Emotional Honesty

3 Steps To Overcoming Shame

April 7, 2019 by Matt Pavlik 3 Comments

Shame is the inability to tolerate being known. There is no end to being known. Every day is new. Every day brings more ways you can know and be known. This can be threatening to the person who feels shame intensely.

Shame results from becoming confused about the truth after lies are introduced into your mind. The lies provide an alternative to the truth and therefore an alternative to trusting God.

People who feel shame will instinctively hide: from themselves, from others, and from God. This is exactly what Adam and Eve did after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They acquired a sense of their inadequacy because they could no longer believe God.

“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees.
Genesis 3:4-8 NLT

The opposite of hiding in shame is being authentic. Here are three practical ways to reverse the effects of shame.

Know Yourself to Overcome Shame

Before you can share yourself with others, you must first be willing to know yourself.

Being willing to be known is a discipline. Sometimes the cost of being known isn’t worth the reward. Hiding seems better than facing the humiliation of being known. There are times when you won’t be ready for the exposure. That’s okay for the moment.

However, the more you hide, the more you remain hidden even from yourself. It’s not that you’ve forgotten who you are, but more like you’ve never given yourself a chance to understand who you are.

But hiding in shame isn’t really an option for the Christian. God won’t let you hide forever. You are salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). He calls each of us out of hiding and into a relationship with Him, others, and ourselves.

The more you know the truth about yourself, the more you’ll know how you can contribute to others. You don’t always have to receive; eventually, you’ll know what you can give.

Study and Journal to Overcome Shame

If you struggle to tolerate being known, keeping a private journal is the least risky way to begin. Make time to write consistently. As you journal and reread your writing, you begin to see yourself from an outside perspective.

What should you write about? Read the Bible and other helpful materials that teach you who you are. Then write about what the truths stir up in your heart.

Share Yourself with Others to Overcome Shame

Choose a trusted person and begin to share verbally. Practice putting into words what you’re feeling inside, entrusting your private life to another. Receive their acceptance and care.

Remember that God is a person too. Pay attention to how He speaks to you whether directly or indirectly through others.

Share publically, but discriminantly. Share more with everyone you know. This doesn’t mean being an open book to everyone. Healthy people discriminate how much they share with each person. However, as you heal, you should be able to share more freely with more people.

Share Yourself with God to Overcome Shame

Some parts of ourselves only God knows. Can you completely put your inner feelings of shame into clear words for others to understand? Maybe. Can you receive the truth of who you are completely through words alone? Unlikely.

As you grow in being genuine with others, you grow in readiness to receive healing from God. His acceptance is the only true antidote to shame. He can address your shame at the core through a deeply spiritual, relational transaction. Essentially, God reveals who He is to you in order to cure your shame.

Shame is difficult to overcome. It’s easy to fear the unknown. And it’s ten times harder when that unknown is you.

Where are you on your journey to overcoming shame?

Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

May 24, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

How does remembering your past help you today? Think of re-membering as bringing scattered parts of your life 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. Have you ever worked on a puzzle only to get to the end and realize some pieces are missing? It’s frustrating because it feels so incomplete.

I’m fascinated by my past. I’m not thinking of historical facts. I mean my psychological and emotional journey. Memories are important because they are the key to setting a person free from being trapped in the past.

You can’t change what has happened to you but you can change its meaning. You decided how much a particular memory has the power to define who you are. They answer the question: 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. Healing can be both strengthening the positive memories and weakening the negative ones.

Questions to Help You Remember

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?
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 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 toe in the water. If you considered more than one, you might feel overwhelmed as you swim in a pool of emotional memories.

As 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.

Remember the Past, Compare it with the Present, and Plan the Future

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 can lead 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 (life responsibilities) that you forget what it’s like to enjoy life on your own terms.

Here are three more questions that should help you “pull yourself together.” What day would you most like to relive? What makes life worth living today? 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.

