I was born into a loving family with wonderful parents and four siblings. We lived at an institution where my parents served as staff. Unfortunately, being raised in this atmosphere set me up for emotional difficulties. For many years, guilt was a constant in my life.

GUILT

At school I was taught the same principles and values as my parents taught, but somehow the school’s teaching led me to think of God as someone who was out to punish me. Being a sensitive girl, this led to an unhealthy guilt. Interspersed through all the good times I had as a kid were these nagging feelings in the back of my mind.

Even as I reached adulthood and beyond, I never got over my guilt issues. They haunted me, sometimes worse than others, as when our eldest son was unwell from birth and died a year later. In my mind, I thought perhaps I was being punished for something I had done wrong.

Finally, when our two living sons were seven and five years of age, my life crumbled to the ground. The tipping point to what had now become anxiety and depression was a tragedy that took place in our small town. All the emotions came in full force, and I could not rise above it.

But I realized that I needed to find my way out of this and couldn’t rely on anyone else to fix my problems. I needed to find my own answers, began to look at my symptoms, read and did research on what could be wrong with me, and found that obsessive thinking was actually an imbalance. Along this journey, I received help in the form of medication. As the days went by, we became cautiously optimistic that I was recovering.

GRACE

I came to discover that the right kind of guilt brings about positive change, not rumination over past wrongs. God was not standing over me with a whip, ready to punish me for something. Instead, he was extending me grace and I have not questioned this fact since that time.

When a person thinks obsessively, they try over and over to think their way out of a problem, when, in fact, the opposite actually brings relief and normal thought patterns.

Letting go and letting the medication do its work brought the relief I needed.