Video Transcript: The Why of Integration

Welcome to week seven, part one, the why of integration. I'm glad to be back  with you now. I want to tell you something as much as we've talked in the  previous sections about all of these cool things. Integration and the personal  work that we get to do inside is my favorite part of this whole bit. From here on  out week seven through the rest of the course, this is basically like my favorite  thing. So thanks for sticking with me through weeks one for six. Let's go have  some fun now, integration is this big thing, and I want to start with a few quotes  that kind of reset where we're at with depression and anxiety and mental health.  And then we're going to jump into what integration does in the second part of  this week. And then in the third part, we're going to jump in a little bit further into  how it happens. So we're going to start with why, and to start with why, we're  going to start with Elizabeth Wurtzel. That's the thing about depression. A  human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight.  But depression is so insidious and it compounds daily that it's impossible to ever see the end. We see this breakdown, and we've talked about this before, that  this erosion. It's almost like a rock in a river right the water rolls over it and it just  erodes and erodes and erodes and it wears down. And we've talked a little bit  about how mental illness is so hard not just because of what you're going  through, but because you don't know when the end is coming. And with this  process of integration, you get not just one opportunity, but you get repeat  opportunities to do the work of integrating yourself and your faith and your  mental health journey, because it's this continual struggle, and because of that,  it creates the cycle of continually working on yourself and continually growing  and developing. CS Lewis puts it this way, mental pain is less dramatic than  physical pain, but it's more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent  attempt to conceal mental pain increases burden. It was easier to say my tooth  is aching than to say my heart is broken. We'll come back to this quote in just a  moment. I love CS Lewis's one. CS Lewis, he has a lot of wisdom and things to  share. But more than that, his just ability to speak that mental pain is less  dramatic. It's it's not as sudden. It doesn't hit the same way. It doesn't change us the same way. But it doesn't mean it hurts any less. And his way of saying, I'm  going to bring it back one more time. The proven attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden that I have to mask and I have to hide, that I need to make sure that I'm still doing okay. We talked about how long this process can take,  that it can take years and years and years, and if it's taking 10 or 11 years, and  I'm masking that entire time I'm covering up how badly this hurts because I want to be okay for the people around me and my job and my responsibilities, that  just increases the burden. This is getting harder now I don't just have to be  mentally broken. I actually have to go through the extra step of hiding, and it  creates this extra responsibility that I can't carry on top of the responsibilities I  already have. Elizabeth Gilbert is an author, and she says it this way, when  you're lost in the woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you're 

lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've wandered off  the path, and then you find your way back to the trailhead any minute now. Then Night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are. And it's  time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't  even know which direction the sun rises anymore. This is the slow erosion. It  takes you so far away from where you thought you were, you get disoriented.  You don't know where you are. Sally Brampton says killing oneself is anyway a  misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard  struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt  to say with a note of approval, he fought so hard, and they are inclined to think  about his suicide that no one was involved, that somebody. Simply gave up. This is quite wrong. I used to say after Robin Williams that I remember writing about  his death, and I remember saying that it wasn't a bad day that killed Robin  Williams. He died by suicide a number of years ago. It was 10,000 bad days and he couldn't stomach another one. It was the hopelessness, it was the long  onslaught. And it wasn't that he was just defeated by one day. It was that he was defeated by the monotony of all the days running together and hopelessness  that comes with it, knowing that you are just going to have to fight another one  the following day. So what about this integration thing? Why should we be doing  integration? Well, when we started my quiet cave, we actually started a  mentoring program. It ended up not being sustainable because we couldn't train  enough mentors, but we learned an absolute time when we did it. One of the  things that we did was we set up interviews with all of these people who had  mental illness, who were looking to get into a mentoring program. We invited  them in, and they were all over the map. We had people who were literally  homeless drug addicts to CEOs of million dollar corporations. And then on the  faith scale, we had everything from people who were actively agnostic to pastors and local churches. So all over the scale, right? All of these data points, but  what we saw were commonalities, because some of the things that people were  struggling with were just like other people, other things people were struggling  with over and over and over and over again. Now we saw three that kept coming up over and over and over and I want to share those three things we heard over  and over again. The first thing was, I will never be who I was. This was a looking back. This was I was somebody. I did things, I was important, I had  responsibilities. I don't have them anymore. And it was also almost making that  past sent that past person an idol, that person that I was, that that was the life  that I wanted. They had the job, they had the relationships with my wife. They  had the relationships my kids. They did stuff, they volunteered. They were an  elder. They led things. They led Bible studies, whatever it is, right? That was the  person who did stuff, and I'm not that person anymore, and I don't think I ever  get to be that person again. And there's a mourning and a dramatic loss of self  that happens when I never get to have my capacity. The second thing we saw 

