The Story of a Cure: Anxiety, Depression, and Panic with David and Psalm 59

Episode Transcript:

Hello and thank you for joining me on Loving the Imperfect. I’m Brianne Turczynski. I am your host. I am a teacher, a writer, an author, I’m a documentarian filmmaker and I started this show to have the classroom I always wanted and to share with you some of my stories, some of my experiences. If you have any questions about anything I’ve talked about please feel free to contact me through my website, http://www.Lovingtheimperfect.com. There is a contact page otherwise, I do most of my social media on Instagram and Facebook, and you can contact me there too. Today’s episode we will cover Psalm 59. This is the last Psalm of David this season. 

There are 17 verses. Psalm 59:
  

Deliver me from my enemies Oh God be my fortress against those who are attacking me deliver me from evildoers and save me from those who are after my blood.  See how they lie and wait for me. Fierce men conspire against me.  For no offense or sin of mine, Lord.  I have done no wrong.

Yet they are ready to attack me.  Arise to help me. Look on my plight. You, Lord God Almighty. You who are the God of Israel. Amen. Rouse yourself to punish all the nations. Show no mercy to the wicked traitors. They return in the evening, snarling like dogs and prowl about the city. See what they spew from their mouths.

The words from their lips are sharp as swords. And they think, who can hear us? But you laugh at them, Lord. You scoff at all the nations. You are my strength. I watch for you. You, God, are my fortress.  My God, on whom I can rely.  God will go before me and will let me gloat over those who slander me.  But do not kill them, Lord, our shield.

Or my people will forget.  In your might, uproot them and bring them down for the sins of their mouths, for the words of their lips. Let them be caught in their pride for the curses and lies they utter. Consume them in your wrath, consume them till they are no more, then it will be known to the ends of the earth that God rules over Jacob. 

They return in the evening snarling like dogs and prowl about the city. They wander about for food and howl if not satisfied. But I will sing of your strength in the morning. I will sing of your love.  For you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble.  You are my strength. I sing praise to you. You, God, are my fortress, my God on whom I can rely. 

Okay, so I want to take you through the wilderness with me if you’re willing to come along. You might consider this journey a bit taxing emotionally, and if so, please click off this episode. 

I have told you before about the panic attacks and the anxiety I endured for seven years.  I want to tell you more about that if you’ll allow me.

And I only want to do this because I think it might help someone out there listening.

I am cured of them, but I wasn’t cured by pills. Though I had a bottle of anxiety pills on hand in case it got bad, but I never took them. And I’m not saying anything against taking pills, just for me, I chose not to at this time in my life. Before having these attacks, I had never in my life had any depression or anxiety, and if I’m being honest, I never understood it when other people had depression and anxiety. I would hear of people being depressed and I would sort of just to my shame. I thought, well, there’s so many things to be happy about. How could you be depressed?   Now that I have experienced it myself, I’ll tell you truthfully, it is a wonder anyone makes it out alive when they have these severe mental traumas. Like anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.

Mine were not the typical—I don’t think—not the typical panic and anxiety that others have described to me or that I have read on the internet. They were what I call agoraphobic panic attacks. I’ve said that before, and I kind of I think I made that up. I don’t know.

It means fear would grip me and just like the psalm of David, it felt like something was after me. Like something was lurking in the shadows and it came every night for seven years. 

Sometimes the attacks would come in the daytime too. Sometimes they’d come in the morning.  Sometimes they’d come when I was sitting at the dinner table surrounded by family. It would just come over me. There was no telling. It had no schedule. 

 I’ve read on the internet that panic attacks are only supposed to last for 20 minutes or something like that. Mine lasted sometimes a whole day or three days or hours. 

And it wasn’t like my heart was beating very fast. It wasn’t like that. 

It was just this intense feeling that I wasn’t safe. Even though I was sleeping next to my husband or sitting around the dinner table with people that loved me. I use the word panic because in my mind I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t.

It’s like you’re trying to find a hiding place before it comes over you, and you can’t. So that’s where I get that word panic because I was panicking to try to run away from it to get away from it all the time. I’ve spoken about this briefly in past episodes. It felt like I was losing my mind a lot of the time when it came. I didn’t know it would last only seven years. I thought it would last my whole life. And this thought ripped the joy out of me. And I began to go down that dark narrow hole with thoughts of ending my life. I was never actively seeking to end my life. It would just come over me. Like, I just can’t do this anymore. If this is going to be my life, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to go. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stand this.

It was more like that sort of thought. Because I no longer was living. I was no longer living.  

The simplicity of life that I once loved was gone. And what’s worse, for someone like me who always loved being alone and loved being with my own thoughts and using my imagination, I suddenly didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts anymore for fear that I would slip into that dark place. And I could never talk about it with my family because mentioning it at all triggered these attacks.  So, my ailment trapped and silenced me.  And because of this imprisonment, I went deeper into myself. Deeper to find God within me.  The power, I thought, could help me. The only resource that I really had because I couldn’t talk about it. So, I needed to access my heart. I needed to access the life force within me, which only came through meditation. And through this journey, as I was passing through this, I did meet saints and angels. I was visited by the blessed mother, and St. Therese of Lisieux, and by Jesus, and had experiences from people who had passed over.  And this gave me the confidence to keep going, that maybe all was not lost. 

And I believe that’s a reason I had these experiences was to help me get through this thing. I learned a lot in those years. And I think what I learned was truth and how the spirit of love was working in my life. 

So, I wanted to do this episode to give other people hope that are maybe experiencing this sort of darkness. I was actively seeking help from the mystical, from my prayers, that’s all I had. I couldn’t even go see a counselor or I would have to go through hell in my head. 

