Ep28 - But Isn’t Anxiety a Sin?
A common thread through many of the stories we share is our guests’ experiences of being told that their anxiety or other mental health struggles are a faith issue, not a mental one.
With a growing awareness of the reality and prevalence of mental health struggles, are there really people who don’t believe that mental illnesses can be a sign of our fallen world, and are instead the result of wilful disobedience to God?
Today we’re chatting with Lara d’Entremont, a young woman who grappled with being told that her anxiety disorder meant she was living in sin; refusing to trust in God.
Lara is from a remote part of Canada, and grew up in the faith even though her parents aren’t believers. But from a young age, as anxiety became part of her life, being taught that anxiety is sin took a grip on her heart and mind that made her question her salvation.
In trying to work through this, Lara ended up down a particular branch of Christianity that believed that faith and mental health diagnoses, psychologists, and all of the ‘secular’ concepts of mental health were completely at odds — and the two could not coexist together.
Lara tells her story of struggling through unhelpful teachings about her anxiety, and of the damage it ended up causing to both her mental health and her faith. Ultimately, Lara shares how she discovered that God’s truth does allow us to seek medical treatment for mental illness, and how it enabled her to blend her faith and mental health journeys together.
From the outset, we want to note that this episode talks about Biblical Counselling, because that’s what Lara was studying at the time. But ‘biblical counselling’ is a bit of a catch-all term that can refer to a whole range of different approaches, and while Lara has personally experienced harmful teaching in the name of biblical counselling, those teachings aren’t what most of us would consider biblical counselling to represent.
In a future episode, we’re going to be interviewing a biblical counsellor directly to hear more about what they practise, and how they approach using God’s Word to counsel and encourage people who may be struggling. But for now, it’s important to remember that Lara’s story in this episode is just one person’s experience, and isn’t demonstrative of biblical counselling as a whole.
Lara has recently published a book called ‘A Mother Held: Essays on Motherhood and Anxiety’, which you can take a look at here. You can also check out more of Lara’s story in her two pieces on our blog, called ‘I’m Haunted by Intrusive Thoughts’ and ‘When Unruly Thoughts Refuse to Be Taken Captive’.