Rachel was a bundle of nerves. She could not sit still for long. She would often pace the floor. She tossed and turned in bed at night, unable to sleep. Her family and friends wondered what was wrong with her. More and more, she would, for no apparent reason, suddenly break off a conversation, turn away as if angry, and refuse to say anything more to them.
She had gone to her physician because she was nervous and jittery. After a thorough examination the doctor assured her that her nervous system was all right, and that there was nothing physically wrong with her. He said some problem must be troubling her.
And so, at the advice of her physician, she came to our clinic for counseling. Knowing her history of “nervousness” from the referral, I proceeded to try and discover the reason.
“Are you experiencing any difficulties?”
Rachel was quite surprised. “That’s what my doctor asked me.”
“Are you?”
“No, I don’t have any problems.”
“How are you getting along with your husband?”
“Oh, fine,” she replied.
“Any problem with the children?”
“No.”
“Or with your parents?”
“No.”
“In-laws?”
“Neighbors?”
“No.”
We were having a fast-moving conversation. She was answering my questions promptly—too promptly—without even giving them a passing thought. It is not unusual for a reluctant client to respond this way.
“Are you here because you wanted to come?” I asked.
“Frankly, no,” she said, “I’m here because my physician insisted. To be honest with you, I’m disgusted to be here. What can talking to you possibly do for my nerves? Does my physician think I’m a mental case?”
She answered my last question with a lot of emotion and more information than her previous terse replies. There was a lively person under that indifferent front after all.
“You must have an ideal life,” I ventured.
“Well, no,” she replied, smiling faintly. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
“Then what about it is not ideal?”
She thought for a few seconds, then volunteered: “Well, I’d be a little happier if my husband were more considerate.”
I encouraged her to be specific.
“To be truthful, there are a number of things he does that put a damper on the happiness of our home,” she said. She went on to explain that her marriage had not turned out just the way she thought it would. In fact, she said, there were many ways her husband failed to measure up.
“If his friends only knew the way he treats me!” By her tone and choice of words she was implying a selfish, heartless brute of a man.
“In what ways is he inconsiderate?” I asked.
She did not reply and was silent for nearly two minutes. Finally she said, “I can’t seem to think of anything specific right now.”
I asked her to think awhile longer. I knew it wasn’t necessary to talk just to fill a gap in our conversation. She sat quietly for several minutes. Eventually she spoke.
“I’m a little embarrassed—oh, it’s not anything I should bring up. I mean it’s kind of small, but anyway, you asked me to be specific, so I’ll tell you what comes to my mind.
“It started early in our marriage. You see we have a toothbrush holder in the bathroom. I’m left-handed so I’ve always liked to put my toothbrush in the slot farthest to the left. He’s right-handed, and he knows I’m used to that slot. But time after time, where do I find his toothbrush? In my slot!”
These are the kinds of things we hear cause issues in relationships, but we never quite believe it. She really was frustrated over this simple thing; and it was a very real frustration.
She apologized again for bringing up such a trivial thing but said it did remind her of something else.
“It’s the sink in our bathroom. Do you think he’ll wipe it out when he’s through shaving? Never! And the towels—when I ask him to put clean ones out, he hangs them on the racks with a horizontal fold instead of a vertical.” And that, she indicated, was enough to upset anybody.
There was more. Her father had always gone down to the kitchen before the rest of the family and had the coffee ready when the family started their day. But not her husband. He never got near the coffee maker.
She continued. “I try and try to get him to match his tie with his shirt, but he goes to work looking like a rainbow if I don’t see him before he leaves the house.”
At the start she had presented her husband as an awful individual. But like many people who describe their antagonists in broad, accusing terms, she could come up with no more serious indictments than these when asked to be specific.
Often a person seeking counsel will describe a spouse as someone against whom the counselor should be protected by a bodyguard. But when the spouse turns up for an interview, he proves to be quite a gentleman (or lady)—and with some complaints of his (or her) own. This was the case with Rachel’s husband, Paul.
“She complains when I raise the bedroom window a half inch,” he said one day when it was his turn to speak. He also liked to watch the football game on television, but she always chose that time to talk to him.
“I’m not against talking with her,” he said, “but why on earth can’t she wait until the game is over?”
Her answer? “If he loved me, he’d put me ahead of his dumb ball game.” She believed that if he’d just stop his irritating ways there would be no problem between them. I asked him why he didn’t.
“Because she won’t change the ways she annoys me,” he said.
They were caught in a vicious circle, a pattern that had developed in their marriage because of the habits each had brought into it. Who would link a misplaced toothbrush to nervousness? Yet, add the dirty sink, and the towels, and the coffee, and the mismatched necktie, and the windows, and the television sports, and you have battlegrounds in the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, and living room, as well as at the front door. For most couples you can add on minor eruptions centering on the church, the neighbor’s children, and the checkout clerk at the grocery store.
Some irritants are more exasperating than others. Take the skirmish over the football game on television. He knows she’ll try to distract him the minute he turns on the game, so he is tempted to delay going home and to ask himself where else he can watch television. She thinks to herself, Oh brother! It’s almost time for him to come home and turn on that annoying game.
