The Silence That Speaks

Part IV

If surrender was the call in my dark season, then why did anxiety still grip me? I had entrusted my suffering to God, recognizing that healing was not about escape but about communion. And yet, even after that surrender, I found myself caught in something I didn’t fully understand—a struggle that wasn’t just spiritual but deeply psychological. I had faced the silence of God, but now I had to confront another silence—the one within myself, the one that held my fears, my unresolved questions, and the weight of a suffering that still demanded reckoning. This is where anxiety took on a life of its own, not merely as an emotion but as something far more paradoxical—something both repellent and strangely compelling.

When Søren Kierkegaard examines the nature of anxiety, he describes it as a paradox—both repellent and strangely compelling at the same time. He writes:

“When we consider the dialectical determinations of anxiety, it appears that exactly these have psychological ambiguity. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy. One easily sees, I think, that this is a psychological determination in a sense entirely different from the concupiscentia [inordinate desire] of which we spoke.”^[1]

At the time, nothing about my suffering felt like a paradox—it was just pain, something I wanted to escape. But looking back, I can see that Kierkegaard names something I had to learn through experience: anxiety doesn’t just torment—it demands engagement. There was a part of me desperate for relief, yet something deeper was pressing me toward a confrontation I wasn’t yet ready to face.

Kierkegaard speaks of the "dialectical determinations of anxiety"—the strange tension between wanting to escape suffering and yet feeling compelled to make sense of it. He describes anxiety as both a "sympathetic antipathy" and an "antipathetic sympathy"—a resistance to what unsettles us, yet a strange attraction to it. That was exactly my experience. I wanted nothing more than to shut it all down, to silence the crushing weight of anxiety and despair. Yet the cry of “Why?”—the demand for meaning—kept pulling me back into the very thing I wanted to flee.

Kierkegaard insists that anxiety is not just fear or distress but a threshold experience—a confrontation with the depths of the self, with limitation, and ultimately, with God. At the time, I wasn’t just seeking escape—I was demanding understanding. My suffering wasn’t something to suppress; it was something that required reckoning.

And this is where Christ meets us. He doesn’t dismiss anxiety, nor does He simply command it away. In Gethsemane, He enters fully into it—sweating drops of blood, wrestling with the weight of what is to come—yet in the end, He surrenders, not in defeat, but in trust. True soul care isn’t about avoidance; it’s about allowing suffering to become a passage toward something deeper, something redemptive.

Kierkegaard helps me see that my suffering wasn’t just something to endure—it was something that, paradoxically, was drawing me toward a more authentic life in God. And even when I wasn’t consciously aware of it, Christ was already there—not just as a comforter, but as the One who was transforming suffering into something that could bear the weight of redemption.

That line—"One easily sees, I think…"—stands out because, at the time, it was anything but easy to see. If I now grasp what Kierkegaard is saying, it is that anxiety does not reveal itself in a straightforward way. It both repels and draws us in at the same time. Kierkegaard assumes this is self-evident, but for me, it wasn’t. I had to learn how to see what he was pointing to.

At first, anxiety felt purely destructive—something to be avoided, silenced, or numbed. The idea that it carried anything beyond affliction was unthinkable. But over time, I began to see that my suffering was not just something happening to me; it was pressing into me, exposing what I would have otherwise ignored. The more I resisted, the more relentless it became—not as a punishment, but as a summons. I wasn’t just being tormented; I was being confronted.

Hollis names something similar when he writes,

"The sacrifice of collective acceptance, which individuation demands, is redeemed by our bringing a larger person back to the world, to our relationships and to our dialogue with mystery."^[2]

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about individuation—I just wanted relief. But looking back, I can see that stepping away from easy answers, resisting the impulse to suppress my distress, and wrestling with what my soul was trying to reveal was a kind of individuation. It required relinquishing the comfort of the familiar, including the collective assumption that anxiety is merely something to be managed or avoided. The paradox is that engaging suffering rather than escaping it didn’t pull me away from life—it reshaped me for a deeper return.

Throughout this ordeal of endless anxiety feedback loops, automatic negative thoughts, and sleeplessness that no medication could resolve, I learned something I never expected: the harder I fought the pain, the more it intensified. I had heard the adage “whatever you resist, persists,” but I had never lived it so viscerally. I was desperate to escape, grasping for anything that might relieve me. But my refusal to accept where I was only amplified my fight-or-flight response, locking me in a cycle of suffering that fed itself.

And yet, in those moments of absolute exhaustion—when resistance had failed, and hopelessness swallowed me—I found myself reaching for something more than relief. I wanted God to intervene, to lift the weight, to silence the torment. But God, it seemed, was not only silent but distant. And in that silence, an ache I hadn’t anticipated surfaced—the longing to speak with my father.

