Mental health recovery after CF.
Posted: Thu Apr 11, 2024 12:22 pm
I was recently asked the question. What mental health support is available after leaving Christian Fellowship and how can a psychiatrist and psychologist help you?
I was born into the Christian Fellowship. This is an important point to consider as I had no reference point to life other than what the leaders told me. I say this because my challenges are different from someone who was forced in by someone or choose to go in themselves. Before I started School I had been indoctrinated 3 times over through the Sonseekers program. By the time I started school I had strong suicide ideation. I have carried these thoughts well into my adult life. Looking back on my childhood and teenage years I can clearly see I struggled with chronic depression for most of my life although, we weren’t allowed to acknowledge such things as mental health because “Christians can’t have mental health problems, mental health is just a symptom of lack of faith and not being obedient…” During my last 18 months in CF these thoughts ramped up again to the point where I was pleading with God to take my life. I officially left Easter 2018 although I had been emotionally checked out since 2017. I started to rebuild my new life. For a while things were going well until the excommunication started to really impact me. The despair grew so much that I had 3 attempts at taking my life. This was just before my wife and I found out she was pregnant. I was admitted to a mental health hospital and was there majority of her pregnancy. I was put under the care of a Psychiatrist and Clinical Psychologist who treat a lot of veterans with PTSD. My diagnosis (as is with most cult survivors) is Complex PTSD, the difference being (in laymen’s terms) , complex PTSD is multiple interwoven traumas oppose to PTSD which can be identified as a singular event such as a car crash.
My psychiatrist did the usual first line of treatment with medication. Then started me on bilateral TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) this is similar to ECT except it uses magnetic pulses not electricity. The purpose was teach my brain to function normally. It reduced anxiety on the right side and stimulated the left for depression. During my stay in hospital, I completed 2 full rounds of this. My unmedical explanation of this TMS stabilised my brain so that I could do the actual processing of the trauma. It was not a cure but part of the solution.
My psychologist did a couple of things. The first was allow me to talk and just let my story out. The therapeutic work though was to do a therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which helps resolve the trauma. Certain memories are connected and so it can take a number of sessions to work through a particular web. I can not stress enough how important the therapeutic relationship needs to be in order to do this work.
Why did I go down this path and not seek healing through prayer? Firstly because I tried. I sought God with prayer, fasting, laying on of hands, none of it helped. The priest at our local church gave me some food for thought. He said “ Do you think modern medicine is a gift from God?” I didn’t understand what he meant so he explained. God has given humans a high functioning brain. He has also given people the ability to study and understand things and find cures for disease and illness. So do you think trusting Drs is actually apart of God’s healing for you?” The more I thought about this the more it resonated with me.
Coming out of CF leaves a person broken and often in despair. It’s a lonely place being excommunicated and at hard very hard to see the way forward. In a word the future is hopeless. I found it difficult to even consider the possibility of seeking mental health support because of what we were made to believe. Its was only through circumstance that I was forced to get help. My testimony is that there is a way out of this darkness. I don’t want to dismiss anyone’s personal journey of recovery but this is my story. Now I am married and have a son, working again, engaging in hobbies, attending our local church as I feel led. I don’t have it all together but I can say with confidence that if you are willing to do the work God will meet you and the shackles of CF will fall away one by one.
I was born into the Christian Fellowship. This is an important point to consider as I had no reference point to life other than what the leaders told me. I say this because my challenges are different from someone who was forced in by someone or choose to go in themselves. Before I started School I had been indoctrinated 3 times over through the Sonseekers program. By the time I started school I had strong suicide ideation. I have carried these thoughts well into my adult life. Looking back on my childhood and teenage years I can clearly see I struggled with chronic depression for most of my life although, we weren’t allowed to acknowledge such things as mental health because “Christians can’t have mental health problems, mental health is just a symptom of lack of faith and not being obedient…” During my last 18 months in CF these thoughts ramped up again to the point where I was pleading with God to take my life. I officially left Easter 2018 although I had been emotionally checked out since 2017. I started to rebuild my new life. For a while things were going well until the excommunication started to really impact me. The despair grew so much that I had 3 attempts at taking my life. This was just before my wife and I found out she was pregnant. I was admitted to a mental health hospital and was there majority of her pregnancy. I was put under the care of a Psychiatrist and Clinical Psychologist who treat a lot of veterans with PTSD. My diagnosis (as is with most cult survivors) is Complex PTSD, the difference being (in laymen’s terms) , complex PTSD is multiple interwoven traumas oppose to PTSD which can be identified as a singular event such as a car crash.
My psychiatrist did the usual first line of treatment with medication. Then started me on bilateral TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) this is similar to ECT except it uses magnetic pulses not electricity. The purpose was teach my brain to function normally. It reduced anxiety on the right side and stimulated the left for depression. During my stay in hospital, I completed 2 full rounds of this. My unmedical explanation of this TMS stabilised my brain so that I could do the actual processing of the trauma. It was not a cure but part of the solution.
My psychologist did a couple of things. The first was allow me to talk and just let my story out. The therapeutic work though was to do a therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which helps resolve the trauma. Certain memories are connected and so it can take a number of sessions to work through a particular web. I can not stress enough how important the therapeutic relationship needs to be in order to do this work.
Why did I go down this path and not seek healing through prayer? Firstly because I tried. I sought God with prayer, fasting, laying on of hands, none of it helped. The priest at our local church gave me some food for thought. He said “ Do you think modern medicine is a gift from God?” I didn’t understand what he meant so he explained. God has given humans a high functioning brain. He has also given people the ability to study and understand things and find cures for disease and illness. So do you think trusting Drs is actually apart of God’s healing for you?” The more I thought about this the more it resonated with me.
Coming out of CF leaves a person broken and often in despair. It’s a lonely place being excommunicated and at hard very hard to see the way forward. In a word the future is hopeless. I found it difficult to even consider the possibility of seeking mental health support because of what we were made to believe. Its was only through circumstance that I was forced to get help. My testimony is that there is a way out of this darkness. I don’t want to dismiss anyone’s personal journey of recovery but this is my story. Now I am married and have a son, working again, engaging in hobbies, attending our local church as I feel led. I don’t have it all together but I can say with confidence that if you are willing to do the work God will meet you and the shackles of CF will fall away one by one.