Mental health and the Spiritual Exercises

Ignatius' depression, anxiety and suicide ideation

Ignatius of Loyola is known for many things. For instance, his encounters with Christ and desire to help others in theirs led to him giving spiritual direction in what became The Spiritual Exercises. From this and his belief of God being at work in the world flowed the formation of the Jesuits, a society with an immense 500-year global impact on education, mission, and charitable works.

What people are less likely to know is that Ignatius suffered bouts of depression and anxiety and contemplated suicide. But Ignatius got better. His prayer life and development of The Spiritual Exercises resulted in better mental health and well-being for him and others. People are discovering how Ignatian Spirituality overlaps with contemporary psychology.

It should not surprise us that ways of praying can align with good psychological health. Empirical research is being conducted on how the Ignatian Examen can benefit mental health. The four D's of Ignatian spirituality - Discovery, Detachment, Discernment, and Direction - are being mapped against secular psychotherapy.

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises are so wonderfully person-centred and on an emotionally healthy spirituality. Some things we can readily glean and apply in our own lives that are within good mental health practices and the Exercises include:

• Talking & Colloquy: The core of the exercises is talking to God and talking with someone else (a spiritual director). The Exercises are also full of opportunities for reflection and to notice our self-talk. Conversation is how we find meaning and understanding in therapy; the same is true with God. The Ignatian Exercises call the conversation with God a colloquy, i.e. an intimate conversation.

• Differentiation & Attachments: We are not our feelings. It is good to notice them and explore them. Paying attention to our moods is central to Ignatian Spirituality. Where modern psychology explores our attachments, the Ignatian Exercises likewise focus on noticing and letting go of false attachments. 

• Commitment & Acting Against: Central to many therapies is choosing to act around values and not to give in to feelings, to commit and take action around something meaningful and purposeful. Part of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is the notion and practice of Agere Contra. The term comes from the Latin, meaning 'to act against' or 'to act otherwise. In other words, we deliberately choose to go against our natural inclinations when those inclinations are moving us away from God.

• Awareness/Acceptance & The Examen: Good mental health emerges from awareness and acceptance. Once we know how and why we think and feel, we can accept those things and come to terms with them. Accepting emotions and feelings that may feel out of your control and mindfully accepting their experience is necessary for well-being. Built into the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is a practice that stands on its own, called The Examen. It involves a few minutes every day to pause and reflect on our day, how we have thought, felt, and experienced life and consider how we will live in response to those reflections with God.

• Hope & Election: A dynamic of many therapies is learning to think differently about the future, a practice called prospection. Prospection is about changing negative anticipations for the future for more objective and healthy imaginations. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises have something called an Election as part of them. The election of the exercises is a way to imaginatively consider our past, present, and future with God. Who has God made me to be and wants to show me so I might say yes to his future for me?

• Overspiritualising, Consolation and Desolation: On the one hand, we can over-psychologise our lives and avoid any reference to the spiritual. Then, on the other is the danger of over-spiritualising and making everything we suffer about the spiritual attack and the demonic. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises contain a comprehensive discernment process to examine our moods and explore how they are a mixture of many things. From false attachments, bad habits, real suffering and also, at times, the demonic.  

Encountering Christ and Mental Health

The suggestions above do not claim that spiritual exercises are the only place to meet God or that prayer is the only practice aligned with good mental health. However, they are one mode of spirituality and prayer for encountering God that has good mental health habits built into them.  

It is not just that the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises overlap and correlate with good mental health practices. In Ignatius's understanding of the exercises, Ignatius believed that people practising them really met with God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And I have had the same experience.  

Gethsemane: Don't fall asleep

When I undertook the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, there was a point when I got to a mediation on Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. At the time of making this meditation, I was suffering greatly from anxiety. Amid all things COVID and some awful church conflicts, my anxiety had flared. I have known anxiety since I was a young boy. It was a coping mechanism to keep me alert to the danger of abuse. But it took root as a coping mechanism that often anticipates more danger than there really is. It is hard to describe anxiety to someone who does not suffer from it. For me, a deep dread overtakes my whole being with a sense of impending doom. The hardest thing about anxiety for me is that my sense of God's presence recedes and, at times, disappears completely.

As I read the passages about Jesus in Gethsemane, I imagined I was there, with the disciples watching. Jesus was in anguish, and for the disciples, this was too much for them. Until this moment, Jesus had been the calm in the storm of everything. Yet here he was, sweating blood and asking God if he could avoid what was happening. I saw the disciples shut down. Their sleep was not from tiredness but sheer overwhelm. Luke 22 tells us it was 'sorrow' that caused them to fall asleep. Overcome with anxiety and grief, they froze and switched off.

I noticed Jesus turn to look at me. In my prayerimagings, I hear the Lord say to me, 'Don't fall asleep. I need you to stay awake this time.' His voice was kind, an invitation and not a rebuke. He continued. "You fell asleep twice before. I need you to stay awake this time and share this with me."

A question formed in my mind, 'How and when did I fall asleep, Lord?"

Then he showed me. The first time was when I was thirty. I had a significant breakdown. Being bi-vocational with three kids, I had dealt with my anxiety by being a workaholic. I woke up one morning to have what I did not realise was a major panic attack. Those next few months, all I could do was hold a bible to my chest as I went to bed each night, my wife having to sit next to me, holding my hand with the light on until I went to sleep. The Lord graciously brought me through that time with much healing and understanding of my mental health and my faith.

Then, when I was forty, both my parents took their own lives, six months apart from each other. Estranged from each other for many years, the abuse and all that troubled them manifested in their suicides. Their last communications to me were letters saying what an awful son I was and blaming me for their condition in life. Even though in therapy, I had foreseen how their lives might end, the impact of this plunged me into the darkest of depression. In many ways, I fell asleep to myself at that moment and stumbled through the motions of life until the Lord woke me up.

So, in this moment of prayer and colloquy with Jesus in the garden, I walked up to him, kneeled with him, and held his hand. I felt him shaking in anguish, knowing that he felt the anxiety that was shaking me. And I went back there to kneel with him, again and again and again. My anxiety lessened as I stayed awake with him, and the Lord did a beautiful work in me. Anxiety is still something I am prone to and might be this side of eternity. But now I know a mental health prayer practice to meet the Lord.