Depression: When a Member of the Flock Needs Special Care - Lesson 5

Dr. Gregory Knopf and Dr. Gary Lovejoy
Depression: When a Member of the Flock Needs Special Care
co330-05
Things We Can Do to Help (Part 1)
Lesson Transcript

Dr. Gary Lovejoy [00:00:04] Action. We'll have our final session. And we want to talk a little bit about some of the things that you can actually do that can be helpful. I understand that a lot of times people are reticent to seek out help for a variety of reasons. But but there are some things you can do actually without seeing a professional and other things that would be helpful to see a professional to facilitate these things. But before I say anything further concerning that, I want to just make one comment that there are many pastors that that labored for many, many years in the field, and I have great respect for them. I have in my practice, I see a lot of pastors and missionaries and others who are working in full time the field. And and studies show that roughly 70% of all pastors are undergoing some aspect of depression. That's an astounding figure. And I mean, seven out of ten pastors are struggling in some way and oftentimes they are under heavy duress. They have many things that are going on. They have events are occurring sometimes are trying to resolve conflict in the church. They have a secretary is telling them all the things, the appointments they've got to be to. And and they've they've got their own sometimes their own issues within their own families. And there's just a tremendous number of pressures. And I believe that the vast majority of people who attend church do not really know or even have an inkling about the level of pressures that are placed upon a pastor. The vast majority, it's probably also unknown to most people that the majority of people who graduate from seminaries and go into the pastorate leave the pastorate and most and in one study, 90%, 90% of the respondent pastors responds, said that he had considered resignation and leaving the ministry at some point in their ministry. Now, some of them didn't. Many of them didn't, but they considered it. They were to that point and over 50% of them do. And I have some experiences of a good friend of mine who graduate from seminary in his and he was literally chewed to pieces and is experienced in his first pastorate. And he left the ministry altogether. He never became a pastor. He was a bright young man who served well. So I'm very, very sensitive to the issues of pastors who struggle and who and who have a tremendous weight placed on their shoulders. It's not just a you know, sometimes we like to think, well, a pastor works on Sunday and and maybe on Wednesday if they have a midweek service. And, gee, you know, that's pretty, pretty good. But he is usually putting the average pastor puts in 60 hours a week. The average pastor that means some put in more. But that's what the statistical averages. That's a huge number of hours. And I'm just saying that that what we're talking about in terms of change and and dealing with depression, that I speak not only to congregants, but I also speak to church leaders and elders and and add to pastors who are under tremendous pressures. And and pastors, above all, struggle with the idea that they could be depressed because they're supposed to be the leader of the flock. And I should be the paragon of of mental health and and spiritual health. And here I am struggling. And how hypocrite. What kind of hypocrisy is that? But it isn't hypocrisy. And that's why I took some time in the previous video to talk about the fact that some of God's dearest servants who served him well in the Old Testament, a new struggle, likewise with the difficulties of their ministries. And so I, I just want you to understand that that these are common problems, far more common than you can possibly think. And I think it's good to be aware of that so that we might nurture one another and that we might be sensitive and open to the kinds of problems that are shared and and discussed. And that when we do open up, that we don't respond negatively, but that we invite further conversation. I remember a Sunday school class that met in Spring Mountain Bible Church and and they discussed depression and it started out as a small group and every week it grew larger and larger and told it was filling the room. And and what one person over and over and over said over and over again I didn't I have always struggled depression, but I didn't think I was This is the right place to bring it up I. Like if I did, I might be judged. And but I find that I can say and share my burdens. And other people have similar concerns as I do. And I just didn't realize. And I feel like they felt a camaraderie, a sense of brotherhood, and at the same time they were uplifted. The fact that that they could actually openly discuss it. And that's what our aim is. Our aim is that we can open up this whole realm, that we can discuss it so that the church as a whole doesn't suffer from the fact that we have this kind of unwritten rule. We don't talk about those things. Otherwise, you know, we talk I talked earlier about the emotional, repressive family. Sometimes we become a spiritually oppressive family. We can't we can't talk about the things that affect our spiritual life the most powerfully. And sometimes those things are are physical and spiritual and so and emotional. So I wanted to preface that so that we understand that this problem is not something limited in scope. It's large in scope. Now, when