Communion: The Cure Beyond Psychotherapy

The moment I learned of her true condition, I was in a hospital waiting room on the phone with a nurse who had earlier told me that my mother had been in a minor car accident and was recovering in the ER.

It sounded like she was okay, to the point that I asked the nurse if she thought I needed to come down to the hospital, figuring that she would probably be released within the hour and be on with the rest of her morning. She left it up to me, and I decided it was best to go down. By the time I arrived, she had been moved from the ER to the ICU, and I was not allowed to see her. The news I received earlier was dead wrong. My mother was in critical condition and fighting for her life.

Three weeks later, she passed. That was one year ago this week. The circumstances surrounding her death make for a long story, which I won’t tell here. But this being the anniversary of her death, and the fact that her passing was a big reason why I started this blog, I thought it appropriate to write about the psychological aftermath I experienced and how it has changed me both as a Christian and a therapist.

The update on my mom’s condition hit me with such intensity that I thought I was about to die; I truly thought my heart was going to stop, and I would be the next in line for the ER. This was not a heart attack, and in fact, I knew this sensation well.

I nearly drowned during a snorkeling incident several years prior, and ever since, I tend to have minor panic attacks when my chest gets triggered. The tightening sensation makes my nervous system think that I am drowning again. It’s very odd; if you’ve never had a panic attack, you are truly blessed.

The attacks were mostly under control till that phone call. As a therapist, I knew all the things to do to beat anxiety, and for the most part, it worked. So, when that old drowning sensation hit me in the waiting room, I was able to recover quickly and not completely lose my s***. What I was not expecting, however, was to have a new round of serious panic attacks for several months following her death. They would occur regularly, nearly daily, at home, at work, driving, whenever. It was pure torture.

I was at the movies with my son one night when it hit. The movie was Gladiator II, and the opening war scene was enough to send my nervous system into overdrive. I tried to play it cool (what father wants his young son to see him have a panic attack?), but the more I tried, the worse it got. I had to get out of there. I lied to him, saying that I was having a low-blood sugar issue and needed food asap. We rushed to the nearest drugstore, I bought a Cliff Bar and a Gatorade, and paced the aisles with the face of someone drowning on dry land, looking like a complete madman just trying to get my system under control. My son was visibly worried and dumbfounded. I felt so sorry for him.

I could give dozens of examples like this, but, needless to say, something had to change, and it needed to happen quickly. Being a therapist with constant panic attacks is like being a bus driver with narcolepsy; it’s a serious impediment to the work.

I knew all the things to do and did them just as before: I cleaned up my eating, slowed down my coffee and alcohol intake, got good sleep, even put myself through EMDR processing, but none of it was working. The one thing that broke through was starting a nightly discipline of embodiment. My routine is simple: I remove all distractions, set a timer for 10 minutes, lie on my back, and diaphragm breathe while focusing on the sensation of embodiment and the present moment. This works—it always works—but not exhaustively. The attacks were fewer in number, but still far too frequent.

This is usually when one goes online to find a therapist. As a therapist, I trust the process, but not with this one. My mother’s death left me with a conscious exposure to a lifetime of unprocessed loneliness, a variety of which was directly linked to a lack of what I would call genuine communion (I would say “connection,” but that word does not go deep enough).

Again, it’s a long story I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say that this variety of loneliness, experienced throughout childhood, damages the very fibers of human existence; it represents an unmet need so primal and intrinsic to human well-being that the only cure could be spiritual. At our core, we are communal beings. Everyone knows this. Practically the entire diagnostic manual for mental illness is a long list of different types of communal aberrations. Yet, a deficiency of genuine communion is precisely the thing that psychotherapy cannot remedy. Try not to laugh, but for me, this was a massive revelation.

Anyway, part of how I deal with psychological illness is to contextualize it historically. I like to ask which illnesses are basic to human beings versus which are more the result of particular cultural phenomena. History is good for teasing this out. It’s also worth contemplating how psychotherapy, as a professional intervention, is fairly new on the scene and how, for eons, mankind had to rely on other resources to cure things like anxiety and panic attacks.

What did they do? Historically, people leaned on religion. Well… they leaned on alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes, but also religion. “Why am I not leaning on my religion first and foremost?” came the next thought.

