The infallible pill of recovery: Grace

Last time in this series we talked about grace as 'the free and unmerited favour of God.'

This is a surprising idea - not, perhaps what we thought it was. Somehow we all grow up with rather baffling ideas about the uses of religion. The most dominant idea is that religion is 'being good - that religious people are 'good.' This means superior to others, of course. Then, when we discover how inferior most religious people can be, this ruins any hope we might have entertained of developing a spiritual life.

The spiritual life has little in common with such thinking. Spirituality is on the inside - it has little to do with rituals and observations and behaviours on the outside. Our spiritual and emotional lives are the same, for this reason. They both arise from the same core of being:  the emotional foundations of our human life. Spirituality - you may not wish to know this! - is bedded on the rock of emotional suffering. Of our hurts, disappointments, losses, of our mistakes and failures, our inabilities to live the life we always wanted to. There is nothing like facing complete chaos to discover the value of the spiritual in life! We saw this in an earlier blog. We usually find a Spiritual Power of our understanding - which I will call the Source - only through intense pain. Why is this?

A crisis isn't just a crisis, it is also a crossroads. It faces us with major dilemmas - with a variety of paths we might take, but we no longer know which one. Or with the sense of hopelessness that comes with feeling there is no path we can take. So long as we feel 'in charge' of our life direction, we can maintain composure, some sense of being an ok person - one who knows who he or she is. At the crossroads of a crisis, we realise that we are not 'in charge' any more. Anything could happen at any moment, and there's nothing we can do about it! This is a terrifying place to be. Howling winds of anxiety confront us, producing weird physical symptoms we might never have associated with anxiety before. Have you ever experienced 'jelly legs'? Sober, I mean? It is the sudden feeling that there is no strength left in your legs - you cannot stand upright and feel stable and based on the ground. Or you may have suffered hyperventilation - the feeling you are choking, though you are breathing, you are straining every ounce of energy and yet cannot get the oxygen you need into your lungs.

Common symptoms of anxiety are:

- muscle tension

- jaw clenching

- knee or foot jerking

- sighing

- tension headaches

- dry eyes, mouth and throat

- copious sweating

- feeling inexplicably cold

- constipation

- bladder urgency

- sudden increase (or decrease) in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration

- mouth watering (salivation)

- feeling inexplicably warm in a normal temperature

- migraines

- nausea

- vomiting

- diarrhoea

- dizziness

- difficulty concentrating

- mental blanking

- brain fog (can't think)

- jelly legs

Notice that these are all physical - the mind is physical, don't forget, and includes your whole nervous system, which spreads out from the brain down your back and across your body. The reason extremes in either direction occur in this list is that they come from different parts of the nervous system with different functions - some of our systems energise us when we need it, some calm us down. But they all suggest the same source which is anxiety. We now know from detailed neurobiological studies that the human system is founded on balance - what is called 'regulation' in scientific studies. In early infancy, if all goes well, a soothing parent or caregiver helps regulate and understand our emotions at a level we can cope with. If we become too frightened, too angry, too sad - in any way 'over the top' - our caregiver helps us to calm down, with cradling or holding, with soothing words, with touch, with warmth, with her or his calming presence. At the beginning of life, we are not born with this ability to regulate our own emotions. We develop the ability, gradually, with good luck and skilful parenting. Parents with emotional damage themselves or addictions of their own will find this skill much harder to pass on.

Why is balance important to us humans? Why can't we go over the top? Have a good old panic or hysterical attack and run around screaming? Or their opposite, sit in a heap and refuse to move or think at all? The answer is simple - nature has provided us with a system that works for us, in terms of survival. Being unable to regulate our feelings is dangerous - it leads us to all kinds of disastrous behaviour and dangerous situations, which the world outside us can then take advantage of, and does. Children can get away with a fit of unregulated behaviour for a while, but parents know instinctively it is not good for them to become this way regularly, and work out strategies for calming the level of excitement, fear and despair they sense as 'over the top.'

Anxiety is a symptom - Freud called it a signal from the unconscious - that our internal feeling level is approaching the unmanageable, the result of the inability to regulate our emotions beyond a certain point. And we have already made the important point that emotion is at the foundation of the human psyche. Everything we do or fail to do or resist doing or overdo is motivated by feeling, never by thought alone. Our feelings are being stimulated all the time by people, places and things around us. And we can do little about it, short of becoming a hermit! Other motorists annoy us, and we feel anger. Our partner disagrees and we feel 'put down.' Our children misbehave and we feel afraid of what our neighbours or friends will think of us as parents. Our employer makes unreasonable demands and we feel resentful. Life is one long round of having our emotions stimulated by the world outside ourselves.

Here's the rub: events are on the outside, but our feelings are on the inside! We cannot prevent the world outside us from impacting on our feelings. Stuff will happen! People do what they do, and we register it as a feeling. We are not depressed because of a visitation from outer space. Something has happened, or someone has said something or behaved some way that has upset our inner emotional balance. Our beautiful, complex and well-ordered systems will be regularly impacted in this way, and that is not in our control. The capacity to maintain emotional balance - to self-regulate - is therefore critical to a contented life. How do we gain it if we don't have it already?