people want to change, want to they're seeking, you know, very oftentimes when people come in my door and counseling, it's a mistake to always assume people want change. Many times people want pain relief. And that's very different. They just want to be out of their pain. But when it comes to actually change, it might be threatening to them. Some people are threatened by change. In fact, it's very well known. In fact, you'll find it most introductory clinical psychology books that there's an early critical stage in therapy, and that is when a person begins to share their burden of whatever is troubling them and they get it out, they feel better and think, Gee, I don't need to go any further. But they're on the brink of change. They're on the threshold of change they get right there. And that that's a little threatening to them. That's a little frightening to them. And so they they back away from therapy. And so if they do that, you know, they will be back either to you or to someone else because they haven't really faced the issues. And see, I think that's it's important to keep that in mind because because whatever it is that you face, you know that if you don't face anything, nothing will happen, nothing will change. And so there but but the whole idea of depression can be quite complex and and maybe even surprising to you if you have it. Sometimes it's a problem of secondary gain. Whether that is by that I mean that, like any behavior, depressive behavior can be reinforced by unintended consequences. Let me give you an example. A young man came into my office one day and he had been he has his parents had brought him. He was in his late twenties, I think he was about 26 or 27, probably no longer eligible for health insurance from his parents. And so he was he was later an agent. You would expect him to be well on his way in his career, but he'd never held a job for longer than six months. He had never been productive in any way. He sat at home for long periods of time, play video games, did not much of anything. He and he was very, very depressed and his parents were very concerned with him. And and when he came to my door, I was quickly informed by his parents that I was like the seventh great therapist that he'd seen them. They'd trundle him round from one office to another, and they would try things like increasing his social skills or increasing his employable skills or trying to give him greater assertiveness or and various types of things. But nothing worked. Nothing took. And and so he sat down in front of me and began speaking, and he had a somewhat apathetic view of life. And I started talking about different things and and finding out what things he had done in past therapy and so forth. And then as in the course of conversation, I started talking about his parents and what it was like to be living still at home and what problems that may have presented to his parents. And I picked up some clues from him and he suddenly straightened up in his chair and began talking in a more animated fashion. I picked up some clues and so I asked him, I said, Would you mind? I had a hunch. And so I said, Would you mind if I spoke to your parents, had a session with your parents? And he practically he practically threw his neck out, nodding in such agreement. Yes, he would like me to see his parents. And so I had them come in and we talked. And course they talked about how their concern for their their son and he was and one day they were going to be gone. And what's he going to do? And he's so completely dysfunctional and blah, blah, blah, wringing their hands over it. And then the conversation turned to them and I started asking him about things that had to do with their marriage and. And so where I kind of segway that from talking about the impact of having their son still at home. And then it was what I realized in my hunch that there were major marital problems in this marriage. In fact, this marriage was hanging by a slender thread, and most likely they would be divorced, except the common thing that kept them together. The glue that held them together was the fact that of their mutual concern over their son. And their son had somehow picked that message up and what he was doing. And this is reason why no therapy would have ever been effective with him until this is understood that what he was doing was sacrificing his own life because he knew that if he as long as he remained dysfunctional and therefore the focus of concern of his parents, his parents would not divorce and he didn't want his parents to divorce. And so he was giving up his life, sacrificing his life, his productive life, so that his parents would remain remain married. And so so you see how complicated. So his depression was unwittingly reinforced by the fact that they were worried about him, and that's what kept them together. But once the parents were dealt with it, his depression did lifted and he became a productive human being. And you see, that's what. So depression can be a very complex thing. It's not a simple 1 to 1 kind of relationship. And you have to find out what's going on. And oftentimes when you want to to intervene or or evolve and change yourself and change and a person doesn't change, it's time to stop, rethink it, back up and start coming at a different angle, because sometimes it isn't what you think. But one of the general things that I might comment on in regard to depression is a kind of focus adjusting our focus on our thought life every single day. Every one of you thinks the more