Category: Yahweh’s fingerprints

When I get a sore throat, I pop a Fruit Breezer. When I get an infection, I take an antibiotic. When I have a headache, it’s ibuprofen to the rescue. I take vitamins and try to eat healthy. I try to do yoga to make myself more flexible so exercise isn’t such an ordeal. I struggle with consistency, but it’s important, so I keep trying.

I try to cultivate my creativity whenever possible. I read what others have to say and I read about how and why they say it. I try to take in art and music and other things that make me feel creative. It’s important to me, and I work at it.

So I take care of my body and spirit, even when it’s difficult. It’s important. Taking care of my mind/emotions, however, has always been last on the list, at least until the last few years.

I find, from talking to others, that they’ll go to the doctor when needed, they’ll try to eat right and make an effort at exercise, but if something is troubling them emotionally, they’ll fight treatment of their ailment with all the strength they have. Been there, done that.

Trouble is, our emotions, whether they be healthy or damaged, affect us in body and spirit. I can speak to this personally. By the time I entered my 30’s, I was plagued with a lengthy list of symptoms that, in retrospect, make perfect sense with what was going on so deep inside of me. Personally, I thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t see the connection.

Here’s a partial list of what I was enduring:
– sleeping problems, mainly intense insomnia
– nightmares, when I did sleep
– panic attacks
– irritability
– outbursts of anger
– shock reactions when being touched
– depression
– self destructive behavior
– comforting myself with food
– control issues
– perfectionism
– chronic, inexplicable pains

I could go on, but the above list of outward signs of something horribly wrong inside of me just goes to show that sometimes, to be healthy, we have to dig deep.

Yet so many stuff their emotions down and refuse to deal with them. Taking a pill is so much easier than digging deep to the root of the problem. By the time I faced my internal demons, my life was a mess. Most of my friends took a well deserved hiatus. I was unbearable to be around, and I couldn’t see why. I wouldn’t see why.

Many just hope the problem will go away. There are times, however, other people in your life to help dig deep and give tools to deal with the demons within. I believe that counselors and others can help the troubled, and they are often under utilized because people are afraid to confront what’s inside of them.

Jene’ finally suggested counseling. She didn’t beat me over the head with it, but when I would ask what’s wrong with me, she’d say, “I think you need to talk to someone.”

I was paralyzed with fear, and I didn’t know why. Like I said, I thought I was losing my mind. The nightmares had become so frequent and my back hurt so badly I could hardly sit down, but I still refused to go to counseling.

Finally, Jene’ confessed she had started praying for God to get a hold of me “in a real and personal way,” and my back got so bad I had to resort to crawling across my floor because I couldn’t stand up.

I made the appointment, and my life is so much better because I took that first step. Like I’ve said before, I have a long way to go, but I’d hate to think where I’d be if I hadn’t gone to counseling.

Yes, I’ll admit, that first six months, I was a mess. I was digging up all sorts of garbage and dumping it out and learning how to heal from something so traumatic, I’d repressed it for a couple of decades. In the midst of it all, I found God’s mercy, and an understanding of these traumatic events and how they make me, me.

I will never be a clean slate. This abuse I’ve suffered will always affect me. Triggers still surprise me. Though I am no longer in couseling, I still seek to improve my understanding of what makes me tick, and I collect tools of how to deal with the storm within. For the most part now, though, the storm within doesn’t control me anymore.

Am I a counseling advocate? Yes. Absolutely. It’s emotional surgery that I think for many is essential in the breakthough to a wholeness that few can understand unless they take the steps to heal.

Currently, I know someone who is in counseling. At first, she was reluctant to go. The only advice I could give her was that it would be tough, she would be a bundle of raw emotions for a while, I would be there for her, and when she got to the other side, life wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better. She’s had a tough time of it, though, and sometimes she’s backed off, but she’s a fighter, and she keeps going, and the lights of clarity are coming on for her. I am so excited for her that when she shares with me what she’s learning and doing, I literally jump up and down in celebration. She’s going to make it to the other side, and she’s going to emerge victorious. We’re survivors and we have to stick together and encourage each other.

I feel an immense sadness for those who know they need to do some emotional surgery and they refuse to get help. They spin out of control, they internalize their madness, and then they wonder why their physical health and their spiritual lives are a wreck. I feel this sadness, because that’s how I used to live. I even ask Jene’, “did I do that? Was I like that?” and she nods, yes… and I wonder how I ever survived knowing what I know now. I’m amazed she’s still friends with me, but because she is, I try to stick by those who are where I once was as much as I can without being pulled backward into their spiral.

I am not perfect… I occasionally have setbacks. What keeps me going is having the tools I need to help me when I stumble. I get back up again, dust myself off, and continue going forward.

I saw this quote the other day and it made me smile:

“I still have bad days, but that’s okay. I used to have bad years.” – Anonymous

It made me smile because I know, in my life, it’s true. I’m looking forward to the time, though, when I can say, I still have bad hours, but that’s okay. I used to have bad days.

I never thought of myself as brave, but it took all the courage I had, plus the encouragement of many others, to seek the help I needed to end my bad years. Seeking help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength.

