Loneliness Where You Expected Belonging

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Dearlessness, there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being told you are not enough in the very places you expected to find belonging. My guest today has spent years believing the message that his mental health diagnosis made him defective. That bipolar disorder disqualified him from showing up fully in his faith community. So he was turned away from the opportunities, told he didn't belong, and eventually stopped believing in the possibility of acceptance altogether. But something shifted when he stopped performing for approval and started reading the words of Jesus with fresh eyes. So what he found wasn't the rigid, conditional version of faith headed known. It was something closer to the freedom. Yes. So welcome to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. I'm your host Savik and this is where we talk about mental health, the way it actually happens in real life, with real struggles and real ways forward. And today I am with a very lovely guest. Please welcome Jeff Dalton. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Hello, thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Amazing. Thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us today. And uh, dear listeners, like before we get into the discussion today, I'll quickly love to introduce you to Jeff. So Jeff is an author of Expressions of the Heart Poems and Devotionals, who walked away from faith after years of rejection and found his way back to something more honest, more healing, and entirely his own. So I do not want to take much of your time to listen. Uh, let's get started and have the great conversation.

Mental Health Myths In Churches

SPEAKER_01 2:08

So, Jeff, like um, a lot of people grew up believing that faith communities are supposed, I mean, supposed to be places of unconditional acceptance. And you experience the opposite. So, what do you think is the biggest misconception people have about how um religious spaces handle mental health struggles?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Well, sadly, it's not a misconception. Um, sadly, now this has gotten better in in churches and stuff in Christianity, which is good, but but for the um majority of it still, um, there's a lot of lies being spread about mental health. And mental health is we're still learning. Um we're still learning, especially about schizophrenia. And now we have brain scans that shows how the brain fires and stuff um when someone is like having an episode. And the the main problem is you have a lot of preachers and pastors who, and this is kind of hilarious to me, who don't have degrees in psychiatry, don't have degrees in psychology, or don't even have mental illness. And yet they feel that they can speak expertly on mental illness. And what they are saying is mental illness is caused either because you don't have enough faith, or you have sin in your life, or you have a demon. And this isn't just ignorant, it's destructive, what they're saying, and it's demonic. And I say demonic because look at the fruit or the results. When they say this crap, mentally ill people then feel shunned, they feel they're no good, or or they are very different. Um, they they feel evil, something's wrong with them, they feel shame, and that's not good. And when you you have these leaders preaching this garbage, then people tend to believe it, unfortunately, and treat mentally ill people the same way. Um, and another thing too is we as people we we like to talk and we hate silence, and we like we like to give advice, and when we see someone struggling with mental illness, and we and we can't relate with them because we haven't we don't have that, we haven't been through that, we want to give advice, but we don't know what to say. Because we don't know what to say, we tend to pull back and not do anything. Where in reality, the the best one of the best things you can do for anyone going through something that you don't you can't relate with, is to show up, just be be available, be present, just listen, because that's gonna do a lot, and that's gonna communicate something to them. It's gonna communicate that they're valuable enough for you to spend time being with them. It's gonna communicate they're loved and they're worthy, they're special, just all because you showed up, and there are two people in my life that um have been with me my journey with mental illness that have done just that. Showed up, and that has meant more to me than any advice, any person quoting scripture um has done for me, just showing up.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I

