after it looked at my body and placed me on The Woman Track? Do I keep trying to squish myself into this box I’m apparently supposed to fit in, despite the fact that I’m not the right shape for it? As much as I wanted to – for the sake of keeping those in power happy and avoiding all boat-rocking – I couldn’t. I was exhausted and depressed and had completely lost sight of who I was and what I wanted, unsure if I was even allowed to have desires and needs.
2. Do I work harder at tossing rigid gender roles, but keep fighting to transform the church, in the hope that one day it’d finally love me for me, not for the woman it wants to mould me into? While I loved the idea of doing this, I had no energy left for the actual doing of it. Arguing for my worth with people who had zero interest in hearing my views or changing theirs had left me burnt out and hollow.
3. Do I choose me, and rescue myself from this soul-crushing misery? 

I chose #3. I told Alan I couldn’t do the full-time-mothering thing anymore, and that I was desperate to know that I mattered in our family, too. At first, I blamed depression, but later, as I let go of the idea that I was somehow supposed to be suited to spending full days with tiny people, I was simply honest: it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t that I was somehow flawed, it was that I was being expected to fulfil a role I’d never wanted in the first place, handed me by men who interpreted the Bible in a way that (coincidentally?) meant they’d never have to clean the bathroom. I told Alan what I needed, which was for him to work four days a week instead of five, so that I’d have some time to study that wasn’t dictated by Hazel’s naps or Mo’s preschool days. I enrolled in my psychology degree. I began to learn and grow and prioritise myself. In the process, I found me again. Alan and the kids demonstrated that they were both able and willing to make room for me in the same way I had for them. 

Mothering and identity and depression and finally chucking out gender roles influenced and were influenced by my deconstruction work. I made some surprising discoveries as I sorted through and examined every piece of my faith; for a start, I’d never realised I had core values – I’d always pointed to the Bible whenever I had to justify the reasons I felt however I did about a particular issue – but here they were, trapped under some religiony bricks. I found that integrity and honesty were hugely important to me, and that both had been hidden over the years I’d spent gaslighting myself and hoping to eventually stop wrestling with doctrines that felt uncomfortable and wrong to me, and simply accept and believe them all. Authenticity was another key value of mine with which I’d lost touch whilst attempting to (out)perform the role of Good Christian Woman™. I’d ignored these as I tried to live up to standards set by others, killing little pieces of myself each time. I was excited to finally listen to and be driven by these values – values that energised and impassioned me – rather than overriding them repeatedly with Bible passages, sermon notes, and thoughts like, “You can’t think that!” and “*gasp* That’s not allowed!” 

Along with my values, I found my body in the deconstructing process, which was the most shocking and wonderful discovery of it all. She’d been stuffed behind stacks of dogma-blocks, back when I was confused about what to do with her, and angry with the limitations imposed on her by evangelical Christianity. It had felt protective to detach from my body, splitting myself in two and spending most of my time hanging out in my head, ignoring, as far as possible, the rest of me. My brain/mind was safe and trustworthy, because it could be used to read and understand and think about theology. My body, on the other hand, was neither safe nor trustworthy. A (Christian) man had helped himself to my body when I was still a child, after which my body felt like an unsafe place to live. My body hadn’t been strong enough to ward off anxiety and depression each time they’d swung by. My body had meant I’d been set on a path I’d never wanted, and it had allowed others to dismiss my point of view. My body was the reason it was assumed that I’d be taking on the bulk of parenting and housework, and also the reason I had to argue so hard for every. single. tiny. step. towards equality at home and church. I’d felt so disappointed in her, so angry with her, so unsure of her. 