the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to sleep at night, you're always thinking, there's never a time when you're not thinking. As a matter of fact, when if you've ever asked somebody, Oh, well, what are you thinking? Oh, nothing. They don't really mean that. What they really mean is nothing I want to tell you or nothing that you would be interested in. But it isn't that there's no such thing as a blank mind. You're thinking right now. Whatever I'm speaking, you're thinking about something. Whether it's what I'm talking about or something about having lunch soon. But whatever it is you're thinking about, something we cannot not think. And why is that important? Because we are have a continuous ongoing narrative in our in our lives about our the events of our lives. It's like we are writing a story every single day of our life and every day we're writing and we are responding to it as well as any narrative. It can be said in several in two different languages. Is it? What do you mean? Well, it's either inside language or it is in preference language. And you might ask, Well, what do you mean? Giving a narrative and the language will need language is language that is related to a need. And what's a need? A need is something that's necessary for survival. There are very, very few needs in life. Almost everything is a want where you live, the house you live in, the friends you have, the vacations you go on, the cars you drive, the type of work you do. All of it is a matter of preference. It's all matter of choice. But there are a few basic things that are not like the need for air. You don't have a choice about if you want to live the need for food, the need for shelter and so forth. What I'm saying is there are very, very few true needs. Almost everything else is a preference, is a desire, is a choice. So what happens if a true need is thwarted? Let's take, for example, the need for air. What if I got up out of my chair here and I walked over and I slammed my hand over your nose and mouth and held there tightly? What would you do? Well, the first thing you do is you desperately try to pull my hand away. And when that doesn't work, you start punching away at me, you start kicking me, you do anything In the longer I held my hand over your mouth and nose, the more desperate you become and you be kicking wildly. You would be in a full fledged panic state. As a matter of fact, it's interesting that that lifeguards are trained for this when they go to save someone who is drowning. They have to be taught how to subdue a person because if they don't, that drowning person will grab on to the lifeguard and drag him down with him. If you've ever tried to save someone from water, there are many, many cases where people the rescuer has been. As has gone down as well. And because they're in full fledged panic. That's what happens when we are deprived of a need. So what happens then? If we take what is really a want, a preference, a desire, but we psychologically convert it into a need? Let's take an example. Let's say I want your approval. I want your approval. But I don't tell myself that. I tell myself I need your approval. Now I'm converted into a need right in my head. I need your room. So now we're talking, we're interacting. I am getting cues that you don't approve of me. I start to become desperate. I start to panic. I'll do anything to get your approval. I may even start to compromise my values to get your approval. This is what happens among teenagers where peer approval is so preeminent they will engage in sexual activity. They will engage in criminal activity, engage in drug activity. Things are better there. Better nature would tell them, No, don't go here. Don't do this. Then they don't even necessarily want to do that. Most most teenage engage in these kinds of things actually have confessed to me that they don't want to do those things, but they feel they need to in order to be accepted by the group. That's how powerful. Why? Because I make need peer approval. Once they send, they need something. They panic. If they don't get it, well, then this is what we often do. We often need to use that kind of need language in everyday circumstances. Let's say, for example, I'm coming to meet you for an appointment and I'm I'm running on the kind of the edge, and I'm coming down the freeway and I'm coming rounding the corner. And all of a sudden I see a red lights traffic jam. Oh, no, I'm late. What time is it? Oh, my gosh. I would be really late. I've got to get there. I have to get there. And I become extremely upset and I'm pounding on the dash. I've seen people drive wrong way up the onramp. I'm going over the median strip, do some crazy things because they're desperate to get someplace and they're so upset. And when they finally arrive at the destination, they're emotional people. Why? Because they're telling themselves they have to see me. By which things like I have to. I must. I've got to. It's awful. It's terrible. I can't stand it. I hated these. This is now in language. It's volatile, emotionally volatile language. There's no faster way to get yourself emotionally upset than to use any language. That's why this is why explains, you know, road rage. So many cuts of road rage. I dare that. I can't stand people like that. And they do crazy things, things that they're their sober nature would say, don't go there. But they do them because they're in a state of high agitation, because they're using need language and need language is what gets us into trouble, is what