Dancing with Bipolar Bears: Living in Joy Despite Illness

Dancing with Bipolar

Bears

Living in Joy Despite Illness

by

Dr. James E. McReynolds

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Dancing with Bipolar Bears Living in Joy Despite Illness

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by James E. McReynolds

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the

publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

For information address: iUniverse, Inc. 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100 Lincoln, NE 68512 www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-30610-1

ISBN: 978-1-4620-9046-4(ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

This book is affectionately dedicated to John Killinger

Professor, preacher, writer, and loyal friend, whose enthusiasm for my ministry has encouraged me to serve as minister of joy to the world

and to my loving wife Laurel Ann

Excellent nurse, mother, musician, nourishing cook, and fellow traveler, cheerleader, and graceful dance partner when I let go of the

bipolar bears

Acknowledgments

My preaching, teaching, tape ministries, visionquests, newsletters, radio and television, and writing of articles and books have been spiritual exercises in remembering who I am as a child of God being daily converted to Christ. For more than 50 years in more places with more people than I could possibly name, God has given me a design for a lifetime of living. Some of these angels have been named in this text.

Some teachers and colleagues stand out: my aunt Estelle Mitchell; high school teachers, Jane Fisher, Gladys Beverly, Fred Keller, Reba Kennedy; undergraduate professors, Paul Brewer, Douglas Harris, Agnes Hull, Dick Campbell, Ray Koonce, William Bass, Dan Taylor, John Davidson, Kyle Yates; and from graduate schools, Hugh Wamble, John Killinger, Everett Reneer, James Stewart, George Buttrick, William Morton, Lavell Seats, Bill Coble, John Morgan, Canon Vincent Strudwick, Jane Shaw, and Morton Kelsey. I thank my loving family: Linda and Steve and grandson Ethan; Carman and Rick and McKenzie and Cameryn; Bryan and Sarah and Alex and Jillian; Carrie and Bill and Brooke; my parents, Hobe and Lena McReynolds; my brothers, Edward and David; congregations full of pilgrim people who have called me pastor;and Norman Vincent Peale, who anointed me minister of joy to the world.

Thanks to members of the First Presbyterian Church of Tecumseh, Nebraska and to John Duling and Peter Frazier-Koontz, Bishop Ray Chamberlain of Hol-ston Conference, Rhymes Moncure of the Nebraska Conference, David Barn-house and Tom Osborne.

I owe a large debt to John Killinger for his wise advice, lifetime friendship, and caring love. My wife Laurel Ann has stood beside me in pain and joy giving her love, support, and confidence.

Friends through it all: John Bacon as the most supportive district superintendent I have known; Harold Bales, Thomas Martin, Ray Dykes, Bob Sanders, Vaughn Earl Hartsell and other close colleagues. I owe a debt to my enemies who redirect my paths so that God can make all things work out for my good. Many other names have been left out and I look forward to dancing with them and unknown others who cared for me and my family during world travels at life’s end.

As a psychotherapist, I learned most from my friends. I have known some beautiful, brave, and inspiring souls. I like to call them friends rather than patients, clients, consumers, or other terms that place them in some subservient perspective. I pray that I portray them in my writing with the affection and admiration I feel toward them as we endure together.

I thank my Tuesday National Bipolar and Depression Alliance groups in Omaha and Nebraska City for the healing support they have given to my friends and to me. I also thank my Recovery support group at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. So let’s dance together even if our stocks of life have ended up bearish, and the polar bears of our visionquests have continued to be just dreams.

These wonderful souls who have touched my life taught me to dance with the sounds and sights of God’s world. Joy and pain move into our souls in rhythm with God’s plan. Following our Spirit Parent’s leading enables us all to risk even failures to rise and to keep trying because God is leading the dance.

Life has been a chronically joyous trip for me. Some scholars have even hinted that being diagnosed as bipolar means creative insight, world-changing communication through music and writing. Traveling the world, communicating God’s joy to the world, I sacrifice myself and my pride. I believe those who read this book will tap into their joy instinct, a gift from God, and that readers will allow joy to guide their decisions.

Recovery International has been a life-saving support group for me. One of their principles is the will to bear discomfort. Illness certainly yields much discomfort for those living with whatever illness that comes. Few humans will escape a mental, physical, or spiritual bout with illness.

I trust this book will help you shift your focus. You can achieve your purpose in life within and in spite of your body’s limitations. Remember, mental illnesses are simply brain problems, and the brain is part of the human body. Any illness is too demanding if you don’t have hope. Thomas Edison once said, If we all did he things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

I have.. .and so can you.