was, I'm not good enough anymore. This was a dramatically different question.  The reason was, this was often framed in light of faith, like I'm not good enough  for God anymore. I don't measure up for God anymore. So before we had this  lack of capacity, I can't do it anymore. Now we have this lack of self. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm not good enough for God anymore. Who am I? And this  is a disconnection from who God is this is a power distance that grows, and it's  also a brokenness that grows. And it happened pretty often, because most  people regarded their owner value according to what they could produce or their capacity. So when that capacity necessarily shrunk, all of a sudden, all of these  things that used to make up their identity just fell away because they didn't fit in  their new container. So we're going through not only a loss of capacity and a  mourning period over that, but a loss of self and a mourning over that. The third  thing that happened is we saw people go through and change their relationship  with God. We saw, how could God let me go through this? He can't possibly love me. We even saw people take it a step further. God must actually have malintent towards me. He must not just, not even not love me. He must actively dislike  me. Because why on earth would he let me go through this? Doesn't he know  I've spent my entire life trying to serve Him, and now he's letting me go through  all of this over and over and over. Every single one of the people in our  programs had something like that going on with them. Does God really love me  anymore? Am I really good enough anymore? And who am I? Now that I can't  produce so we have to ask some interesting questions like, What does a mental  health struggle actually cost? And the reason we have to ask that is because it  costs everything. You can see a person completely unraveling their entire world  view around these few questions. I no longer know who I am. I no longer believe in the God that was. I no longer even believe he's good. Who am I? What is  faith? What does this mean? And I'm supposed to deal with all of these things.  On top of having a mental health crisis, that's a terrible thing to have to go  through, isn't it? The other part about this is, when you're dealing with all of  these issues, we've talked about therapists and building support systems and  making sure you're taking care of yourself and doing self care, the problem is  that these aren't the questions you're going to go ask a psychiatrist. You're not  going to ask him, does God really love me because I can't perform like I used  to? He might have an answer for you, but that's definitely not his job description  or her job description. These are actually church questions. They're faith  questions. They're questions about how you define yourself, and those are  about your worldview and your biblical perspective. So where does the church  sit with these things? Because the church clearly has a role. This is something  really important. My life is coming apart. What do I do? And these are the big  questions that only people like only faith has the answers to so we have to start  struggling and working through them and asking, Okay, what is this mean?  Now? Who actually am I? My container is broken. I don't know who I am 

anymore. I don't know what's going on with me. Who have I become? Who is  God now? Because obviously he wasn't the person that I thought he was. Does  he still have good intent towards me, or is there something else going on? I  thought that God wanted to reward me, and I don't know that that's true  anymore. What am I capable of I don't know anymore. For full disclosure, I often go through what I don't know as far as what I'm capable of, and that's a fairly  regular question. So if you have a crisis around that, just know that I've had  crises around that more than a time or two, also with the other two questions.  This was the path that I took in my 20s, when I was going through my mental  health issues, I did not ask these questions, and the reason I did not ask them is because I was a 14 year old kid and I barely had the bandwidth to do anything.  What ended up happening to me is later in my 20s, I ended up reflecting back  and having to ask these questions because I didn't know what was going on with me. Suddenly, I found myself in a position where I was trying to find myself, and  I had all these things to mourn and all of these things to come to grips with, and  I had to start fighting through to figure out what they were. These were big  questions, and I didn't have any of the answers. If you get to go through them  sooner, that's actually a blessing, and this is not a bad thing. These can feel if  this opportunity is not taken advantage of this can feel like a loss of faith, and  oftentimes it is. A lot of the research shows that when people experience mental  health issues, if they're not embraced by the church, they leave, and it's  because they're asking big, hard, massive questions, and if there aren't  answers, if there aren't people who are willing to wade into really hard things  with them. What is the point in saying this isn't a place where I can be safe, this  isn't a place where I can be loved. This isn't a place where I'm ever going to be  enough. I may as well just go. But if the church is a place where people are  embraced and there is space made for them to start asking these really, really  hard questions, then they have the space and the room to begin to integrate the  question of, Am I capable that we started with at this we have defined ourselves. So heavily by our capacity, what we do at work, what we do at home, what we  do in church, what we do on the side, and we've built those containers to say  that I need to keep growing my capacity all the time I become more and more  and more and more until it just shrinks down. Because who you are as an  individual you define yourself by. It's everything that you used to do. It's all of the big things. It used to be this thing and this thing and this until they're until it's  suddenly gone. And it's because most people build their responsibilities around  their capacity, and if we're lucky, we have a little boundary around the outside,  right? We need a little bit of margin, but most of us don't leave much, barely any. In fact, the average person in America is tired and burned out and worn out,  because we haven't left that margin. We've just pushed the envelope as far as it  can go. We have said our capacity is going to be our responsibility. And so we  do that. So we do that at work and with our kids and with our responsibilities 