exacerbates our emotional states. So then instead of responding in in temper and temperate terms to something, we respond, we overreact to things, we get very upset. And this is that often at the core of our depression, we have learned and we have so learned to use need language and instead of preference, things like maybe I should make a distinction here between that and saying, let's replay that situation. I'm coming to the point where I'm late, see a red light, and I say, and I've had actually had this experience. I start my view of my hand squeezing the wheel. I'm getting uptight like this. I can feel it. And I ask myself, What am I saying to myself? Just ask yourself one question. What am I saying myself? And I listen and I tap into my internal phone line. I listen. I hear, Wow, I got to get there. I'm going to be late. I've got just got to get there. I hear all this language flowing in. I have to ask myself just one question. Just one question I need to ask was the question is, will I survive? Is my survival at stake? When I ask that question, I start laughing. Is my survival instinct. I'm stuck in traffic. What do you mean I? Survival is a stay at most. It's inconvenient. It's a little inconvenient. It's. I might be embarrassed a little bit. Maybe they have left and I called to reschedule, but that's about the most of it. My life is nowhere near in jeopardy. But you see what I use near language. I'm assuming that language is based on the idea that my life is in jeopardy. You see how how out of sync the language is with the circumstance. And that's what we often do. Let me show you how that works in depression. Let's say I am now unemployed. I've been unemployed for some time, been really looking for a job, and I'm trying to find this job and I've got this great possibility. And I'm one of the finalists. I'm going in for my interview and I'm all pumped. I'm excited to go for it. And so I go and I give my best job at the end. Our view, and I think I do a pretty good job interview. But at the end they tell me that I'm not successful, that they have chosen someone else. Man, I'm really bummed. I'm completely depressed. I'm walking out. I'm just depressed out of my skull. Let's say that happened to you and you're just depressed. I just go because you you thought for sure this is the job you dreamed of. You thought you would get it and you didn't. And so you're really depressed. And you come to me and you say, Gosh, I'm so I say, Why are you so depressed? Well, I'm depressed because I went for the job and I didn't get it. And I was so dependent, I was sure I was going to get that job. I didn't get that's why I'm depressed. And I would say to you, that's not why you're depressed. You'd probably get angry with me. What do you mean? It's not why I if I got the job, I'd be happy I didn't get the job. That's why I'm depressed. I said, No, that's not why you're depressed. So what do you mean? Well, because some people go through similar experiences and they don't get depressed, do they? Now, if if, if depression was the automatic response to not getting the job you want, that would happen to everyone, wouldn't it? But see, what happens is this we can think of I like to think of as the ABC analysis of behavior. The A is the activating event. The activating event was I went to the job interview and I failed to get the job. That's the acting event. The emotional consequence was depression and discouragement, disappointment. But what's in between those two is B, which is the belief about the activating event and the B that the my belief is this is my only if I I'm usually saying to myself things like, well, I didn't get the job, it's my only shot at it. I really thought I was going get a job, but since I didn't get it, I'll probably get nothing. I'll probably be a burger flipper all my life and I'll never get the job. I'll hate my work. The rest of my work. I had to get this job. Oh, what a miserable experience. Yeah, I words, if I really believe that, of course I'm going to be depressed. I believe that that was my only shot at happiness in my in my career. Of course, I may be depressed, but what if I had come at that and I was and I didn't get the job? And I say, well, that's disappointing. But there's so many other good jobs out there, I'm going to re go back with renewed hope and and really work at it and try to get a job As long as I if I hit enough places, I'm basically going to find one, then I'm not depressed. I may be disappointed, but I'm not depressed and see. So it's not the end of the world. It's like being in stuck in that traffic. I my survival is non stay, but it's not the end of the world. I will survive. And the same thing here. I don't get the job. It's disappointing but it doesn't have to be depressing. But you see we often interpret those things as with such emotional baggage that there is depression that automatically follows it. And and, you know, this thing is this is a biblical principle. This is not just some principle I dreamed up. It's a biblical principle. And we see it so beautifully displayed in Second Corinthians chapter four, verses 8 to 9. You know, the Apostle Paul was a man who was under tremendous duress. I mean, he was like many pastors, constantly besieged by unhappy people and and conflict and people who who rejected his message. And he was had spent a lot of time being beaten up and and threatened with his life and spent time in rat infested prisons. It was a tough, tough life. It would have been natural for someone to have asked him, how do you take that, Paul? How do you keep going? How do you keep your head above water and all this? And so that would be a naturally a natural question to ask. And I'm sure he was asked that. And so in in his second letter to the Corinthians, he writes something that's very revealing. It gives us a hint of how he how he gets keeps his head straight under under such pressure. And this is what we read in secondary, these four, eight, nine. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. We're perplexed but not driven to despair. We're persecuted, but we're not forsaken. We're struck down, meaning we're discouraged, but we're not destroyed. But what is he saying here? He's basically saying this. He's parlaying he's parlaying preference language with my language. He's saying he's not this is not pie in the sky thinking. He's not saying he said we're afflicted every way. That's that's just a description of what's going on. They are afflicted, but it's not the end of the world who say so. But we're not crushed. That's a being crushed as a as a nine language term, he says. We're perplexed. You don't know how God is working here, but we're not driven to despair, which is a which is any language her are were persecuted, which is pretty obvious they were. But we're not forsaken, which is need language term or we're struck down. We're discouraged. Sometimes it's sometimes just hard to to to keep a keep our top spirits all the time. But we're not destroyed. It's not the end of the world. The language you say. So what Paul was saying essentially this, I don't go there when it comes to the names. I have learned He was a very volatile man when he first was converted. He was known for his volatility really quick. His reaction was to the Christians. He was bound and determined to eliminate every last one of them. That's why he was marching to Damascus, because he was that was a hub of international traffic. And he didn't want Christianity to spread to Damascus because then it would spread everywhere and he wanted to catch it, nip it in the bud. So he was out to kill and disperse every single Christian he could. And he was adamant about it. He was obsessed with it. And he was he was he was driven by the need language of it all. But when he became a Christian, it was really not so much a conversion as it was a surrender. And he he became he went from being an intense antagonist to gospel to being an intense protagonist. The gospel God didn't change his personality as as such, he was still intense with him. He was brilliant intellectually, but he began to realize over time, in the beginning of his ministry, he was a he was an elephant in China shop. I mean, he he had a falling out with Barnabas and with with Timothy and with Mark and with the church Jerusalem. I mean, he was having all sorts of conflicts and problems and he was. But as time went on, he got more and more mellow. He got more and more at peace to the point that when he was writing to Timothy, which he was writing from Rome, it was near the end of his life. And here he is instructing Timothy how to deal with people who are easily offended. This is the same man that was running around offending everybody in the beginning. Now he is giving instruction how to respond to people so they're not offended. Why? Because he's learned how to learn, how to be calm and peaceful, he said in Philippians chapter four. He says he's talking to people about their anxieties about being uptight all the time. And he says, Try thinking about the truth. Try thinking about what really is true in this life. Stop filling your head with lies because lies will imprison you, but the truth will free you. The truth will make you free. And free is peace. Freedom is peace. When I feel at peace with my life, I feel free. If I'm all uptight with depression and anxiety and anger upset, I'm imprisoned. I feel it. I've had patients tell me that I feel in prison. And so whenever we feel imprisoned like that, most like we're probably telling ourselves lies to remind ourselves, What am I telling myself? And then I'll probably only identify the lies I'm telling myself. So in this ABC analysis, I begin to realize that it's what I'm saying to myself about the event that's depressing me. It's not the event itself. And once I know that I've reclaimed control of my life and allowed God to work through me, because, you see, as long as I think, well, everything's out of my control if things happen to me, not because of me and so forth, I will become helpless and I will resign myself to whatever is, and I'll simply give up and give in to depression. But when I realize that I can change something, that I realize that it's my beliefs that need to be changing its I can't change the activating event. I can't change the person rejecting me for the job, but I can change my response to it. You see, so often, I've often told patients this and they they look at me rather quizzically When I tell them this I say, You know, there are only two mistakes people make in life. They look at me, only two, and I see, yeah, it's all boiled down to one or two. One of two things. The first is trying to control things that you don't have any control over and and the other is not controlling things you do have control over. And the reason you don't control the things you do have control over it is you're too busy trying to control things. You don't have control over it. That's the problem. And and what this is what we're we're talking about is reclaiming control over things you do have control over. And that that