Even before Paul and Rachel see each other at the end of the day, they are already sparring (and no one has yet fought a battle without raising a host of emotions). They brought this pattern of behavior into their marriage. The slightest issue becomes a debate. To lose a decision is considered a bitter defeat. To win a decision is sweet victory. But in victory there is always a loser and losing is an irritant.
The tiniest loss, even if it is a minor issue, can be extremely frustrating. A speck in your eye is not a serious problem, but it is so annoying that it takes all your attention until it is removed. A grain of sand is nothing, but put enough grains together and you have a ton of sand. So it is with one’s response to conflict. Each aggravation becomes far heavier than its own weight. As one piles on another, they blend into a vague blob, and all the irritable person is aware of is “nervousness.”
When our emotional wellness is out of kilter, we tend to be a nuisance to the people around us.
Rachel consulted her doctor because she was a bundle of nerves. He sent her to me because he believed that her “nerves” were caused by an emotional rather than a physical problem. In other words, she was not adjusting well to people or events in her life. This is commonly called a “mental health” problem.
George Preston, in his classic book, The Substance of Mental Health, said the essential quality for mental health is to live (1) within the limits of one’s natural abilities, (2) with other human beings, (3) happily, (4) productively, and (5) without being a nuisance.1 I love this last statement! “Without being a nuisance.” How many people do you know that can go about their daily lives “without being a nuisance”? When our emotional wellness is out of kilter, we tend to be a nuisance to the people around us.
Identifying What Is Really Wrong
As we interact with friends, coworkers, spouses, and children, what is truly inside of us will be revealed. If we are constantly irritable, we may eventually experience body aches and pains, tiredness, nervousness, and/or more serious symptoms. The mind can become weighed down by burdens, real or perceived. The irritants may be small, vague ones or big, identifiable ones. A person may say, “I’m anxious,” “I’m angry,” or “I’m exhausted.” Maybe they can’t tell you any particular thing that is bothering them. But they know something is, and once in a while one particular sore will fester until it breaks open.
This uneasiness typifies our society today. The crime rate continues to grow; juvenile delinquency continues to increase; racial violence and dangerous international tension continue to escalate. Many hospital beds are said to be occupied by persons having mental or emotional difficulties. Record rates are being recorded for divorce, drug addiction, and alcoholism. But these are only bulges of a weak inner tube.
Millions of people are suffering from chronic worry, hypertension, prejudice, guilt, hatred, fear, and the fear of failure. In their struggle for inner peace, many turn to the quick solution of alcohol and drugs.
An alarming number of people suffering from these ailments are professing Christians. Unfortunately, the person who knows Christ as Savior is not immune to mental or emotional problems, they are as susceptible to tension and anxiety as the non-Christian working beside them at the office or living next door.
If you are struggling with a difficulty, you are not alone. You are not the only one facing a problem, even though you share your inner conflict with no one.
“My problem is so simple,” you think. “How can I talk about it? I can see that I’m mad at my wife. But when I think of the inconsequential things over which I’m mad, I get confused. Why should I lose my temper over an appointment she forgot to tell me about, or why would I leave the house upset because she decided to paint the dining room red even though I told her I wanted it to stay the same? But the way I am—my reactions to life at home, at work, at church, and with my relatives—causes me to lose sleep at night, to lash out at the children, to say things I don’t mean. I think thoughts that surprise me. I tell myself, ‘This can’t be me.’”
You can see the vague outline of your problem, but you cannot figure it out. You look at a skyscraper and may get the impression that some magician has had a hand in putting together this magnificent, massive structure. But if you had seen it being erected, you would know it was built of relatively small pieces of material—a length of steel, a pane of glass, a copper pipe, a bolt, a weld, a switch, the particles that make up concrete. The problems you face are constructed quite similarly.
While living in the shadow of your problems, you look on them as massive, unexplainable. As you dismantle them to see what they’re made of, you’re a little embarrassed to find their components are so simple and ordinary. So you do nothing. Nothing, that is, until the problems overwhelm you. Then those who know you say, “He blew up,” or “She’s upset,” or “He’s out of control.”
How widespread is emotional disturbance? Statistics tell us that for every person admitted to a mental health facility, at least a dozen are outside, groping in a half-real world.
Many people are sick. Ulcers are eating their stomachs; chronic headaches are driving them to distraction; chest pains have them frightened nearly to death. So not only are they mentally confused, but physically ill. And because they are ill, their conditions are assumed to be in the realm of the medical physician. After all, when people can’t sleep because of the pain in their necks or their stomachs won’t hold food, the help of medicine certainly seems called for.
It is important that we address our emotional ills in order to be healed of our physical ills.
