THAT YOU MAY SHOW COMPASSION
Hey, Kathryn!
Hope all is well with you and that you guys are getting good and settled in your new digs. I was thrilled to hear that you’d found a house — it sounds perfect for you and Jack and the little ones. So thankful you don’t have to deal with that rental company, anymore. They sounded like an even worse version of what I continue to put up with.
How are Millie and David? I absolutely cannot wait to see Millie again and meet the new peanut. I still can’t believe we don’t live in the same city. I know it’s going on two years now, but yeah, well, as I mentioned recently, my brain sometimes doesn’t like to let me live in the present reality.
And how’s that for a segue into what you brought up at the end of your last email?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what you wrote. Like, a lot, a lot. There’s still so much I’m trying to wrap my head around and work through even though I’ve been at this for almost three years, now. Thank you very much for saying it was an act of courage to share what I did with you, but I think it was more desperation than anything else. I just feel like I’ve hit a wall and I’m not sure how to keep from sitting down and giving up.
There’s so much I feel like I need and want to say, so many questions I have and thoughts that don’t seem to want to stay contained any longer. You have one of the kindest, most compassionate hearts I’ve ever known and you remind me a lot of my Granny. Maybe it’d be better to say that she reminds me of you since I didn’t know her all that well until after she died and I read her journals and notebooks. In any case, as kind and compassionate as I know you are, I am terrified to let loose with most of the things crashing around in my brain.
But you asked how you could help and I guess perhaps the place I need to start is with a question. How would you respond to the following?
I’ve been raging at a world and a God who don’t seem to care that I exist.
I’ve been ignored, treated with disdain and contempt, ground under their feet until every atom in my being has been infused with impotent fury.
I have been every dog, every large cat, every cornered beast who ever existed.
My heart and spirit are filled with snarling, growling, roaring animosity.
Yet I’ve attempted to keep all that contained behind a persona of nicety.
And it’s killing me by inches.
I’m really sorry if that seems like a crazy weird place to end this, but I need to wait until I hear from you before I can go any further. It probably doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m sorry.
~Sissy
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Dear Kathryn,
Well, not gonna lie. I’ve been a blithering mess since I sent that last email to you. Can’t tell you how many times I did a net search for “how to unsend an email.” In truth, I don’t really have any idea what I expected from you, I just know it wasn’t what you wrote. I think I bawled for at least an hour after I read your message. Never in my over forty decades on this earth has anyone treated me with such dignity and respect. That you didn’t rush to the “God loves you deeply and you just need to lay it all down at His feet” reaction meant more to me than I can possibly express in words. And it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, some of my other…weirdness won’t appall and/or repulse you.
So to dive right in, something that Granny wrote has stuck with me and it’s kind of informed pretty much everything in the last few years. She said that she had to believe that God had something to say to people like her. I think that hit me because I’d read a lot about what she thought of Him already and about the horror movie that was her life, and for her to feel like that — let’s just say it made me more than eager to check out the whole God thing because anything had to be better than what I’d been trying.
When I first started actually reading the Bible and not just Granny’s journals, I felt like I’d jumped out of a plane without a parachute. I didn’t see much of anything that Granny wrote about in its pages and I gave up for a while. I figured she had a way of looking at things I could never understand.
Me being me, I couldn’t leave things there, though, so I thought if I went to church that might help. I did what I suppose is the modern day equivalent of closing your eyes, opening the phone book to the church pages and pointing. I did a search for churches and ended up at the first one whose website I liked. Again, me being me, I didn’t do anything by halves. I jumped in the deep end and got involved in everything and anything I possibly could. Sunday school, small groups during the week, women’s ministry, you name it. I even joined the praise and worship team when they found out I had a modicum of talent on the keyboard.
[Side Note: Maybe it’s just me but don’t you think churches should be, I don’t know, a little more discerning and cautious when it comes to snagging people to do stuff for them? I mean, they barely knew me a month and I was being asked to do all kinds of things, not just play keyboard. To say nothing of the fact that I was super new to the church scene…]
I’m not positive but I think I might have ended up more confused and bewildered after going to church than when I was just reading the Bible and Granny’s journals. Nothing I heard agreed with, well, pretty much anything Granny had written. It was like they were talking about a totally different Bible than Granny. Being such a newbie, though, I went to my fallback position which was that Granny just had a “unique” way of looking at God and the Bible and she must’ve been a loose cannon.