The heart of Orthodox Christianity is communion with God, realized through the central act of the Eucharist. If you’re a believer and have this as your basic religious orientation, then it follows: if anything could cure a communion problem, it would be the historic Christian faith. I began to realize that I had never given the faith a fair chance in this matter (I thought I had, but in reality, I hadn’t), and I decided now was a great time.

And let me add this, I shudder a little at putting the faith in these terms, because, though many people like to frame the Church as something like a spiritual hospital, this kind of talk is not always helpful. The Church is not like a hospital, per se; the Church is like Christ: it is dual-natured, inhabited by both God and man. “Hospital” might emphasize its human aspect, but leaves out its mystical, transcendent nature.

The Church does not exist to offer another set of self-improvement techniques to an already individualistic culture. As Philip Rieff might have put it, the Church’s mission is not to see the “rise and triumph of the therapeutic” self, but rather self-transcendence. Faith is not a means to solve panic attacks, but when truly lived out, faith will absolutely result in a state of mental strength and steadiness where panic attacks have a difficult time taking root (as I would soon find out for myself).

In the words of St. Peter of Damaskus, “This, surely, is the sign of dispassion, to remain calm and fearless in all things because one has received by God’s grace the strength to do anything.” A calm demeanor and fearlessness are not the substance of faith, but a sure sign of it.

That said, I decided to conduct something like an experiment to settle for myself where faith and psychotherapy intersect and where they diverge. Can a person recover from anxiety in general, and panic attacks in particular, as a result of devoting themselves to the faith and the practices of the historic Church? If not, then psychotherapy is indeed necessary, and everyone who attempted to conquer such before the advent of psychotherapy was only kidding themselves.

The stage was set; now for practicalities. What exactly does devoting oneself to the ancient practices of the Church look like? As an Orthodox Christian, the answer is fairly straightforward: live the liturgical life, which includes daily Scripture reading, attending regular services, participating in the sacraments—Eucharist, confession, etc.—praying the daily prayers, and following the specific counsel of one’s priest and the wisdom of the ancient Fathers of the faith.

Those are the practical steps, but the only way these become effective is contingent on the state of one’s heart. It’s not magic. This is also straightforward, but by far more difficult. Choosing a single term to define this state would, of course, be love. And not the slippery, whatever-I-want-it-to-mean, “love is love” nonsense one hears everywhere in pop culture today. I mean genuine, selfless, humble devotion to God.

As I said, participating in all the liturgical practices of the Church is far easier than maintaining a daily, genuine communion with God. Anybody with a solid Type A personality or a decent amount of OCD can do all the steps, but it is a thing of wonder when a person remains steadfast in their inner devotion (truly a grace from God). I have neither the OCD nor the steadfastness, so the challenge is great.

This article could go on for a long time since the final results of this experiment won’t be complete until I’m dead. In the meantime, the preliminary results are promising. I committed to this challenge roughly three months ago, and it has been unsurprisingly powerful.

My first steps were confession and tending to the daily prayers. The change was almost immediate. By day three or four, my symptoms had completely dried up. Three months later, and after adding in all the other elements, they have remained in full remission. Even these last three weeks, after emotionally reliving the events from one year ago, there was never a point when I lapsed into an attack or even felt the tightening in my chest.

(To clarify, I’m not speaking of sadness but only of anxiety and panic attacks. Sorrowful mourning is how the soul heals itself after great loss and should be embraced, not forsaken. The Orthodox have a habit of teaching that tears are a gift, a second baptism.)

I should also mention that serious engagement in the battle with one’s familiar passions (sin) is also key. Often, Christians mistake keeping the commandments of God for some expired “old law” or Pharisaical “works righteousness” trap. But this is a terrible misunderstanding, and another source of psycho-spiritual illness. It’s not that one studies the book of Leviticus to find out what God wants from them, but rather it is keeping the words of Christ.

In Christ’s own words:

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him … If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” (John 14: 21-23)

If anxiety were able to make its home in the same place where God has made His home—the human heart—there would be a serious problem. In this case, anxiety, in my estimation, would be absolutely insurmountable. However, this is not the case—a more thorough examination of why would be an excellent challenge for another article. As for my next article, I would like to push further into the idea of God as communion and how and why this is so instrumental to our well-being.

Thanks for reading!