He had been gone since 2003. I had grieved, made peace with his death, and moved forward—or so I had thought. But now, something in me reached back for him. I wanted to ask if he had ever known this kind of darkness, if he had ever wrestled with the weight I was carrying. I didn’t just want to remember him—I wanted his presence, his understanding. But he was beyond my reach. The chasm between life and death was fixed, and there was no bridging it. That realization deepened the pain in ways I hadn’t expected.

Looking back, I see now that my suffering wasn’t just happening to me—it was pressing me toward a confrontation I didn’t want to face. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about existential thresholds or individuation. I was just trying to survive. But what I didn’t realize was that my attempts to resist, suppress, and push through were keeping me locked in the very suffering I wanted to escape. The resurfacing of my longing for my father wasn’t random—it was exposing something deeper. This wasn’t just grief returning; it was an ache for presence, for a witness, for someone who had walked this road before and could tell me I wasn’t alone.

And when that presence was out of reach—when neither God nor my father could be accessed in the way I longed for—I was left in a place I didn’t know how to navigate. No resolution, no relief. Just the stark reality of absence. And that was what I had been resisting all along. Not just the pain, but the truth that some things cannot be fixed. They can only be faced.

This was the question that tormented me—what exactly was I facing? Was it some long-buried fault, something so deeply repressed that even I had been too afraid to confront it? Was there a hidden guilt, some unresolved failure lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to unravel me? Or was it shame—something woven into my very sense of self, so foundational that I had unknowingly structured my entire way of being around avoiding it?

Or was it something else entirely? Was the weight of what I was carrying simply objectively crushing—so great that even the strongest among us would have buckled under its strain? That no hidden specter was needed to explain my unraveling—only the brutal reality that life, at times, demands more than we are humanly capable of bearing?

When suffering becomes unbearable, the mind instinctively searches for meaning—it wants to locate the pain, name it, categorize it. But what if there was nothing buried? What if my suffering was not a sign of some deeply embedded fault but something far more common—a perfect storm of sorrow, pressure, and exhaustion that simply exceeded my ability to withstand? If that was the case, then my breakdown wasn’t a failure of character, nor was it the unveiling of some long-repressed darkness. It was the inevitable outcome of a soul vexed beyond what its former coping strategies could manage. My complexes, compensations, and defenses—the ways I had always handled stress—were simply inadequate for the enormity of what I was facing.

And if that was true, then what needed to be faced wasn’t some hidden sin or buried trauma, but the terrifying realization of my own human limitations. That no amount of strength, insight, or willpower could pull me out of this. That there was no version of myself—no smarter, wiser, more faithful, or more prepared version—that could have sidestepped this collapse. I had reached the end of what I could manage. And the only way forward was to admit it.

Psychologically, this is exactly what happens when a person reaches the edge of their capacity. When suffering becomes too great, the mind searches for an explanation—it assumes the pain must be tied to something unresolved. Freud would call this an attempt to uncover the repressed; Jung might say the shadow was demanding to be integrated. But not all suffering is rooted in past wounds. Sometimes, distress does not emerge from something buried long ago but from present-day realities that overwhelm the nervous system’s ability to process them.

As Bessel van der Kolk explains, trauma is not just a memory stored in the past but a physiological imprint on the body that can be triggered and reinforced by ongoing stressors:

"Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”^[3]

Similarly, Peter Levine emphasizes that unresolved distress does not need to be rooted in repressed memories; it can emerge from an accumulation of overwhelming experiences that exceed our ability to cope:

"Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”^[4]

This explains why my suffering wasn’t necessarily about uncovering some long-buried fault. Rather, it was the sheer accumulation of unrelenting stress, exhaustion, and sorrow—one moment after another—that eventually exceeded what my nervous system could process. The weight of it wasn’t coming from the past; it was pressing in from every side, in real time.

Rollo May describes this breaking point as the moment when anxiety ceases to be an emotion and instead becomes an existential condition—not just fear of something specific, but a confrontation with being itself. He writes,

“Anxiety becomes neurotic when one does not move through it. But anxiety can be a constructive force when one does not try to escape it but confronts it and struggles through it.”^[5]

Rollo May names something here that I only came to understand through experience. Anxiety wasn’t just an emotion I could regulate, suppress, or will away—it had become something far more pervasive. It wasn’t just fear of a particular outcome or uncertainty about the future; it was a full-scale confrontation with being itself. May is right—when anxiety isn’t faced, when it is avoided or numbed, it turns inward, festering into something neurotic, all-consuming, and paralyzing. And that’s exactly what happened to me.

For so long, I tried to push past it, to silence it with sheer determination, spiritual discipline, even medication. But none of it addressed what was happening underneath. It wasn’t until I stopped running—until I allowed myself to sit in the discomfort and actually engage what my soul was crying out for—that something began to shift. That didn’t mean the suffering lifted immediately, but it did mean that I had moved from being its victim to being its witness.