More about the benefits of exploring your past.
Image by Nato Pereira from Pixabay
Last updated 2022/12/11

Transform Fake Happiness Into Genuine Joy

July 4, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 8 Comments

You can only be conscious of a few things at any one time. But there are many thoughts and feelings that live beneath the surface. The important ones will attempt to surface, especially the negative and painful ones. Chances are, you’re not excited about allowing them to surface. That’s why you might choose fake happiness instead of genuine joy.

To explain the problems with this situation, I like to use the analogy of a child and a parent. The child wants to express the pain and be comforted. The rational-focused parent says, “not now, I’m busy.” There is definitely a need for the rational parent, because most of the time, it’s not practical or healthy to let a complaining child have full control.

However, “not now” can easily become “never.” It’s easy to procrastinate when uncomfortable feelings are pushing their way to the surface. A balance is needed. The head (the parent) should remain in control, but the head should provide the needed time for the heart (the child) to share its concerns.

Without time to express feelings, a person will become more and more compartmentalized. A small to moderate amount of compartmentalization is helpful when it’s time to be a responsible adult. But the deeper a memory is buried with passing time, the easier it becomes to believe the memory isn’t a part of the real you. And, that’s a dangerous position to be in.

Your personal history shouldn’t be erased because doing so will increase the likelihood of repeating your mistakes. If you can’t remember what you already tried, including how it turned out, you may be doomed to repeat history. Instead, there is another option: transform your personal history through healing and forgiveness.

Everything that happens to you provides an opportunity for you to identify and understand who you are. If you attempt to ignore your memories, you will lose a part of yourself in the process. Every time this happens, you become a little less authentic. That is because buried negative experiences continue to leak lies into your self-image. They poison your self-worth. To heal you must bring the truth in contact with your experiences.

If your primary goal is to be happy, then you might choose to ignore unhappy thoughts and feelings. But this will only lead to the need to invest increased amounts of energy to keep up the appearance of being happy. You’ll have to fake it, and, unless something else changes, there’s no way to “fake it until you make it.” You can’t fake your way into genuine joy.

When you fake your happiness around other people, you’ll likely suffer greater depression when you are once again alone. The size of your problem hasn’t necessarily grown. But you will experience it as more painful because you haven’t been able to share your true feelings with another person.

Happiness will endure so long as your circumstances are positive. The minute you experience a setback, your negative feelings will attempt to surface. However, when you learn how to work through difficult feelings, you learn how to maintain joy regardless of your circumstances.

Compartmentalization is an avoidance technique. It produces an immediate strength to get you through the moment, but left in place, it results in permanent weakness. It’s similar to accepting a numbing agent when you have surgery or dental work. You miss out on the sharp pain while you correct the problem. But it would be dangerous to your health to remain numb forever. Likewise, if fixing the problem is too easy, you might let yourself fall into the same trap again.

As you feel pain in life, try to remain aware of it. Include God in your awareness. You can bring the “child” to the “parent” for true healing. In order to grow stronger and healthier, you must give God access to the weakest, most vulnerable parts of yourself.

If you want to become joyful, make time to be completely honest about how you feel about what has happened in your life. Ask God to help you see the truth.

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Move Beyond Depression Guaranteed

October 23, 2022 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

The recipe for deep depression is a combination of pain and hopelessness. Without pain, hopelessness has no teeth. Suffering becomes avoidable. With hope, pain can be endured. Here also suffering becomes avoidable. A person can’t be joyful without hope.

Isolation Increases Depression

David describes the potential for his depression as involving not hearing from God. In Psalm 28, he uses “pit” as a place of utter despair.

To you, O Lord, I call;
my rock, be not deaf to me,
lest, if you be silent to me,
I become like those who go down to the pit.
Psalm 28:1 ESV

The bottom of a pit is a lonely place. It is easy to feel forgotten. Despair increases when circumstances are hopeless. It’s easy to self-harm when discouragement dominates. In this context, self-harm means believing increasingly negative thoughts such as:

I’ll never get out of this (pit).
I’m not worth saving.
God has me here for a reason and that reason is He is against me.
God has abandoned me.
I’m a terrible person.

