Identity Abandonment
On January 4th, 2024, Republican presidential contender and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley posted this real clunker on Twitter (X):
This unfortunate tweet (X-cretion?) illustrates a number of the bizarre ways in which people talk about emotional affliction nowadays. First off, she equates mental health issues with cancer. This is one of those faux empathetic postures, in which people perform their equanimity by insisting that grave disturbances of the mind and spirit are exactly the same as terminal physical illnesses (i.e. solely a medical problem) and that there should be no more shame or stigma in treating depression than there is in treating a broken leg. The other is that she implies that mental “health” in itself is a problem. I have heard other people use this wording — a classmate alluding to someone’s absence and saying, in whispered tones, “she has mental health.” Why do people say that a person who is psychologically afflicted “has mental health” rather than “has a mental health issue?” Isnt’ the term “mental health” rather ridiculous in itself? It is reminiscent of the more archaic term, “mental hygiene,” often used to describe government departments and agencies and evoking an image (at least to me) of someone dumping Listerine all over their head, as if one could keep one’s brain clean.
In recent years we have started to see traditional religious ideas influence economic policy and sexual politics, even in a subtle and sometimes unspoken way. The notion of the common good has become important in discussions of how a healthy capitalism can function, and the desire to be chaste, or even celibate, is no longer seen as an eccentricity. Isn’t it time, then, that we acknowledge that many of the symptoms of modern mental illness are actually afflictions of the soul? That there is such a thing as the soul, and that it cannot be completely soothed with pills or intake charts that list the symptoms a person “presents” with? What if one’s symptoms are something “presented” by God, as a means to bring us closer to Him, as an effort or last-ditch plea to bring us back into His fold?
The problem is that this has been tried before. And yet the way we think of mental health has only ballooned outward into an even more medicalized bureaucracy. Plenty of people on the left, right, and center are questioning therapeutic culture, but people like Nikki Haley continue to insist that our hearts are broken because “we don’t have enough therapists.”
In the 1990s, arguably the zenith of American economic and cultural power, two books were written that attempted to work ancient religious ideas into our understanding of psychological health. The first, “Care of the Soul” by former Catholic monastic Thomas Moore, became a bestseller after its publication in 1992. The second, “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart,” came out in 1998 and was authored by Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein. Both books attempt to fill in the holes left by conventional mental health treatment. There is a common message, though it appears in different language.
Epstein, a doctor raised in a Jewish family who discovered Buddhist meditation in his youth and found that it greatly alleviated his anxiety and sense of alienation, writes a section called “Being Nobody” in a chapter called “Surrender.” Although many people perceive the aim of therapy to be a bolstering of self-esteem, he notes, or a “building up [of] the ego,” most patients actually come to him because “they are unhappy with how cut off they feel, not because they are not separate or individuated enough.” The book’s back cover explains that in Western psychology, “the ideal is a strong, individuated self.” But what suffering Westerners need, Epstein suggests, is actually a dissolution of the hardened identities they have worked to build. What the Buddha taught, he explains, is that the self is “never real,” or that in the words of Ram Dass, “you’re not who you think you are.” The foremost truth about the nature of the self is actually its “fundamental unreality.” Epstein draws from child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, whose thinking on the psychology of mysticism held that a withdrawal from the world could conversely produce a “gain in terms of feeling real.” The role of a good mother, according to Winnicott, was to provide an environment in which a child could feel “safe to be nobody.” This is the opposite of the kind of achievement-oriented acquisitiveness that characterizes the American mind. And yet it is strangely in tune with Christ’s teaching that instead of boasting before God of one’s accomplishments and sacrifices, as the Pharisee does in Luke 18:12, it is holier to simply stand in the back of the temple and say: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Moore, for his part, distinguishes between spirit and soul. Conceding that America is actually highly spiritual, concerned with “heroic” ideas of “self-improvement” and “emotional health,” he wonders whether it is the murkier, more ambiguous realm of the soul that has gone missing. “Mainstream psychology,” he explains, occupies itself with construction of “self-concept.” But even something like the upright “championing of independence” may constitute “a move against” soul. Speaking of a therapy client who begs him to rid her of her dependence on others, he feels that he is being asked to cut away or eradicate something sacred. His client has simply always assumed that “independence is healthy and that we should correct the soul when it shows some desire for dependence.” But this is not what is known as the “negative way” of the mystics, Moore notes, which acknowledges that “an opening into divinity [is] only made possible by giving up.”
I recently spoke with someone who works for the newly instituted suicide and crisis hotline, 988. A trained peer specialist rather than a counselor, whom callers can request if they want to talk with someone who’s “been there,” she told me that the main reason people call is unbearable loneliness. They want desperately to make friends, but connections don’t gel. They’re not typically dealing with low self-esteem or major psychiatric depression or anxiety, but they feel terribly alone. Many people now work from home and the life they were expecting to “return to normal” after the pandemic has not resurfaced. The peer worker observed, however, that most people expect immediate results and an immediate gratification of their desires — in other words, a hasty eradication of their suffering. If they join a gym and have not made a new friend after a month, they are indignant. This longing for others is so distasteful that it cannot be tolerated long enough for a shift to take place.