I gutted it out for almost two years until The Event.
See, I’d become close to these two women in my small group and I respected them a lot. They both seemed to know so much about the Bible and whenever I had questions, they didn’t treat me like I was a backwards dolt from Planet 10 for not knowing such simple things. We started meeting every week for coffee and conversation, as they coined it, and I found myself being not quite as hypervigilant in their presence, which was a huge thing for me.
A few weeks ago, we were doing our usual weekly thing and one of them said something that reminded me of a journal entry Granny had written. She was talking about another woman who had recently joined the women’s ministry (and yeah, I’m seeing now that maybe red flags should’ve been popping up all over the place because she was sharing some pretty personal stuff about someone I didn’t even know), saying how she’d been abandoned at birth and wasn’t it awesome how her birth mother had loved her so much that she’d given her up since she knew she couldn’t take care of her, and God was totally watching out for this woman, making sure she went to a good home and eventually landing at our church.
I didn’t say anything in the moment but when I got home, I couldn’t get her words out of my head. They didn’t jive at all with what Granny wrote, and for the first time since I’d started going to that church, I didn’t tell that niggling little voice of doubt to shut it. I guess I just needed to know once and for all whether Granny had the right of things or if maybe all she’d been through had permanently skewed her brain and she had no idea what she was talking about.
I sent an email to my two friends and asked if it might be possible that abandoning an infant isn’t a loving, sacrificial act but a sinful, self-serving one, one that actually makes God kinda angry.
I’m not entirely sure I can communicate the tsunami of emotion that engulfed me when I read their reactions to my email. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t mean and nasty or anything like that. I suppose that’s what made it all the more devastating. Instead of responding to what I wrote, I received a deluge of advice and proffered help in getting to know God better so that I can learn just how much God loves me and how His ways are so much higher than mine because it was obvious that I had some issues that didn’t allow me to receive His love properly.
Do I think these women meant well? I want to believe that the they did. Because the alternative isn’t really something I can even…yeah. It’s just…they didn’t even know me. They knew almost nothing about me in any real sense, and they felt perfectly comfortable in saying those things to me. One of the women told me that God is “crazy in love with me”. The other woman sort of tossed these brief and stilted words at me that left me with the distinct impression it wasn’t so much that she wanted to help me as that she wanted to feel like she was good at counseling and helping people. But if either one of them would’ve taken half a second to listen to the few things I actually said, they might have realized what they offered was not really what I needed.
I know I didn’t make it easy for them. When I told you that I had become close to them I meant that in the way we’ve been close. I do a whole lot of listening and observing and even more keeping my lips zipped. I know it might not be the healthy way to have relationships, but it’s definitely been the safer way.
It’s also taught me a lot. A lot about human nature. And since I started going to church, a lot about just how much people take their own pain and pretzel the Bible to conform to the ways in which they deal with their pain. For example, it seems to me that when Jesus said we should treat others like we want to be treated, He didn’t mean that we should spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how we want to be treated and then treat others like that.
I feel like a lot of the help and advice offered is based on what the person offering never received. And then they call that “doing unto others.” What it really is, if you ask me, is a rather self-focused manner of treating people. Which is most definitely NOT what Jesus intended to convey with His words, in my opinion.
Take this for what it’s worth but I have zero doubt that Jesus was so not saying, “Whatever it is that you never got and aren’t getting now, that’s what you need to give to others.” I’m not entirely certain He was even thinking specifics. Because as Granny wrote a lot in her journals and notebooks, the Bible is not a step-by-step-how-to guide or rule book. It’s about wisdom. Jesus was saying that we all need to be true human beings. Sure, there are some common generalities in terms of how we should treat others.
Dignity.
Respect.
Courtesy.
Compassion.
Sensitivity.
But if you needed your parent to tell you they loved you in a specific way, I really don’t think Jesus was in any way telling us to go and do that to others. Part of treating someone with dignity, respect, courtesy, compassion, and sensitivity is studying them to figure out how they need to be communicated with and what would be meaningful to them. Anything else — well, there’s a word for that.
Narcissism.
