Bottom of the Boat

A friend of mine calls it the "gerbil wheel." I have compared it to a fish wildly flopping on the floor of a boat. Another person I knows refers to the phenomenon as "attack thoughts."

What we're all describing is when we feel assaulted by fear, and thinking about the problem causes other negative emotions (e.g., self-loathing, guilt, shame, new fear) to start coming at us at lightning speed from other angles. It doesn't seem fair. We think about the problem in our life because we want relief, we want to be sure that it's as bad as we think it is, and several minutes later we have had so many new horrible thoughts that we feel worse. If you ever see me with my head bowed and my fingers in my hair clutching the top of my head, you can assume that I'm overwhelmed by fear.

For years I tried positive thinking to overcome both my painful emotions and hard situations themselves. I would do my best to ignore my fear and think about God's love for me instead. For several years in a row I had incredible results with this approach. I remember talking to my husband in our kitchen and sounding jubilant. "I get it now. I mean I really, really get it." I believed that I knew the spiritual laws of the universe and that I'd rounded a corner and would not have to suffer again.

I don't believe in jinxes, but oddly, after I said that, I seemingly started to fail at positive thinking for several years. God did many incredible things for me during this period, but two grave problems got increasingly worse, and I believed they had the power to destroy my family and ruin my life. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, I took the approach I usually do: "I will work harder." I prayed more. I read every spiritual book I could to make sure that I was not overlooking the tool that would turn my life around. I obsessed about my prayers, trying to make sure that I was using the verbs and phrases that would allow me to access God's compassion and gain his help. I always thought that I was very close to the solution but that God was waiting on me to do something right, and that I had just not figured it out yet. I asked God to guide me. Silence. I spent a lot of time in my pose (head bowed, hands in hair).

At the end of these years where life got harder and harder, I ended up on my front porch. I went out there every night to cry. Not only had I collapsed emotionally from the stress of my husband's illness, his inability to work and the financial stress associated with that, but lately I was unable to sleep, I was hyperventilating during the day, I was having esophageal and throat spasms that I thought signaled cancer, my extremities would spontaneously twitch and tremble and I was losing weight rapidly although I had stopped dieting. I knew I had broken down emotionally, and now my body was breaking down. I never knew how I would get through each day during that period, and by nightfall, once I had struggled through the day and completed it, I cried on the porch.

"You've given me a $hitty life, God," I said one night with tears streaming down my face, "and I hate you for it." That was the first uncalculated prayer I had said in a long time. I wasn't trying to utter the words that would compel God to help me. I was convinced that he was content to see me suffer, so I felt free to be completely truthful. The physical problems I was having felt like God had slapped me in the face. He had seen how hard I had tried to overcome the hard parts of my life, he had heard me begging him to make things better and now he was allowing me to have such a severe physical reaction to stress that simple things like microwaving oatmeal and making 10 minute grocery store trips seemed mountainous. I didn't know how much longer I could survive, especially since he had decided not to help me. So I hated him.

And the help came pouring in. It came in the form of kind, compassionate people sprinkled throughout my life and in a series of events that gave me more and more hope. I was helped by a loving, concerned physician. I returned to AA. I returned to the Catholic church. I wandered into a Catholic bookstore and found two books that changed my life. I told God that I was letting go and meant it. He was not silent anymore. He gave me continual affirmations that I was on the right path and that I was being carried by him. The multiple holes in my faith were filled by the pure love of family, old friends and new friends who linked me to God. Life was too much, it was too painful to bear, but I was not alone anymore. The reality of my life became the love that was present all around me.

Last night some recent financial happenings triggered the gerbil wheel, the flopping fish, the attack thoughts. Our financial future seemed bleak, and as I turned it over in my head, it went from looking worrisome to looking extremely bad. I started hating myself for certain decisions I've made, and I felt shame that told me that I'll always be such a bad person that I'll be beyond God's help. As I type this, I'm still flopping frantically on the boat, wanting to grab hold of the spiritual idea that will deliver me from my fear.

Enough with the struggling. Enough with straining toward grace and trying to get away from fear. Today I submit to fear. As soon as I feel myself panicking and trying to push the feeling away, I will relax back into the fear and let myself live in it in the moment that it surfaces. I will not be alone. The times I have felt God the most powerfully have been the slow minutes that I have entered into my pain and realized, "O God, even here, you are with me."

I welcome your prayers and will post an update later on my submission to fear. Please leave a comment and tell me about anything you're grappling with right now.