This kind of thinking only makes a bad situation (potentially avoidable) worse (appearing unavoidable).

Sometimes God will improve circumstances relatively quickly. Maybe you lose your job, but find one within a couple of weeks. Perhaps you find yourself in and out of trouble before you have time to worry. God is gracious and merciful. He preserves and protects those He loves from danger–both deserved and undeserved consequences.

Such mercy is normal in the sense that God prevents us from receiving what we deserve. He is constantly doing this. Jesus is never not interceding on our behalf before God. If He wasn’t, every moment of our lives would be full of despair. Yet, in another sense, life can be full of heartache. Everyone is suffering on some level.

Some suffering is avoidable while another suffering is unavoidable. Suffering has a purpose; depression is one response to it, but there is another.

Connection Reverses Depression

If depression intensifies with pain and despair, then the absence of pain and the presence of hope would certainly alleviate sadness. How do we get from one to the other? How can someone climb out of a pit? Sometimes God might teleport you to the surface, but quite often He rather chooses a more organic process: grief.

Having someone hear your cry is the path out of depression.

I waited patiently for the Lord;
    he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
    out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
    making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
    a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
    and put their trust in the Lord.
Psalm 40:1-3 ESV

And, what is grief, but crying out to someone who will listen? Grief is an expression of pain in the midst of hope. The way out is rarely painless, but it must be full of hope. Without hope, an attempt to grieve will only dig the pit of despair deeper. Sadness begets more sadness. That’s why sometimes focusing on the positives helps. While it can help, it doesn’t fully address the real problem of suffering.

Grief is more a struggle than it is suffering. It’s a struggle forward or up out of avoidable suffering. When you declare your circumstances as unacceptable, you leave no room for patiently waiting on the Lord. Grieving reorients your perspective until you find acceptance.

When you are grieving, you are moving up out of the pit. Your direction is toward God, toward joy. When you are despairing, you are moving deeper down in the pit. Your direction is away from the light and toward the darkness.

Your direction is more important than your exact location especially when you know you have God’s ear. The next time you are depressed, express your suffering to God and He will lift you out of the pit. If you need help with this, consider professional Christian counseling.

Is Emotion an Obstacle or a Bridge?

March 23, 2019 by Matt Pavlik 3 Comments

Does emotion hinder or does it help? To many people, emotion is a pointless burden. It seems to linger purposelessly forever like a plastic bottle in a landfill.

Obstacles impede progress. You must expend more effort to move beyond the obstacles in your path. Some obstacles cannot be removed by your effort alone.

Bridges on the other hand smooth the journey. Someone already cleared the path which makes your end goal possible and maybe easier. Although, some bridges are challenging to cross. The journey is strenuous, not because of the path, but because of what must be left behind.

Whether the emotion is a positive experience for you or a negative one, depends on your perspective. Rocks in your pack can be considered an affliction, but they could also be a blessing in disguise–they can help you grow stronger so you can move obstacles out of your way. What seems like an obstacle one day, might eventually come to be seen as a benefit.

Emotion is Like an Obstacle

Emotion is never bad; it’s only the messenger. We’re not supposed to shoot the messenger. But what is a person to do when the message is overwhelmingly negative? When emotion is immobilizing, it acts like an obstacle to progress. But it really is only a pivot point loaded with potential.

A person can lean into the negative message and become all the more discouraged. A person can also block out the message. Rough, calloused hands and fingertips are a sign of hard work. Your body forms a protective layer while you get work done.

In an emotionally risky environment, it’s natural to develop an insulative layer to protect your heart. Some negative environments you can avoid completely. And you should. But in other environments, you can’t.

Everyone is going to have some emotional callousness. Adam and Eve became overly defensive after the fall. Over-protection is a tendency we all have to work at overcoming.