In what would turn out to be perfect timing for this series, Hazel came home from school last week singing a ditty her class had been taught called Boss of my Own Body by Teeny Tiny Stevies (I’ve added the video below. YOU’RE SO WELCOME). It’s a cute song that teaches kids about consent, and listening to/watching Hazel’s enthusiastic, girl-power renditions makes my heart soar. The first time she sang it to us, I thought of a Christian song, called Jesus is the Boss, that we used to sing with toddler-Moses, which was similar in that it was aimed at kids and talked about bodies, but different in every other way. In the Christian world we’d inhabited, I was not the boss of my own body; Jesus was the boss. If he said walk, I was expected to walk. If he said sing, I should sing. Autonomy – the goal of the Teeny Tiny Stevies song – is wrong, according to this worldview; your body doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God. And guess who was the best at explaining what God really wanted? Men! (Who did my body belong to?!)

Boss of My Own Body by Teeny Tiny Stevies

Spending my life in churches influenced by John Calvin’s pessimistic view of the world had also given me plenty of time to soak up the message that I was “totally depraved,” meaning that fundamentally, nothing about me was good or kind or helpful or sweet. My gut feelings, my sadness, my frustration, my worry: all of these were extremely suss. In this world, my discomfort over hierarchies was probably not really about a deep-seated desire for equality, it was really an example of my sinful desire to rule over men. My disappointment over the way women and LGBTQI+ people were treated by my churches was probably actually an evil refusal to submit to God’s Word. And my boobs definitely weren’t okay – those two were no more than stumbling blocks for poor Christian dudes.

Reclaiming and apologising to and reconnecting with my body was by far and away the most healing part of deconstructing. I became better at listening to her and saying yes to the things that felt right and good (e.g., talking honestly with Alan about how I was feeling, going to yoga), and no to the things that made me feel uncomfortable or upset (e.g., attending church, arguing with men over whether my gifts should matter more than the fact I had a vagina). I learned to regularly check in with my body and make my decisions based on the messages she was sending me about particular people or books or situations or chocolate bars. This part of the process proved to be more beneficial for my mental health than any of the drugs I’d been taking to help me feel more inclined to choose life over death.

Finding my body during deconstruction did wonders for my mental wellbeing, as did culling Calvin’s idea that I was rotten to the core and worthless in God’s eyes (my depression had all too readily jumped on board with this doctrine). I binned the idea that anything and everything good I did should be attributed to God, not to me, because I was nothing without Him. I began to notice this lack of self-esteem and self-efficacy in other Christians, growing increasingly frustrated with their decisions to “trust in God” and “pray about things,” waiting, waiting, waiting for divine intervention rather than making obvious and necessary decisions and changes for themselves. It angered me that this inaction was framed as a sign of righteousness rather than enabling or mental illness.

I also started to pay attention to how little credit the Christians I knew were able to take (or give) for any strengths or talents they (or others) possessed. In 2017, for example, I picked up a few relatives from Sydney airport and then headed to Canberra for a short family holiday at Floriade. My grandmother, who’d spent the drive down chilling in the passenger seat beside me, clapped her hands upon our arrival at the Airbnb, exclaiming, “Praise the Lord for getting us here safely!” It was clearly my driving skills, alertness, and road-rule-following (and those of the other drivers with whom we’d shared the motorway) that had delivered my grandmother to her destination in one piece, but somehow it was the Lord who got all the glory. (I suspect this is how many family cooks feel at dinnertime or special gatherings, when someone suggests we all thank God for the food in front of us, meals that have taken an actual person hours to plan and shop for and then prepare. But sure, let’s thank God for all this food. We should, I suppose, be grateful that God chose us to provide for and not, say, the 3.1 million children who will die of malnourishment this year.)

Contrary to what I’d been taught and the repeated apologies I’d been offering to God for a decade by that point, I realised that the things I thought and did weren’t all that bad. My deepest desires weren’t towards selfishness or cruelty or pettiness; it wasn’t difficult for me to see and want to choose what was supportive and self-sacrificing in an effort to make others happy (I’d literally almost killed myself doing this for my children). I had work to do, but I wasn’t totally depraved, or even quite depraved – I was a thoroughly okay person! I was free, finally, not only to be myself, but to like myself. A lot. 

Deconstruction allowed me to break up with both my psychiatrist and my antidepressants halfway through last year. (I miss the psychiatrist. I don’t miss the meds.) The freedom and wholeness I now feel are both entirely new and entirely wonderful.