Evangelical Therapy, Part 1 - House Call

A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical

I’d been afraid the trip to Hawaii with “Opa” would be a mistake, but my daughter, Amy, age sixteen, wanted to go; it was Hawaii! She’d never been! Her teenage cousin was going as well, and I convinced myself that the two cousins could act as a buffer for each other from their grandfather, who at his best, might have been described as a “difficult person.” Early in our marriage, my ex-husband told me that in high school, after he came in second in the hundred-yard dash at a track meet, his father insisted he come down to the basement, where he lectured him for an hour about his failure, and how exactly he should have done better so he could have placed first. My father-in-law routinely excoriated my mother-in-law for various imagined sins as well. I remember her sitting in a chair at their kitchen table, her eyes cast down, as he berated her.

So I was concerned about a week-long trip, but it went better than I hoped, until close to the end of the week, when Opa asked Amy what she planned to study in college. After my divorce, my daughters and I had left the evangelical church that had previously been the foundation of our lives, and Amy, my sensitive, spirited girl who loved to draw, wanted to be a tattoo artist. She didn’t dare say that to her conservative grandfather; instead she mentioned her second choice, psychology.

“If you become a psychologist, you’ll go to hell,” Opa told her, starting in on another of his lectures.

“The only therapist I need is Jesus,” proclaimed my mother-in-law, who was usually kind, but probably in this moment, afraid to disagree with her husband.

For large numbers of us now, therapy is a valued vehicle of transformation. But in 1998, when the trip to Hawaii took place, psychotherapy was deemed by quite a number of evangelicals (and unfortunately still is today) as a practice that disregarded the reality of sin and showed a lack of trust in God. Further, many believed, it “wrongly elevated human opinion.” Some evangelicals think mental illness is caused by a lack of religious values and can be overcome by prayer and Bible study. “If prayer isn’t allowed in the therapist’s office, then it’s obviously wrong,” a pastor at our church once stated in a sermon.

My daughters had been raised in the Nazarene church from birth, and years of conditioning in Sunday School and youth group had left them with terrifying images of burning for eternity in a lake of fire, if they happened to die with unforgiven sins.

Me, age 2, in Sunday School

So when Amy called me later that day, upset by Opa’s statement about her future damnation, and the way he refused to acknowledge her idea as even worthy of discussion, I did my best to listen and comfort, but I was upset, too, that her grandfather had inflicted his punishing thoughts on her, and angry all over again about the way fear had been used to control us.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, my own mother suffered from anxiety and agoraphobia, but we didn’t ever use those words, and we didn’t talk about her problems. She never got treatment, and I doubt she thought she needed to. Therapy was for scary, crazy people, and in society at large, of course, to seek out that kind of help was a display of weakness, of being unable to cope. And my mom was coping, sort of—she whistled while she did the dishes and ironed my father’s shirts, she made us cookies after school, after dinner, she sat in a cozy over-stuffed rocking chair with me, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. She just didn’t like to go places, or climb up stairs, or have friends over, or fly on airplanes, or drive a car.

As an evangelical, raised by a mom who rarely left the house, I found my way forward at age twenty by marrying a young man from my immediate circle, who believed that women were meant to submit and be silent, and that men were the messengers of God, their role to make decisions for the whole family.

After ten years of marriage, when I became ill, no one thought to explain my physical symptoms as a manifestation of my emotional state.

I had everything—a Christian husband who provided for us so I could be a stay-at-home mom (the best thing a woman could be), and a beautiful white and brick colonial-style house with a pool and daffodils blooming out front. What could possibly be my problem? I spent three years going from doctor to doctor, having various tests done to rule out physical causes, until my father, who wanted to help, reached out to a previous student of his, who was a medical doctor and also had some kind of training in psychology. My dad trusted him. He seemed a known entity, having attended the Nazarene university where my dad spent his entire academic career teaching physics.

This man, who I’ll call “Dr. M,” for some reason didn’t have an actual job or affiliation with any medical practice and was willing to make house calls. This seemed strange to me, but I think my dad was desperate to do something. I had lost twenty pounds, was dizzy all the time, couldn’t sleep, felt short of breath, and everything “looked weird,” to me, a symptom I could hardly describe and that no doctor had been able to explain.

