Radically Open

Transcending Religious Identity in an Age of Anxiety

Shedinger

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894858
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

America stands in the throes of an anxiety epidemic, yet Americans live in one of the most religious countries in the world? Shouldn't people with deep spiritual roots be less vulnerable to emotional suffering? Such an enigma stands at the center of this book, but the enigma turns out to be more apparent than real. The overt religiosity so characteristic of modern American society ironically serves to foster the anxiety epidemic by locking people into a disenchanted secular mindset, leaving them cut off from the deep spiritual resources they so desperately need in the face of mounting anxiety. Based on the author's own journey through the darkness of anxiety in conversation with the psychology of Carl Jung, this book argues that transcending religious identity and submitting to the greater wisdom of the cosmic story holds a powerful key to resolving anxiety and creating a more just and sustainable world. Surprisingly, the Islamic tradition may provide one of the best models for how to accomplish this.

one

A Journey through Darkness

My problems began—or so I thought—late in the fall of 2004. One morning I was observing a colleague as he lectured to a class at Luther College when inexplicably a pall of darkness and doom spread over me and I felt as if I were no longer physically present in the classroom. While I was still intellectually engaged in my colleague’s lecture, I felt at a deep level as if I were on some strange planet and in some kind of immediate danger with no avenue of escape and no clue what it was I even needed to escape from. Once class was over I returned to my office and busied myself with correspondence, grading of papers, and other routine matters of the life of a college professor, all the while trying to ignore the disturbing feelings with the hope they would resolve as spontaneously as they had begun. No such luck!

Returning home after work, I tried to interact with my wife and children while not letting on how uncomfortable I felt, but to no avail. The feelings of dread and doom were too powerful to hide and I had little choice but to share them with my wife, though there was little help she could offer since I had absolutely no clue what was happening. After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke the next morning to find the demons still smiling at me from the foot of the bed. They followed me wherever I went day after day, week after week, with an unrelenting vagueness that left me powerless to know what to do.

Though I continued to function relatively normally during the day, nights were another matter entirely. Without the busyness of daytime activity to distract me, in the darkness and quiet of my bedroom, the demons had free rein to overwhelm me, rendering sleep difficult at best and impossible at worst. It was finally the mounting sleep deprivation that drove me to the doctor’s office, desperate for relief. My doctor ran a battery of tests to make sure nothing was physically wrong, gave me a prescription for the tranquilizer Xanax to help with sleep, and warned me to use it sparingly because of its highly addictive potential. He also informed me that there are physical conditions that can cause feelings of anxiety, some of them quite serious, like liver disease (something else to worry about!).

As I awaited the results of the tests, I experienced firsthand one of the most perverse aspects of anxiety: it makes you hope there is something physically wrong with you! I actually found myself rooting for the blood tests to return positive for some type of physical illness, even a serious one. At least then I would know what was wrong; I could (hopefully) be treated, and the disturbing feelings would go away for good. I was terrified that if the tests were negative and no reason could be discerned for my symptoms, I would never live another day without having to battle an overwhelming sense of dread and doom that profoundly darkened every aspect of my daily experience. Not surprisingly, the tests came back negative. I was fit as a fiddle. Just dealing with a bit of stress, according to my doctor. Negative medical tests normally bring a wonderful sense of relief, but for me this news was nothing short of devastating. Now what do I do?

The Xanax did help some with sleep, but fearing addiction I used it quite sparingly, and it was becoming harder and harder to labor through each day utterly clueless about the cause of my predicament and therefore just as clueless about where to turn for help. After many weeks of torment, I finally broke down at the urging of family and friends and made an appointment with a psychologist. I was desperate for relief and could see no other choice. I obviously needed help. But the psychologist was not as desperate to see me—I couldn’t get an appointment for another four weeks! Interestingly, between the time I made the appointment and the time I was walking into his office for the first session, I had begun to unravel the mystery on my own.

Coming to Terms with the Past

I was in my mid-forties when this descent into darkness began, not an unusual age for a midlife crisis. But I had earlier struggled with anxiety in my late-twenties—though not as severely—and I began to wonder if there might be a connection between these two episodes. I asked myself, what was the cause of my anxiety then, and could it help explain what was happening now? As it turns out these two episodes of anxiety were very much related, and the connection between them proved so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t hit upon it earlier. Not surprisingly, my anxiety was deeply rooted in my formative years as I suspect is the case for many people who struggle emotionally. Unraveling the mystery would require reassessing my life story from the more mature perspective of midlife. What was it about my formative years that was causing me so much trouble now?

