Photo of a dried piece of wood in the mountains of Arizona that looked to me like an animal skull. *Trigger warning- suicide ideation mentioned briefly*
The nightmares were unbearable. They plagued me from childhood through my early twenties, but I attributed them to an active imagination and a fearful personality. Even at twenty-four when living back with my parents as I finished my BA in Tucson, AZ, I remember waking up crying enough in my dream one early morning that my dad had come to wake me, worried because I was crying audibly, and he could hear me from the kitchen. In Tucson, I bounced around a few churches, all different denominations, and at one in particular I was exposed to a group therapy experience that a member of the congregation led which attempted to unearth some of our latent childhood experiences. The journey was a novel one for me since I had never tried therapy of any kind, and despite my first exposure to it as the secretary in my first college’s counseling office, I still was under the impression that I was a highly functioning person who didn’t need such a thing. I joined the church therapy group out of curiosity, but was unnerved that even the short few weeks, it shook some of the assumptions I had that all was fine under my joyful, religious, competent exterior. After graduation, I moved back to St. Louis hoping to build my life there long-term. As I found a job, a church, made friends and settled into life, the nightmares increased. What I had accepted as a part of my life suddenly seemed unusual, since most of my friends said they slept peacefully.
While this is not a religious blog, statistics say that roughly 85% of the world’s population follow some sort of religion. Since I hope at some point that this space will be filled with stories from other people, different voices and backgrounds, including religious experiences or not, religion might be mentioned again, because it is a large part of many people’s experiences for good or ill. For now, I can only tell my story and I can’t describe my mental health journey without mentioning the Christian church in America. While some churches contributed to many damaging layers to my thinking and experience, other churches also conversely, ended up helping me to heal from them. The human experience is a wide and dual-edged one, and that duplicity infiltrates all areas of the human systems, such as politics, culture, and religion.
Along with the nightmares, I experienced an increase in other unwanted symptoms such as irrational fears about certain people, suicide ideation, and episodes of dissociation that were becoming noticeable even in social situations. I had many friends at the time who were students at Covenant Theological Seminary. Through them, I learned that the school offered free counseling to people in the St. Louis area, because the counseling students at the school basically needed guinea pigs to practice on to fulfill their graduation requirements. I was extremely poor during my years in St. Louis, and at that point, willing to be anyone’s guinea pig if it meant free answers and freedom from the nightmares. I met with a student for a few months until she graduated. The sessions seemed to help a bit and also unearth some unexpected insights, but it was short-lived since she left the school and over the summer, my old car died and I was unable to afford a new one. This meant I was unable to drive out to the school to meet with a different student, so I looked for options closer to home.
At the time, my church happened to renovate an unused wing of the building for the purposes of offering it to licensed counselors from the St. Louis area to use for their practice. The only stipulation was that they had to be open to each taking on one parishioner from the church as their client for free if the pastor recommended them to counseling. Without knowing this was being set in place, I had gone to my pastor to ask if he knew any free resources in the area for counseling, so he recommended me to one of the counselors who was utilizing this building arrangement. Enter Carol. I told her five years later, when I was leaving St. Louis in 2016 that she had saved my life, but she waved her hand and said I should be proud of myself for the hard work I put in, coming to my sessions by train and bus in snow, sleet, and rain twice a week in the first two years and then once a week for the following three years. She said something along the lines that I had saved myself through seeking out help, reading the books she suggested, facing the hard truths of my life that I had been ignoring for decades, and being willing to work through difficult memories and feelings without fear. I don’t know about the fear part…I remember feeling plenty of fear, which is why I thanked her. I learned so many new tools to navigate existence, boundaries, new ways of thinking. Facing one’s mental health is kind of like an adventure story bordering on a horror movie. Few dare to tread into a dark cave that holds unknown terrors, but it feels a lot safer to have someone who knows what they are doing along on the adventure with you. I think I would be a different person, or a currently unalive person, if I hadn’t had the opportunity to receive free counseling with her for five years. I do not say it lightly.
I am being purposefully vague about the circumstances of my counseling, because that is a story for another day, but over time, the nightmares lessened and my day-life improved as well, because I was no longer working so hard to ignore the trauma simmering under the surface of my life. When the past tries to jump up and bite me, people in my life, like my sister, remind me how far I have come, and it helps me remember that journey in a more powerful light. I have slain proverbial dragons and built the endurance to scale mountains and forge deep rivers. The fear is not entirely gone, but I am not drowning in it either. I am at last enjoying my journey and thankful for the people along the way who encouraged me to more adventure and peace. In the midst of that journey, I had a friend one day, when I was bemoaning that I felt like a burden in my struggles, who sternly reproached me with, “Laelia, if God had meant for you to be self-sufficient, he wouldn’t have created the rest of us.” So as a final thought in this part of my story, if you need help, before giving up, take one step to fight for your life- ask for help.
US Suicide and Crisis help line: 988
FRAGILE HUMAN 