Foreword

I have known Jim McReynolds for more than three decades, first as his professor and then as his friend. He is an ordained minister, as he writes in the beginning of this book. Some people might be surprised to find a minister communicating about his own bipolarity problem. But ministers are like everyone else. They have the same personality difficulties and defects as firefighters, accountants, actors, mechanics, housewives, physicists, and psychologists.

I met Jim when he came to Vanderbilt University Divinity School, where I was teaching, to be admitted to the Doctor of Ministry degree. He already had four academic degrees from Carson-Newman College, the University of Missouri, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a doctor of theology from Luther Rice Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Luther Rice was a conservative institution with a less than solid academic reputation. He had been a Baptist preacher for fifteen years, serving as a pastor, evangelist, teacher, and counselor.

Some professors at Vanderbilt thought his resume disqualified him from entering such a demanding, prestigious program. I was on the admissions committee at the time and I insisted that Jim’s application not be rejected because of his previous experience. That would have amounted to the grossest kind of academic snobbery. Jim had been an excellent student. But I did yield to a compromise—that he would be required to complete a Master of Divinity degree at Vanderbilt before being considered for the doctoral studies.

I was frankly amazed that Jim agreed to do this, because it meant three years of hard work before he could even start his doctoral program. But he whizzed through these tough courses like a house afire, even though simultaneously, he was employed as a full-time communications specialist by the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville. This was characteristic of Jim. He wasn’t especially sophisticated or polished, but there was brilliance about him, and an energy, that could tackle and dispatch any job in half the time it takes most people. I didn’t realize then that he was suffering from bipolarity. I knew he had mood swings.

One day he’d be really up in class and another day he’d be down and morose. I assumed this deeply spiritual man’s problem stemmed from his ministry to Southern Baptists, who were displaying early signs of the political and theological crises that would dominate the life of his beloved denomination for the next thirty years. Jim was terribly ambitious. I thought his academic pursuits were part of his secret program to become a worldwide Baptist evangelist.

Southern Baptists tend to extol the virtues of the preaching ministry and they spotlight certain high-profile ministers without giving aspiring young theologies an understanding of the real nature of ministry and of the potential mine-field they are entering. Jim was naive and at the same time he had the drive, the ability, and the contacts to achieve his goal. He knew where he wanted to go, but he didn’t know the price that would be extracted for getting there.

I remember the breakdown he describes in his Evansville parish. I was away from home when he telephoned in the middle of the night and asked to speak to me. My wife Anne, sensing that he was extremely disturbed, asked if she could help. During the time, she said, he alternately ranted, raved, and wept, saying he could not go on.

At daybreak, when Jim lapsed into a state of lethargy, Anne called Tom Martin, a colleague of Jim’s and another student of mine. Jim had served an internship as associate minister of youth, young adults, and students at Southminster Presbyterian Church during his Vanderbilt training. Tom called Jim and took over his immediate needs. By the time I returned home, Jim had retreated into shame and guilt over the incident and refused to discuss it. For awhile our relationship became a bit formal, although I attempted to write him encouraging letters.

I saw Jim as a magnificent failure—that he had formed impossible goals based on his early experiences in the Baptist tradition and that his whole life had been a sacrifice to those ideals. He had enormous talent and a deep capacity for love, especially for his beautiful daughter. However, his demanding, unrealistic approach to ministry betrayed him into broken relationships and a spirit of anger that nearly consumed him.

Jim’s ministry had fastened on the theme of joy even before he finished divinity school. Later Norman Vincent Peale anointed him minister of joy to the world, yet he was incapable of sustaining a sense of real joy. His way of living was a tragic denial of the very principle he most wanted to enshrine in his daily actions.

He sought a geographical cure, spending his money and resources to travel to distant places. He neglected his family and his true self. Occasionally I took it on myself to shatter Jim’s illusions. Little did I realize, when I suggested that he seek counseling, that he had been in therapy and support groups for years, and on medication as well.

This book, Dancing With Bipolar Bears, came to me as a shocking revelation of the demons that have been tormenting Jim most of his life. On nearly every page, I found documentation of something I suspected or believed about his condition but was unable to piece together with any accuracy until he himself confessed it.

Of all the people who will read this book, I think I may have the greatest appreciation for the courage it took for Jim to write it. It is a magnificent act of vulnerability, a panoply of self-exposure whose magnitude is all but impossible for an outsider to estimate.

I have often wept for Jim while reading this book. He is as dear to me as if he were my own son, and his suffering affects me deeply. His anguish is there on every page, in almost every line of the book. I wonder, when I read it, how he managed to go on from day to day. His life was a constant roller-coaster of pain and delight, depression and hope.