I know I’m new to this whole being a disciple of Jesus thing, but I’m gonna go with, yeah, that’s not what Jesus was promoting. The problem is that narcissism does an amazingly excellent job of masquerading as empathy and hubris is a master at donning the disguise of compassion.
And I think God weeps.
Maybe now it makes a little more sense as to why I wrote that email to you and said what I said. I actually hadn’t put it all together myself until I sat down to write this. This might sound ridiculous, but thank you for being the person I always thought you were. Thank you for being even more.
Your Friend,
Sissy
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Hi, Kathryn!
Oh. My. Stars. That photo you attached of Millie and David was easily the most adorable thing I’ve seen in, I don’t know, ever! Had it not been for that major inconvenience, a.k.a. my job, I would’ve been on a plane and at your doorstep tomorrow. Please give them both gobs of hugs and kisses from me!
I realized after I read your email that I never really finished the story of The Event (sorry if that sounds overly dramatic — it had a pretty huge impact on me, though, and it feels like one of those life moments that’s gonna stick with me for a good long while). I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t respond immediately or what but both women called me within a day of sending their respective emails. As you well know, I am sooooo not a talk on the phone person, which I think may have made the situation even worse. I must not have given them the responses they wanted or expected because I got another variation on the “you really can’t receive love, can you” theme. I attempted to excuse myself from both conversations as gracefully and as swiftly as I could (spoiler alert — neither was graceful or swift) and I haven’t had any contact with either of them since.
I’ve been trying harder than hard to move past what happened but I find that I’m really stuck. I did realize something, though, through all this. I used to think that I was a petty, small person who holds things against people. But I’ve realized that’s not true. That is the voice of all those who don’t truly know me trying to convince me of a lie.
Here is truth. I take people very seriously. By that I mean that no one who crosses my path in any significant way is ever considered nothing more than a talking flesh bag of bones. I am not casual about people. Maybe that’s why idle chit chat is so painfully difficult for me. All that is to me is filling the air with sound because silence makes people uncomfortable. An interaction may be casual in the sense that earth-shattering things are not constantly being discussed, but I do not treat people casually. I am interested in genuineness and authenticity.
So when a person wrongs me, I desire genuine emotion if they are going to take the trouble to say anything at all. Not a blanket, “I’m sorry if I ever done you wrong” statement. Not a bunch of words thrown at me in the hope that I won’t realize they’re actually reaching out in order to make themselves feel better, not make things right. I am so very ready and willing to forgive. But what I am not prepared to do is give someone a pass when they aren’t being genuine and authentic.
Thing is, genuineness and authenticity don’t just happen. They are hard-won qualities that require us to fight and never give up. Which is something it seems so few are willing to do. I can understand why this aspect of my personality comes across as combative. I’ve been told it seems like I just want to fight people. I think it’s always come out like that because I didn’t really understand what was going on nor did I have a way to express how I felt. I recognize now, though, that it’s not about trying to change people’s behavior. It’s about knowing that there’s a better way to be an actual human being.
So many people in my life are simply not human beings. Not in the truest sense. And I realize now that the point for me is that I don’t ever want to allow anyone to treat me in a less than truly human way. It’s not about being combative, it’s about respecting myself and asking that others do the same while I also respect them. It’s about me being genuine and authentic and letting people know that’s what I prize. Some will listen. Most will not.
It’s really not that I’m holding a grudge when it seems like I can’t let go of things. What’s going on is that I’ve never been able to express what I’m actually feeling. Even having feelings was verboten when I was growing up, much less expressing said feelings. And as I’ve learned, feelings unexpressed are feelings multiplied. Exponentially.
What’s also happening is that the initial emotions become buried under a mound of protect at all costs. And then I forget what’s truth. I feel like I want to strike back at those who caused my pain only because no one has told me that my pain is valid. But when I know that my pain is honored and I’m able to express it properly, then I realize that I don’t have any true desire to do battle with anyone. I simply want them to be true human beings, and if they refuse, then I want to have the freedom to greatly limit my exposure to them if not end it entirely.
Which, for good or for ill, is what I’ve decided to do with those women and, in truth, that church. I can already hear what I think many of the people in the congregation would say to me. I’m being judgmental and I can’t just jump ship at the first sign of a storm. I can’t base what I think of God and the church on the actions of a few.