church and with our whole lives. And then we're trying to figure out how on earth to manage this crazy life around us. And then when an emergency happens,  and it takes a whole lot of that capacity, what do we do then? Because that  capacity, like I said, it shrinks, and suddenly there's no time to do a lot of these  other things. Because now I need to see a psychiatrist and I need to see a  therapist. I need to practice self care, and I can't barely get my responsibilities  done at work, if I can do them at all. And I don't know how I'm going to manage  and I somehow I need to also figure out how to be with my friends and so that I  can decompress because I can't manage my life, and I need a space. And you  see how this can get so out of control, and you can start to feel so small, like it's  hopeless, when you start asking the question, Who am I? Something can  happen because I've built myself around all of these things, around my capacity  and around my growth, and around how I interact, and around my skills and the  way that I'm made. And now I can't do that stuff, and I'm supposed to be a good  Christian, and I know that a good Christian would do all of these things like lead  the Bible study and be the elder and take care of my kids and be a good  husband or wife and and all of these things, and I can't do any of them. I feel like a failure at everything. So who am I now? The phrase we often heard is God is  so disappointed in me. That doesn't reflect God's heart at all, but we heard it  over and over and over again. It was built on this capacity, and I can't meet my  capacity. I can't do what I did, because God expects me to do things the  kingdom doesn't move if I don't move. That we allotted all of the power that God  has, and we said, Help. He put that on our shoulders, and I must carry it. And  finally, God must not love me. He must have malintent towards me. I can't tell  you the number of people who we talked to who believed that if God let them go  through hard things, that was not in God's character, because God didn't let  people suffer like that. He didn't do that. Parents don't do that to their kids, and if God adopts us, why would he do that to his kids. I have to say that's not really  biblical. I see a lot of characters who suffer a lot in the Bible, but it doesn't mean  it's not an expectation, and it doesn't mean it doesn't cause pain. We saw it over and over and over again. That actually isn't the struggle that I had around this.  My struggle with God was I feel like I need to do more, and I need to give myself up, and I need to be a martyr, and I will give all these things away for you, God,  even when you didn't ask me to, like a kid giving away their toys, not because  God asked him to, or a parent asked him to, just because that might make  somebody happy, and instead, they throw away everything of value and don't  value themselves. Pretty sure God wasn't thrilled with me. In that moment. But  when all of these things break, we have opportunities, and those opportunities  look like this, cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean. Wash me and I will be  whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you have  crushed rejoice. We'll leave that here. This is David in Psalm 51 and he's talking  about his own repentance for sleeping with Bathsheba and then killing her 

husband, Uriah the Hittite. And he says, Let the bones you have broken rejoice.  And what happens when you have a bone and it's broken is you have to set it.  And that's not a fun process. It hurts. You have to move it back to where it  belongs, so that it can grow back right. And then you have to cast it and make  sure it can stay there. And in some cases, if the bone grows wrong, you have to  break it, and then you have to reset it. And this is what David is talking about.  God is rebreaking David, and then he needs to regrow. Let the bones you have  broken rejoice, because they are to be set right. Integration is the process by  which we start seeing and believing ourselves the way God sees and believes in us. It's the way that we re encounter God and re encounter ourselves. And it's  precisely because we have these sorts of events. We'll talk a lot more about that next time. We have opportunity, in large part because we break, and God meets  us in that space, and he heals us, as we talked about earlier. So and shalom, he brings us to complete health and healing that we can be exactly who we're  made to be. And this is from Switchfoot, mostly just because I like them,  because your scars shine like dark stars. Yeah, your wounds are where the light  shines through. So let's go there, to the place where we're seeing these broken  prayers where the light shines through. The wound is where the light shines  through. Yeah, the wound is where the light shines through. Your wounds are  not a bad thing. That's the place God wants to heal you, and that's the place you will shine. And in this way, we can talk about how mental illness is actually a gift, because it allows us to break in ways that we didn't want to so that we can work  through the rest of our lives. We'll talk more about that as we get into the what is integration in this next segment.