Within days of my dad coming up with this idea, Dr. M rolled up to my house in southern Idaho in an ancient Cadillac. He was a giant teddy bear of a man, carrying a black bag, with a pair of gold-framed reading glasses in his pocket, and not knowing what else to do, I led the way to my dining room table. My three young daughters were in the back yard, swimming in our pool, my mom watching over them (my dad had dropped her off), and as I sat across the table from Dr. M, their happy shouts floated through the open window in the kitchen.

He said he needed to start with at least a cursory physical exam, even though I had showed him my medical records.

“We could use this table,” he said, patting its shining wooden top.

I did what he told me to. As a good Evangelical girl (I was thirty-one), I had little conception I could say no to someone I perceived as an authority figure, nor the internal wherewithal to do so.

Besides, my father had summoned this doctor to help me, and I was desperate, too.

I lay flat on the hard table and unzipped my pants, and he lifted my shirt to palpate my abdomen. He listened to my heart with his stethoscope, then had me sit up so he could check my ears, nose, and throat, and test my reflexes. Just an ordinary check-up from a doctor, taking place in my dining room.

After that first visit, he suggested two more tests he thought I should have done, and a few weeks later, when the results from both were negative, he came back to sit at the table and talk.

“Is your husband nice to you?” he asked, in our second conversation.

I was taken aback for a moment, unable to think how to say anything that approached the truth, so l nodded yes. “I’ve been reading about chronic sinus infections,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I have.”

He asked me to stand up and bend over, so the blood rushed to my head, then asked if I felt any pain.

“Not really,” I said.

He came over beside me and pressed his thumbs against my cheekbones. “How does that feel?”

“Okay.”

“Nasal congestion?”

“No.” I sat back down at the table.

“Listen,” he said. “You’ve had every test that any doctor can think of. You don’t have allergies. You don’t have a brain tumor. You don’t have a sinus infection. Your endoscopy was clear. The braces you got for TMJ haven’t made any difference, either, although your teeth look nice.” Then he came out with it. “There’s nothing physically wrong with you. You have an emotional problem.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, stunned, my heart rate speeding up. I genuinely didn’t know.

“The problem is up here,” he said, tapping his head. “In your mind.”

This was all sounding more terrifying by the moment. I wished I could run out the door and jump in the pool with my daughters, who were once again playing outside in the sun.

“What do I do to get better?”

“You can get therapy or take medication or both. I prefer therapy myself.”

“Do people get better from this?” I had made a timeline, drawn on a piece of notebook paper, which I’d taped up on the mirror over my dresser, with the three-year period I’d been sick marked off in the middle of a long horizontal line going either direction, as a way of encouraging myself to believe that this illness was only a segment of my life, not the whole.

“Most people do,” he said. “Not everyone.”

I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. I’d spent three years believing I had an undiagnosed physical illness, and now this doctor was telling me that wasn’t the case. A physical illness was something I could grab on to, but what he was suggesting seemed slippery and amorphous and frightening, a problem with no definite cure.

I was crying by then and got up and went in the kitchen to get a Kleenex, feeling like a failure and thinking of my mom, the pain I had felt as a small child, when overcome with anxieties or mysterious difficulties l didn't understand, she’d disappear into her room for hours and shut the door, leaving me to cope on my own.

I had always wanted to do differently and better with my own children than she had managed to do with hers, but l had a flash of painful insight as l stood in the kitchen crying, that there was a similarity to her difficulties and my three-year illness that l didn't yet fully understand.

I blotted my wet cheeks and when I turned around, Dr. M was there in the kitchen with me, his bulky shape filling up the doorway. He grabbed me in an all-enveloping hug and didn’t let go. Alarm bells went off somewhere inside me, but I had learned long before to shut down my instincts in favor of pleasing others around me. I reluctantly put my arms around him, my face smooshed into his fleshy chest.

Finally, he released me. “I know this is hard,” he said. “But I can do therapy with you. Let’s set a time for next week.”

I acquiesced, as per usual, and before long, he was going out the door and down the sidewalk. He wedged himself into the front seat of his car and drove away.

I’d see him again the next Tuesday, at two p.m., in my dining room.