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Bringing your Potential to Light

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Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

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How does remembering your past help you today? Think of re-membering as bringing scattered parts together. It’s like gathering the parts of a jigsaw puzzle and assembling them together where they belong.

God wants you to see the whole picture of who you are.

I’m fascinated by my past. I’m not thinking of historical facts. I mean my psychological and emotional journey.

Do memories define who I am? Are memories real? Relevant? How did I get to where I am today?

How you first experience something has long-lasting implications. Your journey is, in many ways, a series of first-time experiences. To put the pieces of your life together, you must revisit your first-time experiences to create follow-on experiences.

Your relationship with your childhood memories can tell you a lot about yourself. Here are some questions you can use to explore your emotional health:

  • How do you feel about your childhood?
  • Do you feel like you are still a child?
  • Do you feel like you are stuck in your childhood?
  • Does childhood seem like it happened eons ago?
  • Do you feel extremely distant from childhood, almost like it was another lifetime?
  • Does childhood feel real to you or more like a fantasy?
  • Does childhood seem unimportant or highly relevant to you?
  • Do you remember a lot or a little?
  • How much was childhood the same or different every day?
  • What positive memories come to mind?
  • What negative memories come to mind?

Did you skim through these questions or did you pause on each one and give a real, in-depth answer? Are you willing to embrace your childhood or do you think you’d be happier if you never thought about it again?

Even if you considered only one of the questions, you’ve got a taste of what it’s like to move toward emotional health. You dipped your tow in the water. If you considered more than one, you might be swimming in a pool of emotional memories.

Like I said, memories are fascinating. They aren’t part of who you are. Yet, in another way, they are part of you. You’re not five years old anymore. But you might feel five years old sometimes.

Here are a few more questions for you to consider: In what ways do you feel the same, today, as you did when you were a young child? In what ways are you the same? In what ways are you different?

Life has a way of leading you away from being in touch with who you are. The pressures, demands, and trauma open a chasm between your performance and who you are. It’s possible to become so familiar with present-day performance that you forget what it’s like to enjoy life on your own terms.

Here are two more questions that should help you “pull yourself together.” What day would you most like to relive? Now, what new day do you imagine you would like to live in the near future?

In answering all these questions, look for two things. First, look for any infections: emotional wounds that haven’t fully healed. Second, look for peak experiences: emotional highs that give you energy.

If you’d like more practice at developing follow-on experiences, then you should try a book from my Journal Your Way series.

How To Live With Rejection

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Confidence is the antidote to rejection. It’s easy to think that confidence is only something other people can have. But you can have it too. The secret to confidence is to stop trying to be something you’re not.

Living with the excruciating pain of rejection is hard. Some people would rather be physically beaten than be emotionally beaten.

Does anyone in the world like you? Does anyone want to spend time getting to know you? Does anyone appreciate you? Does God? If you answer these questions “no” then you are living with the oppressive feeling of rejection.

Rejection, though it feels real, is more of an illusion than a reality, if you know Jesus. God knew you before you were born. Jesus redeemed you from all sin that separated you from God. God accepts you exactly as you are.

But this doesn’t mean you won’t struggle with rejection. You have experienced some rejection and you’ll experience some more. To gain confidence, you must learn to not care about the rejection that others direct your way.

Rejection can easily become a downward spiral. None of us knows who we are as much as God knows who we are. The more you’ve experienced rejection, the more you’ve probably gone into hiding. The more you are in hiding, the more people are rejecting the false you (because you are keeping the real you out of sight). But it will still feel like people are rejecting the real you, so you end up hurting more and hiding more.

There is no good reason for anyone to reject the best parts of you that come from God. Therefore, rejection has to do with being misunderstood rather than being defective. I would guess people with obvious disabilities experience this all the time in a much more direct way. How frustrating it is to be judged superficially. How frustrating to be judged instantly and only based on your performance in one moment rather than your potential.

How much have you become your own worst enemy? If you struggle with rejection, you struggle to understand who you really are. If you’ve stopped wanting to know the real you, it will be difficult for others to see you (as in “I see you” from the movie Avatar).

God sees your potential. Your potential comes from your heart, from who God made you to be. He sees you at your best even when you look your worst. You have the best qualities that God placed in you.

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7 NLT

If you struggle with low self-worth, you might be quick to focus on the negative part of this verse. You might be thinking, “But God rejected Eliab, so that means He most likely rejects me.”

God has the right to choose whoever He wants for what He wants to accomplish. God can’t make everybody king. Just because you are rejected for one thing, doesn’t mean you are completely rejected. God will reject you for everything He doesn’t have planned for your life. But this also means He accepts you for all the good things He has planned.

So don’t worry so much about rejection. You’ll probably be rejected 99 times out of a 100. But it’s that 1 out of 100 that matters. You only need 1. Cling to the truth that God accepts you as you are, for the purposes He has for you. Ask God to help you understand your purpose and forget about what He hasn’t chosen you for.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

Push through fear like you would cross a scary bridge.