empowerment is what is what contradicts the helplessness of depression. And it begins to rise in that respect. And sometimes it means changing your behavior before you even change your thinking. So what do you mean? Well, sometimes it's hard for some people to think their way into a new way of acting. But they can act their way into a new way of thinking. I remember one person came in and I remember a psychiatrist was sharing an experience about a patient, came to him and was was not improving, had very low self-esteem, hated her, hated herself. She was she had a very responsible position. She was a corporate executive. She didn't know how she could be angry that she kept saying, well, I know that I'm just living a lie. They don't know how terrible I am and how how pathetic I am. And if they only saw me or got a really win of what I do, they probably fire me overnight. And so she was just had miserable self-esteem. And and I've been working with her for a number of weeks and getting nowhere. And finally one day she comes in and she says, you know, I have to go and have to take time out from therapy for a month because I'm going back to New York. My company, she rolls her eyes. My company is sending me back there to represent our company in a zekulin meetings and so forth. And I don't know why they sent me. I'm going to be you know, I'm going to be rubbing shoulders with all these titans of of of the the great companies around the country. I'm going to be so out of place. They're going to you're going to take one look at me and say, why are you here? And are you here to serve me or you want to give me, you know, or deserves? No, no, no, no. I work and I'm an executive. And so she said, I don't even want to go. But she said, I have to go because my company shows me why. I don't know. It's not something this I gave to her. Well, here's what I want you to do. Then she says, Well, what would you do if you really felt good about yourself? I know you do, but I mean, if you did, what would you do? And if you can't, you have a hard time. Think of somebody you know that seems to be pretty confident. And how would they respond? Well, I would go there. We have an opening at the conferences, a big dinner. And so where I go in, I walk in and I and she described how she'd talk to people, how she'd introduce herself, blah, blah, blah. And he said and then talked about the meetings that would follow and so forth. And he said, Well, here's what I want you to do. He says, I know you don't feel good about yourself, but I'm not. I don't worry about that part. He said, What I want you to do is I want you to do exactly what you just said. Just go inactive, pretend you know, it's kind of like the power of pretending. Just try it. Just go out and just. Just do it. And. And she said, I can't do that. It's just. Yes, you can. You can do it. You may not feel like it, but you can do it. And so finally she agreed. Well, she was gone. A month later, she comes back, the psychiatrist sees her and said, well, how's the things going? And she comes striding into the room and she's a totally different person. He said he looks at her, He says, What happened? And he said she said, Well, she says, I was on a plane trip back to the conference in New York. And she says, Why? Oh, why did I agree to do this? But she says, I'm a very responsible person. If I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. And so I'm saying, how am I going to get out of this? I'm going to make a fool of myself. People are going to say, Who are you? Oh my gosh, why did I say that? But she said, I've got to do it. So she said, I know what I'll do. She said, I resolved it on the first night when I get there at the big dinner and so forth, I'll do those behaviors, I said. And then they'll all look at me like I was a plague or something, and I'll start back to my room. I'll get that embarrassment over with, and then I'll go back to being who I am and withdraw. And I'll just sit and listen. I'm not going to say anything, and that's what I'll do. And then I least have I've honored the request. I did. I tried. It didn't work. So she said, I did that. And I went in and I thought through all the things I would do if I were calm and I went and did them. I didn't feel like doing it, but I went and did them. And you know what? It was kind of weird. People started really responding to me and and she became the star of the show. People came over and talked to her and so forth, and she had all these discussions show and she said at the end of the first night, she said, Well, that went pretty well. Wasn't what I expected. Well, I well, I'll, I'll try it one more time tomorrow then it'll probably all collapse out again. And so she said next day I did that and her response was even greater and said day after day she did this. And she said after a while she's by then. They're all coming to her for ideas and suggestions. And she's just, you know, and she was really, really was the star of the show. And she said, I began to realize that I have something to contribute. And I never realized that before. But the first time I realized what my bosses have been telling me for years and I wouldn't believe them. But she says, I don't think I would have ever thought that just on my own. But I. But she had thought her way into a new way of it or acted her way into a new way of thinking. So sometimes people have a hard. I'm thinking their way into a new way of acting. If so, they might think about reversing that process and acting their way into a new way of thinking.