Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Abuse

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.

Sean’s Healing

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Sean continued to act out in high school. Once the victim, he now became the bully. When anyone taunted him, he fought back swiftly. He hunted down those who harmed him, including those that he hadn’t spoken to in years.

One day though, Sean started feeling different. He started feeling a twinge of guilt whenever he saw the hurt on his victim’s face. Sean didn’t understand why he was changing. God was about to draw him into a much-needed healing process.

Sean began to realize how dysfunctional and wrong his behavior was. He made a commitment to stop mistreating others and himself. At first this was difficult and he had mixed results. Some days he ate healthy and other days he returned to binge eating.

When Sean was twenty years old, God led him through some specific memories. Sean revisited his experience with losing his bicycle at 7 years old. He felt the pain of loss like he never had before. This was actually the first time he allowed himself the luxury of grieving his loss.

Sean realized for the first time that he didn’t deserve his parents’ harsh response to someone stealing his bicycle. His parents didn’t give him the opportunity to correct his ways after his mistake. His life in the past thirteen years would have been very different if his parents could have restored him gently.

God lead Sean to specific scriptures that demonstrated how He offers mercy and grace along with the truth.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Psalm 103:8

Sean became involved in a small group at his church and he told them his bicycle story. God led the members of his group to come around Sean and help him see and experience God’s love. They chipped in and purchased a new (adult) bicycle for Sean. Sean used his new bicycle to get to school and work.

Next week’s post will conclude Sean’s story and explain in more detail how to heal emotional wounds.

Sean’s Bicycle

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Sean loved the bicycle he got for his 7th birthday. It was his favorite color: red.

He rode it everywhere he went in the neighborhood. He especially like to ride his bike to the local store where he could purchase his favorite treat.

One day, upon exiting the store, his bike wasn’t there. He looked around hoping he had simply forgotten where he parked it. But it was clearly not there. His stomach dropped what felt like ten inches and he felt like he wanted to puke.

Of course, Sean was upset about his bike. But that wasn’t the only reason for his distress. He started walking home. The closer he got, the slower he walked. His feet wouldn’t move any faster.

“Someone took my bike.”

His mom, already stressed from the day’s activities, responded in her predictable way, “What? How could you be so irresponsible? How could you… well, you’re not getting another one. Go to your room until your dad gets home.”

Sure enough, his parents punished him for being “lazy.” Not only did he have to cope with losing his bike, but he also had to endure his parent’s hot anger and being grounded for two weeks—a true triple-whammy.

His teen years were filled with more dread. He believed he was “messed up” and carried a heavy anxious feeling with him. He frequently muttered under his breath, “yep, another perfect messup by Sean.”

Sean turned to food to manage his uncomfortable feelings. “I feel better when I eat. Or, at least I don’t feel so bad.” Inevitably this led to weight gain. Unfortunately, this left him open to unkind words from his peers. They snickered and made funny noises behind his back and sometimes even in his face. This quickly became too much for Sean to manage with food alone.

The problems intensified. Sean fought back when picked on. This was only verbal jabs at first, but eventually the depth of his pain produced a physical reaction he didn’t know how to control. The trouble at school only made matter’s worse at home.

Sean entered into a negative cycle that seriously picked up steam during his high school years.

Sean’s story will continue next week as I spend time teaching about healing emotional wounds.

Sexual Abuse Devastates Identity

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I wrote an article for Darlene Harris, creator of And He Restoreth My Soul Project. Her goal is to provide healing resources for those caught in the crossfire of abuse.

If you suffer from the effects of abuse or know someone who does, this article explains the emotional and spiritual struggles of abuse and offers steps for recovery. Read Part I: Sexual Abuse Recovery From a Christian Perspective. Part II will be posted on May 14.