🎭 TREE 793: Anxiety 3 – remove cognitive dissonance

Here are the four things I know about anxiety. They come from personal experience. I’m not offering medical advice. I don’t know if the things that helped me will help you.

1. Treat anxiety as an illness

2. Get therapy

3. Remove cognitive dissonance

4. Quit caffeine

I stopped believing in God in 2011. I stopped being a pastor in 2016.

If I was a good and noble person, I would have quit being a pastor in 2011. Instead I was a scared person who didn’t know how he would feed his family if he quit. So I tried to split myself in two and carried on.

For the good people I served, I did my absolute best to teach them and work for them in accordance with their faith. I owed them that. My salary was paid by the money they gave to the church.

For myself, I tried wherever possible to not say things I didn’t believe. It wasn’t that possible.

Secretly believing one thing while living something else tore a hole in my mind. Depression and anxiety oozed right through. My therapist helped me understand that the only way for me to close the hole was to restore my internal wholeness. I had to quit my job. I did it in autumn 2016 with only a vague plan and no financial cushion. I finally quit going to church at the end of 2017. And then I was able to truly start being myself again.

In February this year, we finishing paying off the debt we incurred while I was underemployed for a few years. That was the price of my restored mental health. It was expensive. It was worth it.

Living with cognitive dissonance is bad for your health. Deal with it early and often. If you find yourself in a position like I was in, returning to wholeness will be difficult and expensive and absolutely 100% worth it.

If anyone from my old church in North Wales is reading this, I’m sorry that I didn’t step aside in 2011. I tried to do the best job that I could, but you deserved to have a children and families pastor who fully shared your beliefs. If you feel like there is anything left undone or unsaid, please feel free to reach out.

Grow slowly
Jeff