The only way I could do it was just keep praying and stay on the side of God all the time, because that was light. Having these experiences with certain beings—and you can believe me or not, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was taught lessons, and those lessons I’ve been talking about in all my episodes. So, good came out of it, I think. I hope that this podcast is inspiring for some of you, or at least helpful, or at least fun to listen to, or at least beautiful.

I was visited by certain people, and they taught me how to listen with the ears of my heart and see with the eyes of my heart, and I really started to listen and see. And slowly, after I had learned many things, the anxiety and panic loosened its grip.

I lay in bed one night and I could feel a big one coming on, and it was a big one, and I thought, this would be the end of me, and then I remembered the words of my mother. She had told me years before to just let it wash over me when I managed to tell her a little bit of what I was going through, she said, just let it wash over you. And I could never remember her words during it because panic does that. It stifles your brain and makes it freeze up. 

And you don’t know what to do.  And all you can do is try to hide or run away from the attack, but you can’t.  This time as I laid there in bed, her words got through to me. Just as the feeling was taking hold, I intentionally allowed it to swallow me to swallow me whole. And I relaxed.  And I allowed it to take me without a fight. And it washed over me like water. Like a blessed stream. And I was cured. I could feel it. I could feel that it had lost all its power. 

So, I want to help people going through this. I want to tell them that it won’t last forever, this, that you’re going through. I really think that our bodies need to work through chemical imbalances that come to us sometimes. Could be hormonal. Could be from our environments. And what we’re going through.

In my case, these attacks were a manifestation of grief, because we had gone through some family things, and the grief that I wasn’t dealing with ended up manifesting in these panic and anxiety attacks. I don’t know if dealing with my grief head on would have prevented it. I just think that maybe it’s something my body needed to go through.

I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me. There is, of course, much more to the story, including what I call the three months of tears that I went through. Tears are healing. 

They’re like sweat, but I think 10 times better than sweat. They say work out to get the stress out and get whatever’s going on out of your body, but I think it’s crying that does this. Its crying will heal us faster than exercise will, because I was working out every day and that wasn’t doing it. 

Instead, I cried for three months every single day, sometimes locking myself in the bathroom and sobbing for like an hour. It’s just uncontrollable. I don’t know. It would just come over me and it just stayed until it was finished and I had no control at all. I really think that those three months of tears helped cleanse my body and prepare it for this final breakthrough.

And from a mystical perspective, tears are prayers. Just like trees, trees are also prayers. God’s prayers for us, the trees. Nature’s prayers for us. During that time, the trees were very healing for me, and they were my silent elder friends and witnesses. I felt that they knew just as I knew what I was going through.

When I would take my walks at night, I never felt alone because they were there with me. And the stars and the moon were there. Which is the same moon that Jesus and Muhammad and Gandhi and all the saints look to often for consolation and a sense of oneness with creation. 

 And we all do the same when we look at the moon. When you really think about it, we’re all thinking about a sense of oneness when we look at the moon. It’s deep in us, that thought. It’s subconscious. But it’s in us, I think.

Because we know that it connects us. 

It connects us all, generation upon generation.  In the moon and in the stars and in the trees.  In these elements, I felt that God was truly there. The spirit of love was truly there, walking with me   like David wrote in this psalm, though an enemy was after him, he wrote, you are my strength.

I sing praise to you. You, God, are my fortress. My God on whom I can rely. 

So that is my story, a small part of it and though David was dealing with someone that was actually hunting him down, Saul was hunting him down. In this Psalm, Saul had sent men to watch David’s house.  He knew he was trying to kill him and that must’ve been scary. I’ve never had anyone physically hunting me down, but mentally, I understand that that is a scary thing when you never feel safe. 

Thank you for listening to my story and giving me the space to tell this story. I do want to give others hope going through something like that, that it doesn’t last forever.

Your body will heal from it. You’re passing through it. And you have a lot to learn from this, from whatever it is you’re going through. Take a moment to realize that and be intentional about how you want to heal yourself. You must help your body. The other thing that I learned is that to this day, even though I’m cured, I must be careful about what I expose myself to. 

So, I can’t read certain things, watch certain things on TV, I can’t watch certain movies, and I won’t listen to certain music. So, I must protect my mind from certain things that might trigger it.  And even though I won’t get attacked again, it still brings up certain traumatic memories that have remained with me. And I think it’s important. I must even be careful about what I eat and what I drink. And in a lot of cases with me, I just needed to sleep. 

So, it’s important to realize what’s going on in your body, try to heal your body, help your body, protect your body, protect your mind, heal your mind. And we can do that by going back into the garden. We can do that through nature, through tears, through meditation through prayers, and sleep. That’s what worked for me. And realizing what it is that caused it in the first place. Let all these feelings wash over you. 

I hope these stories and teachings from Scripture are, at the very least, interesting and give you something to think about every week. I am learning new things, too, every time I do this. I thank you, everyone who’s listening for giving me the opportunity to share my stories with you and look deeper into the Psalms, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. With everything I say, don’t take my word for it. Go find the answer on your own. If you have a question about something that I say, I’m not saying that I’m right. These are my observations. My observations of God and my observations from my own experience and that’s all I have. And I hope it helps. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but I hope it helps you. I hope that I bring up some books and some people that you’ll look more deeply at and maybe find inspiration in them as well for your own life.

That’s it. Thank you for joining me today. Next week’s psalm is 66 by an anonymous author. So, join me then as we journey into some new teachings. Have a good rest of your week. Bye bye.