Ours is the age of anxiety, the age of the tranquilizer. However, it is important to embrace the fact that it is possible that our physical ills are the result of some type of emotional ill. In the late 1950s W.C. Alvarez, of the Mayo Clinic, said,
“Even after 53 years of practicing medicine, I still keep marveling at the fact that so many people whose discomforts are nervous in origin have failed to see any connection between their physical ills and the severe emotional crises that they have been going through. A thousand times when I have drawn from some nervously ill patient his story of sorrow, strain, great worry, or paralyzing indecision, he has looked at me puzzled and asked “Could it be that?” Like so many people he has never realized that many illnesses—even severe ones—are produced by painful emotion.”2
A lot has changed since the 1950s in mental health care, treatment, and exposure, but one thing has not changed: the relationship of our physical health to our mental health. It is important that we address our emotional ills in order to be healed of our physical ills.
Orval Mowrer, atheistic psychologist and professor of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Illinois, one-time professor at Harvard, one-time professor at Yale, and one-time President of the American Psychologist Association, wrote,
“The only way to resolve the paradox of self-hatred and self-punishment is to help the individual see he deserves something better. As long as he remains hard of heart and unrepentant, his conscience will hold him in the viselike grip of neurotic rigidity and suffering. But if at length the individual confesses his past stupidities and errors and makes what poor attempts he can at restitution, then the conscience will forgive and relax its stern hold and the individual will be free, “well.” But here too we encounter difficulty, because human beings do not change radically until they first acknowledge their sins, but it is hard for one to make such an acknowledgment unless he has “already changed.” In other words, the full realization of deep worthlessness is a severe ego “insult,” and one must have a new source of strength to endure it.”3
This is a purely secular way to discuss the problem and it is interesting that several pages later in the same article, Mowrer says this,
“For several decades we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and we have acclaimed our freedom from it as epic making. But at length we have discovered to be free in this sense to have the excuse of being sick rather than being sinful is to also court the danger of becoming lost. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity. And with neurotics themselves, asking, “Who am I? What is my deepest destiny? And what does living really mean?”4
Mowrer is calling our attention to one of the great barriers to finding relief from anxiety and guilt—a sense of worthlessness that is indeed a severe ego insult. We tend to shrink away from the truth about ourselves. We do not want to acknowledge our sin. Mowrer clearly describes our tendency to wander away from sensible and righteous behavior. We all act stupidly and make errors. Dr. Mowrer sees our salvation in squaring our past stupidities and errors with our own consciences by making attempts at restitution. Unfortunately, human relief is not the same as God’s forgiveness, cleansing, and renewal.
God’s Answer
The struggle for peace is just that—a struggle. And it requires that you recognize and deal with the sin that is causing your problem. Acts 3:19 tells us, “Repent of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away. Then times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord.” Paul Tournier, a Christian psychiatrist in Switzerland, says everyone experiences guilt feelings and seeks to escape them by self-justification and repression of conscience. “To tear men from this impossible situation and to make them capable once more of receiving grace, God must therefore first of all awaken within them the repressed guilt.”5
Sometimes, Tournier explains, this “awakening” comes only through severe dealings which are necessary to lead us to the experience of repentance and grace. He writes, “For a man crushed by the consciousness of his guilt, the Bible offers the certainty of pardon and grace.”6
The aim of “operation severity,” Tournier says, “is not the crushing of the sinner but, on the contrary, his salvation. For that, God must pull him out of the vicious circle of his natural attempts at self-justification.”7
The struggle for peace requires that you recognize and deal with the sin that is causing your problem.
The Bible reminds us that “everyone has sinned” (Romans 3:23) and “no one is righteous” (Romans 3:10). The Bible also says our sins are against God. As the psalmist so eloquently said, “Against you, and you alone, have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4). It is your sin that comes between you and God.
This is where the Gospel comes in. The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). To the Ephesians, Paul exclaimed, “Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us” (Ephesians 2:18).
Jesus explained to his disciples, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He also said, “I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends” (Revelation 3:20).
If you sense a stirring in your heart and have never done so, ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins and to come into your life. He will forgive you, and give you access to our heavenly Father. Then, and only then will you be able to ask for God’s supernatural peace.
In coming to terms with yourself, you must consider your relationships to the people and events in your life. Because your mental health is related to your attitudes toward people, it is not a matter primarily for the medical physician. The Bible holds the key to experiencing peace. God’s Word deals with one’s relationships with others, with standards of conduct, with emotions, with the deep issues of life, with the heart of a man before God. The struggle for peace is a spiritual matter, involving your soul or spirit and how you react to the things that come your way. The source of peace involves your relationship to God.
The Bible gives us a picture of a person who draws on God’s strength for their emotional wellness:
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! —Galatians 5:22–23
You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart. —1 Peter 1:22
When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality. —Romans 12:13
Make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose.
—Philippians 2:2
It is time to address the issues in your life and to embrace the life and peace God has for you.
Reflection Questions
- What are some of the stressors in your life that are keeping you from experiencing peace?
- Who are the people in your life that are currently a “nuisance”? If you are honest, when are you a “nuisance” to others?
- What physical symptoms are you currently experiencing that may possibly be from emotional issues?
- What type of response do you have to the idea that some of your feelings and experiences may be because of the sin in your life?
- On a scale of 1-10, how open are you to addressing the real issues in your life?
Take One Action Step
Ask God to open your heart and mind to the changes you need to embrace in your life.