Thankfully, I have many happy memories of my childhood. I recall with fondness carefree summers playing sports and other games with my friends, attending family gatherings, and playing chess with my Great Uncle Fred, who always seemed more interested in engaging with me than with other adults. Yet despite these positive memories, I have become acutely aware in more recent years that, happy memories notwithstanding, I am actually the product of a rather dysfunctional family system (who isn’t, I suppose?!). Growing up, I tended to be a shy, cautious child, someone lacking a strong sense of independent identity with little interest in asserting myself. My mother, unfortunately, took on the role of the proverbially overprotective parent, sheltering me from the vagaries of the outside world and doing little to encourage my independence. My sister (four years older) was more adventurous and more willing to assert her independence, which put her in a much more adversarial role with our parents and especially our mother. My father held an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the educational credential of many Fortune 500 CEOs. You might expect, then, that we lived a very comfortable upper-middle-class or even upper-class existence. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite my father’s impressive educational accomplishments, he never rose above the level of a midlevel accounting clerk, and his embarrassment at what he saw as professional failure caused him to withdraw from social relationships, rendering him largely emotionally unavailable to the rest of the family. He slaved away each day at a routine job in the payroll department of his company, earning enough to pay the bills and maintain a lower-middle-class existence, but that was about all. He had no hobbies, no close friends, and little inclination to take me under his wing and be a real father.

As tensions between my parents mounted (my mother craved more interaction with other couples), my sister got married, which allowed her to partially escape the rapidly deteriorating family dynamics. With little emotional support from my father, my mother turned to me—her shy, cautious child—for connection, and our emotional bond grew deeper and deeper. At a time when I should have been spreading my wings and asserting my independence, I was instead becoming increasingly absorbed into my mother’s overprotective shell. Finally, everything came to a head when, during my junior year in high school, my father was forced to take early retirement as his company downsized (he was too young to collect Social Security), and then his aged parents both died within a week of each other. My father fell into a deep, nearly suicidal, depression and had to be hospitalized. With my sister married and out of the house, it was just me and Mom at home, and fearing being abandoned herself, my mother had no intention at this point of encouraging my independence. Fortunately—almost miraculously—my father recovered from his emotional breakdown and returned home in a much better state. But the cards of my own emotional life had already been dealt. By this time I had completely internalized at a deep and largely unconscious level that my mother was my protector. Lacking any strong sense of my own identity, I was convinced I could never live physically or emotionally apart from her. My identity was entirely bound up in hers.

My father’s two-month hospitalization in the psychiatric ward of the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Philadelphia (he had served in World War II) occurred during the fall of my senior year in high school. At a time when I should have been making college plans, I had little idea what I wanted to do with my life, and the thought of going away from home to attend college absolutely terrified me—unless, of course, I could bring my mother along! But it was all a moot point. There was no money to send me to a fancy out-of-state college, so I applied to Temple University. I could get loans to pay the low in-state tuition, and I could live at home and be a commuter student. Perfect! But what to study? I was good at math, science, and mechanical drawing in high school but avoided subjects like English and history. So at a relative’s suggestion, I took up civil engineering. It combined my abilities in math and science, yet was practical enough to perhaps get me a decent job. I enjoyed my college years and did well academically, graduating magna cum laude, but I had the misfortune (or was it good fortune?) of graduating in 1982 into the teeth of a major economic recession. Technology jobs were scarce. So with limited options before me, I put very little effort into finding a good engineering job and instead latched onto a dead-end job at a hospital close to home. Oh, and did I mention? This hospital just happened to be my mother’s place of employment!

I spent my early and mid-twenties happily living at home, working at my dead-end hospital job and hanging out with friends, while showing little inclination to seek employment more consistent with my educational achievements. (Sound familiar? I was my father’s son!) But then things began to change. I met a girl, fell in love, and got engaged. While this was initially a very happy time, six months before the wedding, my first bout with anxiety began. Like the more recent episode, this one also began as a sudden, inexplicable, vague sense of doom and gloom. It is not hard to see in hindsight why this was happening. But at the time I was utterly clueless. I should have been happy, but deep down I knew that getting married meant finally moving out on my own, away from my mother, the one thing I had convinced myself I was incapable of doing. Who wouldn’t develop anxiety facing the thing they are most afraid of? With help and support, I managed the anxiety, got married, and got out on my own. And before I knew it, I was quitting my dead-end job to attend seminary, which led to a graduate program in religious studies back at Temple University where I earned my PhD. Things could not have been going better, and I truly believed I had finally developed a sense of independence and personhood that would allow me to stand on my own with confidence, apart from my mother. The demons and dysfunction of my childhood were finally a thing of the past. Following graduate school, I secured a faculty position at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and there I continue today.

Anxiety 2.0

Now we return to my mid-forties and the second episode of anxiety. As I headed for my first therapy session, I was convinced that this new round of anxiety must be linked to what I had experienced in my twenties. Yet I had been living in Iowa for almost four years, loved my job teaching in a liberal arts college, and was now raising two wonderful children (one of whom we had traveled to China to adopt—the experience of a lifetime). Clearly, I had finally differentiated myself from my mother and was my own person. Or was I? In December 2001, not quite a year and a half after moving to Iowa, my mother died (my father had died in 1996). Though I was sad about my mother’s passing, my life went on pretty much unchanged for the next three years. But this new round of doom and gloom was descending upon me as I approached the third anniversary of her death. It began to dawn on me that I might not have differentiated myself from her as much as I thought. I was now facing the final, inalterable separation from my mother, and I became acutely aware of how truly alone in the world I felt without parents, especially my mother, and how little sense of my own identity I could muster. It felt as if the very sense of myself as a person had gone to the grave with my mother, and the prospect of having to live the rest of my life without her caused sheer terror.

