My Religious Doctor
Dammed if you do and Damned if you don’t
I met the new doctor, my regular guy being on holiday from the recovery ward.
Initially, I assumed a comfortableness speaking about my theist as opposed to deist philosophy, assuming I had a co-conspirator in this very Catholic hospital environment. I was informed rapidly and strongly that she was a very devout Catholic and that she saw no conflict with her science-evidence-based occupation.
So, I talked about myself and how religion was one of the strategies I had used in the past to deal with the symptoms of persistent anxiety. Strategies such as prayer and meditation to relieve the symptoms of anxiety that, as it became apparent, were caused by the self-downing of religious philosophy. Other strategies included drugs like ‘recreational’ pot, relationships, yoga, 12-step and obsessive art making.
Until I saw a family therapist for the situational depression I was in due to my terminally ill wife’s conservative family and friends used legal but immoral devices to throw me onto the street, closing my home-based business and art studio. They packed my tools, paints, and drawings of a lifetime off to the dump. Then they bulldozed my house with its 50-year apple trees and the pond dug by my deceased friend. I was ‘good for nothing’ in their assessment even though I, at age 40, completed 2 fine art degrees and a teaching certificate, all the while building a home-based micro archival picture framing business.
So I approached my spiritual communities for emotional help and was turned away for having nothing to offer them either.
I believed them.
So I lived in terror, constantly crying for 6 months. Eventually, I got referred to the cognitive therapist who began to teach me to seek evidence for my self-defeating beliefs.
He never mentioned it but I concluded that religion had taught me at a very young age to believe that I was an original sin sinner. It seemed that I was programmed by the religious program. I firmly believed that I was a loser, a thing that fails, an also-ran, a deadbeat, a defeated, disadvantaged, down-and-outer, dud, failure, flop, flunkee, has-been, underdog, and underprivileged, ignoring or undervaluing any accomplishment, achievement, or success.
So I researched and questioned until I found the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy REBT, Dr. Albert Ellis, and got on with the business of getting better: relatively un-over-anxious even though I suffered and am recovering from a major stroke and an attack on the street causing a broken hip and elbow.
Hence, the religious doctor and the recovery ward. As she left she reminded me to use the brakes on my wheelchair, undervaluing me the way religion had taught her to undervalue herself.
Still, old conditioning runs deep and anxiety in this situation was getting stronger. I accepted a Victims group’s invitation to counselling. There I encountered more of the undervaluing of the patient through the hierarchy typical of the church and academia. There were several instaces of not being listened to and when pointed out I recieved apologies of the don’t yell at me kind and none of the making amends kind. So seeing them as self defeating I fired them to look elsewhere.
So I took another look at the writings of my teacher, Albert Ellis and found this gem The Case Against Religion, which relieved my anxiety greatly: Acceptance of uncertainty. The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed — such a probabilistic, uncertain world is most conducive to free thought.
So, my mind has moved on to the ‘what good I can make of this’ stage. I live free from over-anxiety and am able to take reasonable risks to progress physically as I heal.