If you are an alcoholic or any kind of addict, the chances are high you have no or little ability to regulate your emotional life. I know this because researchers have discovered that addiction is a lack of a capacity to regulate. Alcohol is self-medicated regulation. 'I can't do it but what is in the glass will' - thinks the addict. I drink because of depression, I drink because of a disappointment, because of a telling-off from my boss, from my son's uncontrollable behaviour which makes me feel incompetent, I drink to feel happy, to celebrate, to get in the mood for sex, or whatever. These are all 'drinks to feel something.'

In our current culture, we have decided there is 'natural' stuff good for us, and 'chemical' stuff which is unnatural and not good for us. The fact is, human physiology is chemical at the core. When something impacts on us from a source outside us, this produces an emotional response, but the production process of feelings is driven by chemicals manufactured inside us and delivered by our various carrying systems to the place we need them at that moment. All current mood-altering medications replicate this idea, that if we can help to regulate certain feelings by providing the right chemicals in the right amounts at the right place in the brain, we can regulate our feelings with their help.

This may or may not be true of any sufferer from depression or anxiety - I am not qualified to say. I take an objective view of taking medication to aid recovery from anxiety or depression - it can help in the short run as a crisis helper, though should not be used over a prolonged period, and I think most doctors would agree The problem is that after a while the sufferer becomes dependent on the chemical for normal human habits like staying calm when faced with a problem and sleeping well from natural tiredness caused by daily activities. I also know however that alcoholics are in a dangerous position since they are personalities who have had considerable trouble in self-regulation - they have habitually used alcohol for this purpose of coping with painful or difficult feelings. Thus recovery is easier for them if they can improve their handling of emotions without an external regulator such as a pill which may help in the short run, but also bring its own problems with it.

Here is where grace comes in. Grace is better than a pill when emotions are troublesome or over-the-top or too deep in the bottom. So human cultures all over the world have resorted to prayer in crisis or difficulty. It's as natural as breathing to say to yourself, 'God help me,' in a crisis. In recovery, we need to understand that it is not the bad things that happen to us that are our real problems. Our real problems are how we react: our feelings, and the degree to which they make us feel turbulent, in pain, out of control, unhappy, enraged, bitter, resentful, insecure, anxious - and not knowing what to do with them. When difficult feelings overwhelm us, we need a place to go for help which is not a pill or a behaviour that is a direct substitute for alcohol, and therefore likely to make our problems worse in the long run. We need the calming influence of a stable mind which says to us, "Simmer down! It feels awful now but it will get better!" One of the best-known verses of the Bible is Psalm 46 v 10:

Be still and know that I am God

It means: shut up for a minute and listen! When the panic or despair is upon us, we are all inclined to yack without ceasing. Yes, that is another symptom of anxiety - over-talking. Prayer is nothing more complicated than going to the power we have identified as our Source of help with the feelings we have. And allowing them to be displayed! To do this is to be open to the gift of grace: the free and unmerited favour of God.

We need to permit our feelings to exist, otherwise, they cannot be calmed down. You wouldn't go to the doctor with a pain in your leg, and say, 'it's this but you can't look at it! I may tell you what's wrong with it!' (Well, on second thoughts, some people do that! It isn't a wise way to use the doctor.) In counselling, practitioners will sometimes say, 'stay with the feelings.' This is good advice. They mean: 'Don't look for ways to get rid of your feelings. Permit them to happen.'
Here's a useful hint for future emotional situations. You don't have to do anything with your feelings except feel them.  But be careful here that you know what I'm saying. I'm not saying, feeling your rage and hit somebody. I'm saying that hitting somebody is actually an alternative to feeling your rage. We use action to prevent us from feelings we cannot regulate. All you have to do is feel angry and do nothing about it except feel it. 

The real beauty of relying on feeling our feelings is that, unlike any other solution, they pass! Nobody remains furious forever - seldom even for an hour. Nobody remains depressed - outside of a bout of major clinical depression - for a lifetime. Low and high moods are normal and happen to all of us! The intense feeling moderates, sometimes in a few days, hours or even less - it's like the draining away of water from the sink. Water doesn't sit there forever in your sink. It flows down the sink and is gone. If you put a tight plug in, it dries out into the air.  One way or another, the water will go. Likewise, we lose our preoccupation with the painful feeling, whatever it is, and turn to other matters. They build us that way. Nature, the environment, or God (if you will), realised we could not survive otherwise. 

The grace 'pill' is far less damaging than any other way, and also, it works, and quicker than you would find elsewhere. You sit with your turbulent feelings in the presence of the Source - whatever Source you believe in. And allow these feelings to exist until they exist no more. It is interesting that the injunction to 'Be Still" is at once the most difficult and the most useful in the wide world of wisdom! We are so drenched with the idea we must do something, and if not do, then talk, talk, talk! The grace of God does not require much talking. It already knows. You may find the lines below helpful if you still suffer from anxiety. It is an energy psychology exercise created by the extraordinary Sandi Radomski and her colleagues.

There is a part of my being that already knows how to..... (state the problem as a positive, not a negative, i.e. how to be still, how to feel serene and content, how to face this tragedy etc.)

It is willing to inform the rest of me now. 

It is doing so now with grace and ease.

My mind, body and spirit are receiving this.

Information transfer is now complete.

(Acknowledgements and gratitude to AllergyAntidotes.com)