You have an automatic defense system that sometimes malfunctions.

Sometimes your defensive system protects you so well that you don’t even know what it’s protecting. I’m lost; I don’t know who I am. At other times, you’re surprisingly vulnerable. Why am I flooded with emotion now?

Emotion is Like a Bridge

Because God exists, hope exists. No circumstance can determine the final outcome of your life. Because of God, emotion, even discouragement, can be productive.

Everything has a purpose–even negative feelings. You can’t avoid all risky environments because there’s no heaven on earth. So the best anyone can do is commit to crossing the emotional bridge.

Emotion can always become a bridge to a better place. That bridge can look like an obstacle, at first glance. Maybe you aren’t ready to leave behind what is comfortable, whether that be numbness or negativity. Maybe you aren’t ready to find out who you are deep down.

Crossing the bridge means embarking on a journey to becoming alive.

The obstacle to a better future is refusing to leave behind the past. You can only escape past and present pain by crossing the bridge of emotion. As you feel what you’ve experienced, it will carry you forward.

God didn’t make us to journey alone. We need traveling companions to help ease the pain of seeking true living that God has planned for us. Avoiding future pain is wise… unless that pain is needed to make you into a better person. Or perhaps the better way to put that is becoming a better person always involved confronting your pain.

If you’d like to better understand how difficult emotions can be blessings, try the book Hind’s Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard.

Read about choosing healing instead of coping.
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Last Updated 2022/10/16

Break Free From Suffering Needlessly

March 30, 2019 by Matt Pavlik 2 Comments

Everybody suffers. Some suffering is necessary while other suffering is needless. If I told you I am suffering needlessly, what adjectives would you use to describe me? Perhaps you’d think I was foolish or masochistic?

Jesus suffered, but not needlessly. There is a time to stay the course and suffer and there is a time to choose an alternate plan. 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

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

Needless Suffering is Self-Inflicted

Some suffering is avoidable. We suffer because of evil, its destructive deeds, and sin. Others can cause some of these deeds, but other destructive behaviors are self-inflicted.

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

It’s easy to want to give up all hope when evil must co-exist with good (our present reality). God made us to desire complete beauty, not distorted beauty. But beauty remains even when part of it is missing. A puzzle with a hopeful message, even though it has some missing pieces, can still inspire hope. Beauty, even with some blemishes, fully retains its identity as God’s inspirational instrument.

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

Our world is not without good even though it has some evil mixed in. Despair is needless suffering because it focuses on the bad news as if it were stronger than the good news. Suffering will always be a part of this life, but you don’t need to give it more power than it has on its own.

Needless Suffering is a Form of Learned Helplessness

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 it did when you were a child. Except now, if you have more power or money, you can create an even bigger mess.

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

Learned helplessness is a cycle of defeat with no apparent escape. When people need to escape, but no escape is allowed, they can learn to accept feeling hopeless. Without hope, a genuine exit will feel no different than an impassible wall.

A bird in a cage learns what is possible and what is impossible. If the bird truly believes, “there is no escape,” then even when the cage door opens, the bird will not leave. The cage may be too comfortable or the outside too foreign.

Likewise, you can feel so negative for so long that you become numb. Then you can reach the point where it is normal to feel numb.

In this way, you can learn to turn off your emotions because they don’t seem to be of any help. But emotions are not the bad guy. Even the circumstances are not a catastrophe. The learned sense of hopelessness is the worst of it all.

Working through difficult experiences and emotions becomes the bridge of escape. But the bridge can appear to be too scary to cross. Instead of crossing the emotional bridge, you remain “land-locked.” The bridge forward is visible but might as well be invisible because the thought of making it across seems unbelieveable.

Needless suffering results from refusing to cross the bridge. Crossing the bridge might also be painful, but it leads to a better place.

Read more about emotions as a bridge to health.
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Last updated October 2, 2022