May’s insight reveals the paradox of suffering: what we refuse to face only tightens its grip, but what we struggle through can become a force for transformation. That was what I had to learn. The anxiety wasn’t meaningless. It wasn’t random. It was pressing me toward something I didn’t yet have the capacity to articulate. The real question wasn’t how do I make this go away? but what is this asking of me? Until I wrestled through that question, there was no moving forward.

Viktor Frankl, reflecting on suffering during his time in a Nazi concentration camp, writes,

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves” (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 112).

That’s where I found myself. I could not change what I was facing. I could not undo the loss. I could not manufacture relief. The only thing left was the confrontation itself—to either resist what could not be altered or allow it to shape me into something new.

And this is where the psychological meets the theological. Frankl’s insight points to a reality that the Christian faith takes even further—not just transformation within suffering, but redemption through it.The faith does not promise an escape from suffering; it offers something far greater. Christ does not sidestep agony—He enters into it. In Gethsemane, He kneels beneath the unbearable weight of what is to come, fully aware that suffering is too great to bear. And yet, rather than resisting it or attempting to escape, He entrusts Himself: “Not my will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

This is not resignation to despair—it is an act of trust in the only One who can redeem what suffering threatens to destroy. If Frankl is right that suffering demands a change in us, then Christ reveals what that change must be—not just survival, not just endurance, but a surrender that leads to transformation.

That’s where my former ways of coping failed. I had spent years learning how to manage life, how to endure, how to push through, how to make sense of pain. But there are sufferings so deep, so consuming, that they will not be managed. They will not be outwitted. They can only be entrusted. My suffering, my longing for my father, my wrestling with God’s silence—none of it had an easy resolution. But what I began to see was that Christ does not merely meet us after the suffering has passed. He is in it, with us, bearing it. He does not promise escape—He promises resurrection.

And that became the turning point for me. I was not called to find a way out of suffering. I was called to walk through it—to trust that even in the silence, even in the grief, even in the unbearable weight of absence, I was not alone. The end of my strength was not the end of the story. It was the place where the mercy of God met me—not with easy answers, but with presence. Not with escape, but with the quiet assurance that even in death, even in loss, even in the deepest darkness, life will have the final word.

Looking back, I realize that even here—in this place of suffering and silence—I was being confronted with my father’s absence in a new way. In the ache of longing to speak with him, to ask if he had ever faced what I was facing, I began to see something I had not fully admitted before: he and I were more alike than I had cared to acknowledge. The same burden I was carrying, he had carried too. The same darkness I was struggling to navigate had, in some form, crossed his path as well. The difference was that he had never spoken of it.

He came from a generation where suffering was met with silence, where survival was the priority, and where talking about one’s inner world wasn’t a luxury afforded to men who had families to provide for and obligations to uphold. Pain was not to be processed; it was to be endured. And endure, he did—many a dark night, many a private sorrow never given voice. But the cost of that silence was that those of us who came after him were left to figure out on our own what to do when suffering came for us.

And that’s where I felt the most inadequate. There was no inherited wisdom for this. No framework passed down. No roadmap for how to sit in the depths of pain without being undone by it. I was left feeling as though I should have known how to bear this, as though my inability to "handle it" was some failure on my part. But now I see that what I lacked was not strength—it was a way of navigating suffering that had never been handed to me. My father did the best he could with what he knew. But his silence left a void, one that I was now forced to fill.

And yet, that lack—rather than being a curse—became a space where God met me. I had to learn what my father had never been given the tools to teach. I had to discover for myself what it meant to face suffering honestly, to name it, to walk through it without burying it, and to find a path forward that wasn’t just about endurance but about transformation. And I did not have to do that alone. What my earthly father could not give, the Spirit of God supplied.

But did that mean I had made peace with my father? I don’t think so—not yet. Understanding is not the same as resolution. I had come to recognize his burdens, to see his suffering in a way I hadn’t before. But the silence between us remained, even if now it felt less like distance and more like unfinished work. If anything, I had to begin making peace with the fact that he and I never spoke of these things while he was alive.

The healing, then, was not just from the suffering itself but from the unspoken inadequacy I carried because of it. I had to reckon with my father’s silence, not resolve it. I had to hold the tension between what I wished had been different and what actually was. He had faced the dark nights, he had carried his own burdens, but he had done so in the only way he knew how. And now, it was my turn—not to follow his silence, but to walk a different road.

This was how God was forming something in me that my father had never been given the chance to discover: the wisdom to engage suffering rather than suppress it, to move through it rather than just endure it, to find healing rather than just survival. And in that, I was not forsaken. The Spirit of God, who led me through the depths of suffering, was also leading me into the kind of wholeness my father may never have known—but would have deeply desired for me.

---

^[1] Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson, vol. VIII, Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42.

^[2] Hollis, James . Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path (p. 131). (Function). Kindle Edition.

^[3] van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Viking, 2014, p. 21.

^[4] Levine, Peter. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, North Atlantic Books, 1997, p. 20).

^[5] May, Rollo. The Meaning of Anxiety, 1950, p. 15.