Being Barred From Preaching

SPEAKER_01 6:21

agree, I totally agree. I mean, and uh like when you were told that you couldn't preach because of your bipolar diagnosis, then what did that communicate to you about your word? Like, not just in the pictures, but in your own mind.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Well, it sent a powerful message to me. Number one, that was uh d defective, that I was broken, and that I was defective, not because of anything I did, or you know, it was because of something that I had that I was born with, that I couldn't help. There's no cure for it. I can treat it with medication, which I do, but it's not gonna make it go away entirely. Um it communicated that I was not valuable enough, or well, not valuable enough, or not good enough, um, that other people were worthy enough to preach, but not me. And it's interesting because the very elder that told me he prevented me from preaching because of my mental illness, he actually struggled uh in his past with pornography, and because of his past, he felt very unworthy, even unworthy to be an elder. But here's the kicker he felt worthy enough to preach. He did preach sometimes, and so here he is feeling that he's worthy enough to preach, even though he had a past of pornography, but I wasn't worthy enough to preach, even though what I had had nothing to do with sin. I had nothing to do with sin, and had everything to do with an illness, just like cancer is an illness, just like diabetes an illness, or being overweight, because he was overweight at the time. That's an illness, too. Um, so that's what it really communicated. And like I said, I mean, this elder didn't just communicate this with his words, but his action when he got up and preached. Because what he was saying was, I'm better than you, I'm more worthy than you are. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Quite true. Yeah, I agree. I mean, that kind of message doesn't uh like I mean, just live in one area of your life, it becomes the lens through which you see yourself everywhere, like uh when the people who are supposed to reflect uh love instead reflect conditional approval. It's not just a rejection, I mean it's identity uh distortion.

Failure And The Productivity Trap

SPEAKER_01 9:29

So yeah, and um like you wrote that after your book didn't sell a single copy in the first week, you gave up on believing in God. Yes. So how did failure in the in the in in that moment connect to everything you did already been caring about not being enough?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Well, unfortunately, a lot of churches are like the world, and one aspect of the world is you are valuable as much as you can produce. Okay, you know, um, it's all about how much money you can make, or how many people follow you, or how big of a church, or how big of a business. Um the more you produce, the valuable you are, the or the more and and it's the more successful you are, they view that as success. The problem is if you don't produce, then you're seen as unsuccessful, a failure, and not valuable. And unfortunately, the church has become a lot like the world. Um, and before I wrote my book and published it, I actually tried to start a business two times, and I failed, didn't make any money. I also tried to invest in trade stocks, failed. I lost I lost a lot of money doing that, and so and you know, and I did uh do preaching videos, but here and there, but didn't really get a follow-in, so I failed. Um, so that's why when I ran an ad for my book and didn't sell a single thing, that was more one more thing that I failed at, and that's and that is why it broke me. And I really felt like God was against me. Um because I also tried to be a traveling preacher as well, um, or that God didn't exist, and then I started reading the gospels, and in Matthew, there's a parable called parable of the talents, where a master gives three people money. Uh one person five talents, the other two, the other one. The one with five goes and gains five more. Same with the person of two talents, two more. The person with the one talent buried it in the sand, hit it. The master comes back and and talks to the person who was given five talent. And this is interesting. The master said, How'd you do? The person said, Well, you gave me five, I got ten more. Here's what the pastor, here's what the master focused on. He didn't focus on how much he produced. He embraced him or how much he produced. He said, Well done, you were faithful to what I gave you. Same thing, the person who had two talents produced two more. Same thing. You were faithful. Congratulations. The person with the one talent who hit it in the sand, the master was displeased. Not because he didn't produce anything, but because he was unfaithful, he didn't do anything about it. And that really spoke to me that Jesus does not care about numbers. He doesn't care about how much you produce, he just cares about being faithful. If you're faithful, then Jesus' eyes, in God's eyes, you're successful. And so what I had to do was make a choice. Was I going to define my value, my worth based on the world and the worldly church, or on Jesus? So in so in January, I decided to base my value and my worth, my success, or define my success by Jesus, how Jesus looks at me, his standard. And when I did that, I was set free. Because it was no longer striving to get followers or money or views or how many people to buy my book. Now my focus only is being faithful to Jesus with what he's calling me to do. That's it. And that is so incredibly free. And I can't describe it, but it is so free when when you do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Got it, got it, correct. So also, um I mean, yeah, like sometimes the only way to find what's real is to kind of uh let go of what's broken. And uh that week of silence after that after the failed launch was not kind of emptiness, I would say, it was the clearing that made space for something truer to emerge. So yeah, and um healing is not linear. Um,

Choosing Truth Over Old Labels

SPEAKER_01 15:13

you have had uh setbacks, rejections, uh being told that you didn't belong. Um, so how do you sustain this sense of freedom and worth when older messages try to kind of creep back in?