Push Through Fear and Find Hope

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A string of devastating disappointments can weaken you to the point you live in constant fear of the next disaster. Don’t give up. You can push through fear and find hope.

Job experienced multiple traumas. He suffered from the loss of his children, his finances, and his health. Though he was greatly distressed, he held on until God brought him relief.

In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.

Job 1:22 NIV

Just like Job, your mental attitude makes a difference. Do all you can to guard your heart against bitterness toward God. A healthy fear of God is good.

At any moment, you have the ability to choose a different path. With each decision you make, something changes. As long as something is changing, hope is alive.

If it seems like you are up against a wall with no way out, perhaps you are afraid of something. The enemy uses fear to distract you. When you are afraid, everything looks worse than it really is.

Here are two possible ways you can become immobilized by fear:

  1. You expect a change for the worse: You fear a change that will result in you being worse off than you are currently. You anticipate you will make a bigger mess of an already bad situation.
  2. You expect no positive change: You fear you’ll never be better off. You believe your dreams are unobtainable, your effort is futile, and change is impossible.

If nothing about you could ever change, fear would multiple quickly. You would become consumed with hopelessness. The more you feel trapped, the more you would panic. The more you panic, the more trapped you would feel.

Anxiety blocks creativity. The more anxious I am, the less I have access to the part of me that can find solutions. I can’t make a good decision when I am anxious. When my ability to change my thinking becomes inaccessible, I become confused, paralyzed, and unable to move forward.

Don’t give up. Push through fear like you would cross a scary bridge. You can use these 3 strategies to bridge your way to hope:

Use the Gospel to Push Through Fear

You were once dead in your sin, but now you are a new creation. You are forgiven and capable of becoming more like Christ. You can change because God is empowering you. This is the ultimate hope all believers have.

The kind of change I’m talking about is the kind that matters most. The priceless kind. Would you rather have an easy life or the strength and peace to endure a hard life?

The hope of the Gospel is more than enough to calm my fears.

Use Your Identity to Push Through Fear

All positive, significant change is a decision to embrace more of who God made you to be. Circumstances can change for better or worse. But your identity is fixed. And this is good because it’s easier to hit a fixed target than one that moves all the time.

As you accept and move toward your true identity, you’ll gain the power to also accept your circumstances.

If you’re believing lies about yourself, you are opening yourself to evil. Walk away from abusive situations. I don’t mean give up on loving others. Instead, I mean improve your self-worth by actively refuting lies with the truth.

Use Momentum to Push Through Fear

The smallest change can result in unstoppable momentum. There’s always hope when there’s something you can change. If you can make a change in what you’re doing or saying, then something must be different inside of you.

God takes no pleasure in seeing you beat yourself up or put yourself down. When something terrible happens, it has nothing to do with who you are. Remember Job? He lost so much, but that didn’t change who he was to God.

Can you decide to take better care of yourself? Relax and allow yourself to find the greater separation between who your circumstance says you are and who God says you are.

Always hold on to hope because you can make a change. If the change you want seems too big, then start smaller. Even a small change can lead to big hope. Do something different. Take a walk instead of sitting inside all day. Veg out instead of doing laundry all day. Do something to enjoy the moment you have right now.

To push through fear and choose peace despite your circumstances, you will need to pray.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Philippians 4:6-8 NIV

To explore this idea further see Ephesians 2:1-5, Proverbs 13:12, and see my post on Quora.
Image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay

Transforming Panic into Peace

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Would you rather panic for no reason or face your known, but shameful experiences? If you refuse to face your experiences, you will probably end up with increasing anxiety. But if you choose to face your negative experiences, you can transform them into God moments.

When you push specific emotions out of your awareness, they will eventually resurface as some unnamed but equally uncomfortable emotion. You might experience some relief if you don’t have to name the feeling. But unnamed feelings only increase in intensity until you deal with them. The feelings associated with negative experiences are like an undetected virus that moves freely through your body.

Chances are, when you don’t have the stomach to face the reality of what you have been through, you will avoid naming and claiming your emotions. Who would want to remember being beat up at school, being sexually assaulted, or being yelled at by parents?

Trauma disorganizes and it takes significant effort to restore order. Facing the sickening emotions can drain most of your reserves. But that effort produces healing.

God designed you to respond to the difficulties of life. Whether you like it or not, God made you able to feel the pain of your negative experiences. God declares a law of reaping and sowing (Galatians 6:7-8). You’ll reap what others sow if you are powerless to step out of harm’s way.

You can't control what happened to you, but you can control how you respond. The longer you avoid dealing with emotional unrest, the more time you give it to establish a stronghold of chaos. Click To Tweet

Has the chaos within become normal to you? Have you forgotten or never known what peace feels like?

During the first few years after I became a Christian, I journaled almost every day. Becoming a Christian enabled me to look back at my first twenty years and realize how much I didn’t understand. I processed through my experiences with new insight. As I connected life events, I also connected with emotions that I didn’t know I had.

Becoming a Christian felt like waking up from a bad dream. I was thankful I wasn’t stuck in the former reality. But at the same time, I had to face the reality of all I had experienced.