Finally, the four weeks passed and I headed for my first therapy appointment, during which I related my history and my insights about it to my new therapist. I told him I was undergoing a profound identity crisis brought on by a delayed grief reaction to my mother’s death. I’m not sure how kindly he took to a new client providing such a detailed self-diagnosis in a preliminary therapy session. Diagnosing my problem, after all, was his job. Not surprisingly, he was not overly impressed with my analysis. He informed me that things like identity crises and midlife crises were not DSM categories and that my problem needed to fit some standard mental health category in order for my insurance to help pay for the therapy.1 Besides, he thought I knew very well who I was, though he did admit to being somewhat perplexed by my symptoms. His approach to mental health was what is called these days behavioral medicine, meaning his primary goal was to try to reduce the severity of my symptoms and help me feel better. It quickly became apparent that he had little interest in helping me explore the deeper meaning of my mother’s death and the profound identity questions it had raised for me, though this latter approach seemed to me like it would have been more helpful. I did not simply want to feel better; I wanted to be better. Though rather perplexed by my situation, my therapist did admit to having a real professional curiosity about it and had a professional interest in working with me to try to sort it out. Great! I was going to be his research project. This all felt a bit patronizing, but I shouldn’t be too hard on him. I really did like my therapist as a person. It’s just that he was working from a particular philosophical perspective about the causes of mental illness, a perspective that I do not share and that I will critique as a significant part of the argument of this book.

After a number of sessions, when it became clear that he did not have the answers I was seeking, I ended the relationship and continued to go it alone for awhile. I was convinced I knew what the problem was even though I did not know in any concrete way how to solve it (short of resurrecting my mother!). The entire emotional terrain of my life had been permanently altered by her death, and I had no clue how to live within this new reality, being without any strong sense of an independent identity of my own. Not surprisingly, over the next several months, as I allowed myself to open up fully to the significance of my mother’s death, I spiraled down into a deep, dark pit of anxiety and depression that nearly disabled me (following in my father’s footsteps again!).

I developed an acute case of agoraphobia, leaving the house only to walk to campus to teach my classes, and even then I frequently developed acute anxiety attacks while standing in front of the class (how I ever kept it hidden from the students, I’ll never know!). At home I fell into repeated bouts of intense crying that scared my wife and young children. Twice I registered to attend a scholarly conference in another city only to back out at the last minute, terrified to venture beyond the boundaries of my home and the Luther College campus. One summer, our family drove east toward Pennsylvania to attend a long-anticipated family reunion (anticipated, that is, by my wife since the reunion was with her family!). We drove as far as Rockford, Illinois, where we stopped for the night, but my anxiety became so acute during that night that I was unable to continue the trip and we were forced to turn back and miss the reunion. My life and the lives of those around me became increasingly dictated by my deteriorating emotional state.

Anxiety is often described by mental health professionals as a generalized sense of fear or dread that is not attached to any particular event that would be expected to generate a fear response (like being attacked by a lion). Depression is often described as a feeling of sadness and a loss of interest in pleasurable activities that occurs on most days for at least two weeks. But as anyone who has suffered from major anxiety or depression knows, describing these conditions as feelings of fear and sadness is like calling the Mona Lisa just another painting. There is nothing in the normal range of human emotional experience that is at all analogous to the subjective experience of a major anxiety disorder. I cannot adequately describe what I was feeling because there simply are no words to describe it. Our language is tied to our normal range of experience, so we literally do not have the language to accurately describe such a heterogeneous experience in a way that someone who has not shared it can fully understand. The well-known writer and education guru Parker Palmer has written that he finds his own struggles with depression “difficult to speak about because the experience is so unspeakable.”2 So it is with my anxiety. I couldn’t believe it was even possible to feel the things that I felt, and it is utterly impossible to describe it adequately in language that can fully convey my subjective experience. But I will nevertheless do my best.

One of the more pernicious aspects of anxiety is that you begin to fear things that have nothing to do with the underlying cause of the anxiety. Your life becomes consumed by fear, and you begin fearing the fear itself. In my case, I developed an obsessive fear of committing suicide. Now, I did not want to commit suicide, mind you, but anxiety made me feel so out of control that I was afraid some impulse would come over me, forcing me to harm myself against my will. This obsession with suicide is not nearly so irrational as it may sound. Many times, people develop anxiety in response to some particular aspect of their lives. They experience feelings of anxiety when they are in the fear-producing situation (like a problem at work, for example), but they can relieve the anxiety at least temporarily by removing themselves from the situation stimulating their anxiety. For me, unfortunately, it was the entire context of my life that was making me anxious. At a deep emotional level, I simply could not bear to be in the world without my mother, but of course the only escape from life is death. There is no third alternative. Predictably, then, I began having impulsive thoughts about trying to escape my anxiet...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Journey through Darkness
• Chapter 2: Religious Identity in a Secular World
• Chapter 3: Jung and the Failure of Religious Identity
• Chapter 4: Islam and the Transcendence of Religious Identity
• Chapter 5: Living a Radically Open Life
• Bibliography