What a saint his wife Laurel Ann must be, to have seen the angel in Jim clearly and strongly enough to have endured the devil that accompanied it, and not only that, but to have encouraged the angel to win out over the demon.

From the moment Jim told me he was writing this book, and revealed its wonderful title, I have treasured the impact it will have on others suffering from bipo-larity.

Most of us have something wrong with us, but we can usually bear it if we know we’re not alone with the problem, that millions struggle with it as we do. We now know of the millions of people in our country and around the world are coping with the bipolar bears to one degree or another.

I realized, on first reading this book, that I might myself have twinges of bipo-larity. At least, like most highly productive people, I achieve big highs when I’m working on a project and often feel low or depressed when it is finished. Therefore I tend to have something going all the time, and I often find myself over extended, trying to complete more projects than any human being can satisfactorily complete. The older I become, the more anxious I am about all the things I have started and not brought to fruition.

When I found Jim writing of the same thing in his life, I began to wonder if I hadn’t simply been lucky in the projects I had brought to a successful conclusion, while he had not always been as fortunate.

Many readers will find their own shadows in these pages. This is important. This book will help readers to face their shadows and to begin to deal with them more realistically.

And Jim, with his talent for grasping truths and an innate capacity for counseling born out of his own needs and reflections across the years, will not only reveal their shadows; he will teach them to dance with them, to own them, and to celebrate them and incorporate them into their whole being.

That, in the end, is the real value of this book. It is not only about smelling the roses, it is about the pain of grasping the thorns, which is also part of life. For that reason, everybody who reads this book with even a modicum of sympathy and understanding will come away from it a wiser and stronger person, with a greater ability to laugh at our foibles and dance with the bears.

Jim, my old friend, this is the book your life was waiting to write. It is a perfect example of self-immolation. You have laid your life on the altar, dosed it in gasoline, and set it afire so that we could see to dance. I congratulate you on one of the finest achievements of your long-suffering career.

You didn’t know, when you began, that this was what you were living for, but it was. I know it has been a painful delivery, but the baby is here and it is beautiful. This book will bless thousands of people. It has already blessed me. Thank you, Jim. I love you.

JOHN KILLINGER

Introduction

As I complete more than fifty years ofministry, nothing has happened to me than what happened to Jesus. I have found the right medication to keep the dancing bipolarity bears at bay.

Sometimes I am even an eternal optimist about the future. Why do we who know the dance continue to get up and do patterns of self-destruction? Why is it so difficult to become healed? One evening a spiritual director told an insightful parable about a beggar. He was about sixty years old, but looked eighty. For many years, he asked strangers, Could you spare some change? One day a young woman walked by. She said, I have nothing to give to you. Then she asked, What is that thing you sit upon?

Looking up at her, he replied, It’s just an old box. I found it years ago somewhere in the woods.

Have you ever looked inside? she said.

No, it’s just a heavy old thing. There’s nothing in it but junk, the beggar related.

Have you ever looked into it? she asked.

Oh no. There ain’t nothing in it, he said.

Why don’t you just look? she insisted.

The filthy beggar tugged the lid open. And he and the stranger saw that it was full of gold.

Bipolar sufferers know that there is no joy inside doing the steps of our bipo-larity dance, even if unknowingly we sit on their gold of living. But we don’t know any other dance steps. We can’t even create a new dance and in our minds, and we no other dance partners.

Many were taught not to dance at all. Some were burned while dancing for pleasure, for love, for security, for validation, and all the while they already had a treasure within that included not only those good things but better things than anything the world can offer.

Something must have taught us how to be blind from birth. So we just can’t enjoy a Nebraska sunset, a red rose, clean sheets wind blown on the clothesline, a basketball swished into the net, or a piece of art. Expecting us to smell the roses, to cease the anger, to slow down, to take off the false masks, is like expecting a blind person to suddenly see like others see. There is one difference: eventually we can do it.

Who am I? C.S. Lewis once said that he dreamed he washed and got dressed, but he was still in bed. It’s hard to get up and face the world. Our hurtful experiences, habits, thoughts, and mixed up feelings cause us so much anxiety and fear that without much joy along the way, we just quit trying.

Suffering diabetes or heart disease or cancer is not too different from our struggle. People with heart disease have to change their lifestyle. They have to eat different. They must exercise and stay out of the way of stress-provoking people and places. We really hate the pain, the rejections, and the misunderstandings about who we are as children of God. The things we do such as locking ourselves away from society, always putting other people first, doing more than could ever be expected, and being overly responsible prevents our healing. These self-destructive acts begin to feel quite natural as