If books like “Care of the Soul” and “Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart” became bestsellers during the 90s, showing that there was hunger for an infusion of genuine spirituality into the realm of mental health, and suggesting that somewhere in the storm of psychological and financial acquisitiveness there was a simultaneous yearning to let go of stringent self-definition, why have we become even more identitarian in the following decades? As it has become harder to afford groceries, or buy a house, or pursue an advanced degree, are we now clinging to hard markers of identity instead, as if they could provide us with some sense of accomplishment or security? Why, for fuck’s sake, is it so important to distinguish oneself as an “Evangelical” or a “strong Black woman” or a “fifth-generation Texan” or “neurodivergent?” Isn’t this making us sick? Isn’t this bad for our mental health?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” in 1841, a soaring, defiant, profoundly American essay that I used to love. I found a copy of it the other day, full of pencil marks from years ago. I was taught according to the nature of this essay. I was raised on these ideas. But looking at it now, I almost feel sick. I don’t know if some of these sentences are the words of a great Transcendentalist or phrases sewn onto a pillow sold at Target or a headline on Oprah.com. “Trust thyself.” Ok, but what if I’m wrong? “I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.” You go, girl! “Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause.” Ugh. Emerson sings the praises of the “self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.” But what if I can’t be all things to myself? And then, the real clunker, just as bad as Nikki Haley’s tweet: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Well, that’s definitely not true.
Ian Marcus Corbin writes in an essay called “America Unraveled” that “when a vision grows stale for a people, they may yet be pressured to mouth allegiance to it, but they cannot be forced to believe in it.” We need a new Emerson, he says, or a Thoreau, or an MLK, someone who can envision what it means to be American now and “articulate it in a way that captures the hearts of 300 million-plus people” — someone who will ask “who we are and what we care about together, and answer in a way that makes our belongings feel strong, deeply bonded. None of this will be simple or quick.”
I lost myself, and was found. —The Spiritual Canticle of Saint John of the Cross
Is the mental health crisis real? Or is it just another “crisis,” meant to create “awareness,” a campaign “that conveniently dovetails with the institutional push for therapy access,” as Carmel Richardson writes in The American Conservative? Is humanity struggling with despair and fear and disturbances of the spirit any more than it always has? A recent Cambridge University study showed that people of faith experienced far less distress (almost 30%) during the Covid era and its resulting lockdowns than secular people. What is more, those who rated higher on the religiosity scale experienced even less distress. The findings suggest “that it is not just being religious, but the intensity of religiosity that is important when coping with a crisis,” according to the study’s co-author.
But if this is true, why do we see such despair and drug use in rural areas of the United States, where people are more likely to be religious? So-called experts will point to the perceived pride of rural Americans and their supposed reluctance to ask for help, as if the dignity of earning one’s own living were not something naturally to be desired. But when the necessary conditions for earning a living disappear from your community due to forces beyond your control, and your whole life you’ve been taught nothing but “self-reliance,” how are you supposed to respond?
And which “self” are we supposed to be relying on, anyway? The deep, intuitive voice of the genuine Self, and the wisdom that dwells quietly within each person? The “self” that is full of delusions, arrogance, and misperceptions, that sometimes needs to be corrected by others? The “self” for which we are instructed to “care” by purchasing pedicure kits at Walgreens?
Maybe America needs to let go of its identity. Dependence is a dirty word to us, more associated with addiction and geriatric diapers than trust or stability. There are good kinds of dependence and bad kinds, but to be dependent for an American feels like a wound. Writing of the ideologies he left behind when he grew beyond his roots, Matthew Sitman shared in Dissent Magazine that “suffering was ultimately the result of bad choices. You were, in the most profound sense, on your own.” And that he came to believe that “it does not have to be this way.”
I don’t have answers to the questions I’m asking. I only know that clinging to identity is exhausting, and that the real liberation comes with letting go of hard categories. I’m also resistant to using God as a tool, to simply exclaim that religion is the answer to the mental health crisis, real or not, as though the Lord were simply another utilitarian tactic in the problem-fixing kit.
God is bigger than that. And one of the most radical things one can do today — truly, a real resistance — is to sit quietly in God’s presence, producing nothing, demanding nothing. No quick fix. No solutions. Just His presence, and to know, and be known.
Several weeks ago I read about the death by execution of Kenneth Smith, a man who had been on death row for a while and had already survived one execution attempt in 2022. NPR had a good interview in which he stated that when they tried the first time and it didn’t work, he was “strapped down, couldn't catch my breath. I was shaking like a leaf. I was absolutely alone in a room full of people, and not one of them tried to help me at all, and I was crying out for help.” He speaks almost like a monk, talking about his “brothers” who have lived in the cells around him and what they must feel like when “going through this.” When you Google his Wikipedia page, the results show his name, followed immediately by “(criminal).” Kenneth Smith (criminal). Imagine being known by — your very name becoming — the worst thing you ever did.
When I learned about his death I sat down and said a rosary for him. And by the time I got to the end, I had a strange sort of vision of his risen body floating out of the chair, or gurney, or wherever they had him. His spirit was completely free and light. No more pain or blame.
No one is their “identity.” None of these things — “criminal,” “trans,” “Republican,” — can ever explain the wholeness of a person or know him as he is known by his Creator. A Prayer of Abandonment by saint and hermit Charles de Foucauld contains these lines: “I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will … I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself.” In the end the only identity that truly matters is to be a beloved child of God. I do not like going against Emerson; I am a proud American, after all. But self-reliance has made me sick, and what I am seeking is total dependence on the One who knows me, and embrace of others.