Today, I don’t need to process the distant past as frequently, but I’m always learning something new and working to have it make sense with my personal history.

This kind of processing is like decompressing after a long day. What would happen if I didn’t take the time to express everything? What do you call energy that is building up in a closed system? A bomb!

Do you realize when you hold in emotions that God intended you to release, you create a ticking time bomb? The pressure starts building and a date with destiny is set. When time runs out and the bomb goes off, there will be personal and collateral damage.

There are only so many ways you can manage uncomfortable emotions. You can Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out.

Numb Out

Numbing out means you shut down your emotions. You cut the power; you trip the circuit breaker. Your brain circuits are overloaded and you are fortunate your automatic shut down is working.

This averts the immediate disaster. You dodge the bullet; you avoid feeling the crushing weight of what happened. You gain some immediate relief, but also more than you bargain for: some long-term problems.

Burn Out

In the midst of re-experiencing an overwhelming event, you are unable to find the automatic off switch. The intensity of your emotions continues to grow. The pain and panic become so unbearable that you must look for a way to force the shut down.

You might start cutting yourself. Or drinking a lot. Or end up in the emergency room because you think you’re having a heart attack.

Ride Out

You endure the waves of painful emotion without going in critical overload. If you’ve been through trauma, this is easier said than done. But it’s possible.

Riding out is a commitment to re-engaging your emotions while learning how to manage them so they don’t create a new trauma. When you can’t manage this without going critical, that’s when you need support.

What happens when a newborn baby cries? The baby is expressing discomfort about a situation that she can’t control. She is hungry, has a messy diaper, or needs sleep.

God didn’t provide newborns with the brain wiring to self-sooth. If no one addresses the problem and no one soothes her, she must eventually choose to Numb Out.

Because of the severity of the trauma you’ve been through, you could be in a situation like the newborn. You don’t have enough practice to calm yourself down, so you need to borrow the support of others. You need a surrogate mom to help you soothe.

With the right amount of support, the energy from the waves of emotion will die down eventually. With the tension gone, you experience peace instead of panic.

Choosing to Ride Out by facing dreaded emotions is an act of bravery. Remember, you reap what you sow. If you confront your past, you can move beyond it.

How much time do you spend in Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out? Why is that?

What questions do you have about facing unpleasant emotions?

Are you ready to gain more peace? Tell God you are ready to face and then embrace your emotional pain. Ask Him for insight into your suffering. Allow Him to guide you on the journey to greater emotional wholeness.

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

You May Be Suffering Needlessly

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If I told you I am suffering needlessly, what adjectives would you use to describe me?

Everybody suffers. Some suffering is necessary while other suffering is needless.

Here is one way to define a balanced, healthy love:

Love does not suffer needlessly but neither does it run from suffering when running would be a denial of love. A loving person walks away from harm when possible and stays and faces harm when that is the only way to be loving.

Emilie Calabrese
Necessary suffering is God-ordained while needless suffering is self-inflicted. Click To Tweet

Take a moment and reflect on your current suffering. Can you separate out which suffering is necessary and which is needless?

A mid-life crisis can involve coming face-to-face with the need to grow up. Instead of pressing forward, you decide to run away, refusing the opportunity for growth. Of course, then the only way to go is backward, so your behavior starts to look like your childhood and early adulthood.

Instead of crossing the emotional bridge, you remain “land-locked.”

Self-inflicted pain is really self-rejection, a form of learned helplessness. Share on Twitter

Self-inflicted pain can be anything from the literal cutting of your body to psychological put-downs such as, “I’m not enough” or “I’m disgusting.”

Learned helplessness is a cycle of defeat with no apparent escape. The bridge forward might be visible but might as well be invisible because the thought of crossing seems ridiculous.

Start the journey by being aware of how you are suffering needlessly.

Sean’s New Reality

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Last week, I ended part two of Sean’s story with him receiving a new bicycle from his small group. This experience, led by God, allowed the truth of the scriptures to sink into his heart. Now he could not only say that he knew the truth as a fact, but he knew the truth as a reality.

Sean’s story illustrates the point that our experiences shape the way we view our identity. Our interpretation of our experiences can be accurate or inaccurate. When we go through a negative experience without a positive experience to counter-act it, we’ll see our identity through the eyes of the negative event.

If we’ve gone through a time of discovering the truth, we’ll know the factual truth about our identity. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough. We must go one step further to experience a positive event that can override the negative event. Only then can we know the truth about our identity as God sees it. We’ll see ourselves properly, through God’s eyes.

How we interpret the events affects our long-term feelings about life. If you’re feeling depressed or anxious, it’s probably because of a negative interpretation of a negative experience. Without a positive intervention that allows you to see the truth, you might end up with destructive behavior toward yourself or others.

I’ve included a diagram below which illustrates how a person can move from a hurtful event, to a healing process, and onto a new reality. I regularly use it with my clients to help them see how their lives became dysfunctional and how they can return to healthy living. See if you can trace Sean’s experiences through the diagram, then try an example from your own life.