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Well, I focus on the truth, um, which is in the word of God, the Bible. Okay. Um, because the Bible is in because God, the creator of the universe, the one and true God, only God, um, he inspired men and talked through men directly, and they talked to people, um, and then came down to earth in human form. Um, that's Jesus, who's also God, and taught, um, and basically set people straight, um, because I got off track, you know, taught about who God is, the way to God, and Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth, meaning absolute truth, not my truth, but truth, the absolute truth, and the life. And the only way, the only path to God, to know God, and to have eternal life with Jesus in heaven. And so the Bible talks a lot about how God views us, how God's created us. Um, it talks a lot about God's heart, what God really wants, which is your heart in a personal, honest, real relationship with you, not your religious duties. Um, part of how God sees me, I'll give you two examples. One is all the way back to Genesis in creation. Every time God created something, he said it was good. So he declared a value of good. When he created man and female the sixth day or the last day, he said, very good. So we are not just good, we're very good. We are we are better than the sunset or a mountain or the endless ocean. Also in Psalm 139, David testifies that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. And he's talking about how God knit him together in his mother's womb. So God sees us as fearfully and wonderfully made. So now I have a choice. I can either believe what man says about me, who is imperfect, who is fallible, who doesn't really know anything, who hasn't created me, doesn't know me. Or I can believe and go by what God in his in the Bible says about me, that I'm very good, that I'm fearfully, wonderfully made. So it's a choice, and Jesus said later on that you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Free from what? From lies. Yeah, you know, because it's the lies that tell us we're worthless, we're not valuable, we're failures, we're ugly, we're not good. Those are lies from the pit of hell. So only by knowing Jesus and reading the Bible and interacting with Jesus can we know the truth of who we really are, and then that's gonna set us free.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

So

Practical Steps For Lasting Freedom

SPEAKER_01 19:12

uh Jeff, like if you have to give an advice to the listeners today, uh, what will you give?

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Well, my advice would be to accept Jesus into your heart and into your life, to trust him to save you, what he did on the cross to save you from your sins rather than your good works, which cannot save you, and to submit to Jesus' lordship and start following him, start having a personal, honest, real, conversational, like daily relationship with him. Start reading the Bible, how to begin in the Gospels, and how to begin the Gospel of John, because that says that's a little different because the Gospel of John is also about who Jesus is, not just what he did. And then start believing who Jesus is, start believing who he says about you and pay attention when you read in the Gospels, how Jesus treated people, how he approached people, how um how people came to him, um, what he says. Really pay attention to that. But that'd be my advice.

unknown 20:38

Yep.

How To Connect With Jeff

SPEAKER_01 20:39

And if listeners want to connect with you, how they can connect.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Well, I can go on my Facebook page at JM Dalton 777 or TikTok at Jeff Dalton777 or YouTube at Jeff Dalton9906. You can give my book, Expressions of the Heart, Poems of Devotionals, on Amazon, and you can get a digital copy as well as a uh paperback copy or a physical copy.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

So,

Closing Reflections On Worth

SPEAKER_01 21:17

great dear listeners. What I'll do is I'll put all the links to tails everything into the show notes for the easy reference. And I'll just say that uh you don't have to heal what you won't acknowledge, and you cannot build a life on someone else's version of worthiness. So, thank you so much, Jeff, for sharing your perspectives, your knowledge, your experience from your life. It is definitely gonna help people uh in their life as well. And um, dear listeners, like um, I'd say like everyone, if you're listening right now, or maybe you'll be listening later, healing does not ask you to be perfect, it asks asks you to be real. And if today's conversation has made something in you, just be with it, write it down, let it breathe, and remember that you are not too much, and you are not defective, you are human, and that's exactly enough, right? So, with this, this is your whole services, and this is a healthy man healthy life. Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you so much.