The scariest part was relinquishing control… but once I got the help I needed, I saw clearly that I never had it. I clung to control like it was my sanity, but in reality, control was driving me insane.

I let go of pain and regret, of shame and guilt, and He delivered me from the bondage of crippling perfectionism. I’ve come so far, and the bad years shrunk to bad months, and then bad weeks, and then bad days… and that’s okay.

I still have a long way to go to get to bad hours. I still let the issue of control through the back door to taunt me, but somehow, with God’s help, I don’t let it grab me. If I could only find the strength not to grab it instead. I still have to tell myself that it’s not perfect, and that’s okay, but I’m usually over that rather quickly, having found that mistakes make my black and white world very colorful.

I’m still learning to let go of everything I feel that’s keeping me from moving on to bad hours. I still fear success. I’m trying to let go of that. I still fear intimacy. I’m trying to let go of that, too. I know you’ll find it strange (people who’ve been through what I have probably wouldn’t), but I still have to check a door I’ve just locked more than once (and I do know why I do it), but I no longer stand in front of a locked door for a half hour crying because I can’t walk away from it. I’d like to be able to lock a door and just walk away from it without checking it, and I’ve actually done that a time or two recently. I’m hoping it gets easier to walk away as I let things that keep me in bad days… go.

The victories are small, but they keep me hopeful.

I still have bad days, but that’s okay. I used to have bad years.

I used to think of myself as something of a handy-woman. I have my own tools. I can hang my own pictures, make minor repairs around the house, spackle, hang drywall, and paint. When I was a kid, we helped remodel our old farmhouse. I used to help spackle and drywall old houses in Indy when I was in college. I have a good handle on how tools are supposed to be used.

Therefore, when Jene’ handed me a shelf and said, “It’s yours if you want it,” I was very excited. After all, I’d hung all the shelves in my bathroom and even used a power tool (drill) to do it. No problem.

I’ve seen bolts and nuts like this particular set before. They’re long bolts with anchors that flip open after you shove them through the wall. No problem. I drilled four holes the size of my pinky in the wall and tried to get these bolts to work. The anchors did not deploy, so I was stuck with four holes in the wall and nothing to hold the shelf up with.

I cleverly disguised the holes by covering them with bright sheets of yellow paper. Nobody will notice that. Then I noticed that the bolts were stuck in the holders for the shelf and would have to be removed if I hoped to hang up the shelf.

I finally started the process of unscrewing the bolts from the undeployed (and very stuck) anchor wings. Wouldn’t you know, the wings broke, thus complicating their removal.

I wanted to cry. Something so simple had gone so wrong and while I was trying to laugh at my situation and play it off, I really was having a tough time not throwing the shelf and all its bolts, nuts, anchors and such through the window. It was bad enough that the bolt was stripped and in my attempts to separate it from it’s captivity, the screwdriver slipped and I scratched my thumb. No blood was drawn, but it was very painful.

While I struggled with the bolts and the shards of metal that peppered my bedspread, I kept remembering times my mother would tell me how stupid and worthless I was when I couldn’t do something so simple. As the contradictory woman she was, though, in the same breath she’d say something like tools were for boys and that if I knew how to do all this boy stuff, I’d grow into a woman who would never need a man, or attract one. She told me once that she’d raised me to be too independent and that I’d better learn to act stupid or I’d die an old maid. (Though I am considered an old maid, it’s not because I’m intelligent and can’t act stupid. I know this).

I don’t know why my inept attempt at hanging this shelf opened that wound, but it did. It was weird, though, because since my mother died four years ago, I have not heard her voice. Not one syllable. At the funeral, I sat there and every hateful thing she used to say, I put in the casket with her… and when they closed the lid on the casket, she fell silent.

Still, I didn’t hear her voice last night, but her words are still there, hidden in a corner of my brain… that is apparently tied to how I handle mechanical situations in this case. I found myself frustrated and screaming, “I’m not stupid!” because I don’t want to be or act stupid for the sake of not appearing capable. It’s just not worth it to me. Yet, there are times I feel completely dumb, and when I do, it’s so tough to fight through the barrage of words that attacks me from within, and I find myself trying to be smart in areas I’m just not cut out for just to prove that I can be smarter than she ever thought I could or should be.

It makes me uneasy sometimes to think that after all this time some pattern or behavior or belief, whether good, bad, unwarranted or real just pops out into my consciousness and there it stares back at me like four pinky sized holes cleverly disguised by bright yellow paper. I know God holds us to the fire so the dross rises to the top and there, dealt with, he drains off the bad so we can purer and closer to who we’re really supposed to be. Even so, moments like being confounded by four silly bolts is still scary to me sometimes. It makes me wonder what’s next and what might trigger it. God help me next time if I’m spreading cream cheese on a bagel and something weird and deMOMic pops into my head.

All I can do is keep praying that someday the corner of my brain with deMOMic diatribe hidden in it will be emptied once and for all.

The shelf is hung and today I found a scoop of spackle in a yogurt container on my desk (from J – see the borrow a husband program – BAHP from my move in November) and I will fill the holes this weekend and that will be the end of this part of the story.

Now I just need to find some cool items to put on the shelf. After all, I went to all the trouble to hang it.