Ok
everyone, here is the post that everyone has been vigilantly waiting for: a
post about vigilance, and maybe even hyper vigilance. Hyper-vigilance is
a type of anxiety problem and a symptom of trauma. A lot of people talk about
it in the context of PTSD when something horrible has happened and from then on
the people who suffered are constantly on the lookout to protect themselves
from anything else like it. But I want to say that a lot of people are in
chronic stress situations that do warrant some kind of unreasonable vigilance,
so people's anxiety can be both appropriate and inappropriate at the same
time. I consider myself to have been in situations like this for decades
at a time, and I may never really understand why that turned out to be part of
my life. For me, it was the stress of being mentally ill and keeping a
retail job where any wrong move or bad word could cost me medical insurance for
the rest of my life, and result in homelessness, death, or bankruptcy, and in
my mind, cause a subsequent loss of the ultimate privilege of pleasing God with
a productive Christian life. Other people find themselves in situations
that I think extract even more of a constant vigilance, such as caring for
children with special needs, or caring for children at all in such a dangerous
culture and world. It is wearing on people in ways that I think no one
else ever understands, even when other people are living their own lives of
hyper-vigilance. And I think that it can be confusing when there are
official mental health symptom labels that by definition suggest that maybe
some vigilance isn't justified, though most people assessing those symptoms
usually do have some clue about the true suffering.
But
what I am saying is that people are misunderstood when the unreasonableness of
the persecution or the excessive responsibility makes people think that the
emotional reaction of total fear or constant alertness is what is
unreasonable. Frankly, church people make this mistake very often, and I
also think a lot of mindfulness people who lead meditations where they
literally say things like "you have no problems" and "everything
is how it is meant to be" are even worse than the bad Christian
counselors. But the fact is that you are supposed to be scared when a giant
python is squeezing the life out of you or your loved ones, or when a society
of thousands gang up on you to take everything you have as soon as you acquire
anything, or when an evil government holds your people hostage and grants
little moments of relief in exchange for a gradual compromise of everything you
believe in. Some evil warrants sheer terror, and some people are
terrorized not just in horrible events but in their everyday lives for years.
People who say that there's nothing to worry about are unworthy of what has
been preserved by the monitoring and endurance of depressed people, and many of
us have been so burnt by our own brain chemicals that we simply don't have any
energy left to feel sorry for the shamefully ignorant people who told us that
it was a sin to be anxious.
