The Turning Point

To put some timescales on things: I was healed of autism in February 1998, I became depressed in June 1998, I made the firm decision to turn away from being depressed in January 2001, and most of the further healing that covered on this website occurred from July 2005 onwards, which was when we first came into contact with the Restoring the Foundations ministry.

Over the summer of 1998 I abandoned all the hopes in life that had spurred me on, and I came to make the judgement that life was definitely not worth living. It was during this time that God spoke to me out loud (like the prophet Samuel), and said “Nigel, where are you going?”, but I didn’t turn back. In November 1998, I lost the contract I was doing pretty much as a direct result of being depressed, and ended up getting another one which was over the other side of the country, so I had to stay away during the week. That contract lasted until April 2000.

That time was a living hell, for both myself and my wife, and it had a long-term detrimental effect on the children too, though that is hard to quantify. Each week my wife would wonder whether she would see me alive again as I went off. She got next to no support from the church and felt very isolated and abandoned (her parents were long since deceased). I used to pray that God would take me away to be with him, but it never happened. Instead, it felt like evil creatures were crawling all over me and mauling me, and I wondered why God would let this happen as I was asking for just the opposite.

I wasn’t severely depressed all the time. It was like having a tummy bug, where you feel worse and worse and till you are eventually sick, and then briefly you feel all right, until the whole process starts all over again. It was in those brief moments that I was reachable and could have some hope.

What made me turn, was the realisation of what I was putting my wife and family through. When being depressed like this, your whole world shrinks until there is only you in it, and so you become completely self-absorbed. But the thought came to me that, whilst I may not care about what happens to me, I don’t want to inflict what I have on anyone else. I came to realise that the way I was, was destroying my wife and family, and that is what made me decide to not be depressed any more.

This decision wasn’t made in a moment, but consisted of a number of decisions and counter-decisions back and forth. The start of 2001 marks the point at which I decided I wanted to make the choice for life permanent, and started to take positive steps to make that happen.

In actual fact, I did slip back into the beam-me-up-scotty way of thinking regularly for quite a time after that. The primary trigger for this was my wife telling me how much of a disappointment I was to her as a husband and a father to the children. The other main trigger was church meetings, and we kept mostly away from these from 1998 until about 2004. Looking back on that time, steering clear of the church was a wise move, and I suppose it is unfortunate that I am forced to come to that conclusion. We have had to do a lot of forgiving of the church and various people in it since that time.

In January 2001 I joined 2 things: a wind band (I play the flute) and a German conversation group. The thing about playing music is that you become completely absorbed in it such that you forget about everything else, including all your woes. It is a combination of the level of concentration needed to play and the soothing effect music has on the soul. With regard to the German circle, the social interaction did me a lot of good. I completely forgot that I hadn’t been able to relate to people in groups, and I have to say, that the friendships built were closer than any I had had in a church home group.

At that time (just after), my wife and I also started going for counselling at Harnhill Centre for Christian Healing, which is run by the Church of England. I was very fortunate in that the man who I had counselling me was an ex-doctor who understood about autism and I was able, for the first time, to explain to someone what it was like to be autistic and have them understand. This had quite a profound effect in starting me to get free of the ungodly belief that no-one understood me.

Also around that time we read the books by John and Paula Sandford: Restoring the Christian Family, Transformation of the Inner Man and Healing the Wounded Spirit. These were foundational for us in starting to understand our own psychology, for want of a better way of putting it. It was through reading these that I came to understand the level to which I was wounded on the inside, and how it all worked. In actual fact, I found them quite depressing, and I wouldn’t describe them as an easy read (I think, because the language is very American). The main problem I had was knowing what to do with what I was learning.

One particular thing that stood out for me in one of these books was about depression, because it related very accurately to what I was going through. One of the things it says that when people are depressed, their spiritual pilot light has gone out, and so trying to encourage them with spiritual things will have the opposite effect.