And I will definitely keep doing some deep dives into the Bible to see what God has to say about all of it, but in the meantime, I guess my question for them would be, was Paul just joking or being metaphorical when he said that disciples of Jesus are His ambassadors?
~Sissy
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Hey, Kathryn…
So I thought I was kinda done with the church I was telling you about but it appears that the saga continues. I don’t know what was said and maybe it’s better that way. All I know is that one of the associate pastors contacted me and asked to have a meeting. For many, many reasons, my hackles went up and I so desperately wanted to give that one a big ol’ pass. The old voices kicked it into overdrive, though, and I found myself fighting a very losing battle against feeling like I must do whatever any authority figure tells me to do no matter what.
It started off well enough, I suppose, until he asked me why I thought God didn’t love me. Now, I have to say that at this point, I flashbacked so hard that I might as well have reverted to being an actual infant. I went total deer in the headlights and all these words came dribbling out of my mouth about my Granny and discovering that just like her, I had been suffering from Complex-PTSD, and that I had been trying to find hope through God and, and, and, and, and.
That’s when it happened. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “If you really knew Jesus, you wouldn’t struggle with mental illness.”
Kathryn, my heart hurts so badly. I am completely shattered and I desperately need to know if God really does offer any hope for healing to people like me or if it’s all a sham like I spent most of my life believing. I mean, He must, right? Right? I know we think we’re all that now because we’ve come up with these clinical and scientific labels for the human condition, but people have been people since Man and Woman were booted out of Eden. So that means even when they didn’t call it Complex-PTSD, people were suffering from it.
Why do pastors and teachers never talk about it? Is it because they truly believe what that guy told me? Is it because they don’t see mental and emotional health in the pages of the Bible? All they see is sin and not sin, as if that’s all life consists of and it’s all we need to talk about. Did God really intend for us to leave mental and emotional health at the front door when we read the Bible? Are we supposed to set aside the psychological aspects of our beings and not see any psychology in the Bible?
Or could it be that He had the writers and compilers put it together in such a way that we would miss the point and the truth unless we set our imaginations ablaze and applied the disciplines of psychology and every other -ology to everything we read in its pages?
I came across a quote by a woman connected with a well-known ministry and I’m not really sure I can properly express how utterly devastating her words were to me. It went something along the lines of saying that death is God’s merciful way of ushering us into His presence.
I know I haven’t made a huge deal of it, but I still have so many — too many — dark days when I have to fight with every atom and molecule of my being not to give in and let death take me. I mean, if what that woman said is true, why am I wasting my energy? Why am I not surrendering to His mercy?
Truth is, when I ask the question “Why do I want to keep living?” I usually can’t come up with an answer other than, “Because giving in to death would be wrong.” I feel like I’ve been doing all this, enduring all this pain and agony and torment, and I have no reason why. I don’t know what I’m living for. I don’t know why I’m fighting this hard. There has to be more than just “anything else is wrong.” Because if that woman is to be believed, there’s not a single person who calls themselves a Christian that shouldn’t be rushing to die so they can be in God’s presence.
I am the walking dead and no one is speaking for me. I am one of those who, like Job, wait for death but it does not come.
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Dear Kathryn,
Thank you doesn’t quite cover what you did for me, but for lack of any more suitable phrase, “Thank you.” I know you and Jack were totally serious about the offer and the day may come when I will take you up on it. For now, I think the best thing for me is to stay with the pain and keep fighting to find the Light. I do promise that I will text you every night before I go to bed, though.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve done not much else besides pray and think about what happened with that pastor. It’s a constant and consistent struggle to believe that I’m not just being a whiney loser who needs to suck it up and get with the program. That I’m not simply making it all up.
My brain has been waging one of the fiercest battles yet and it’s been raging for days. All the old hits are coming out to play. Today the tune was a true standard, “You Were Born Defective.” Of course I would misunderstand and wildly misinterpret the kind and generous ways of my parents and other relatives! I was wired that way from birth. And sadly, their love and caring was not enough to overcome my unhinged way of thinking and so I remain broken. Oh, and naturally since I was steeped in sin from birth, my sinful and evil brain concocted all these scenarios that were simply delusions of a sick mind. There was never any abuse or mistreatment. Only a twisted little girl who wants to slander good people for some hateful and perverse reason.
“I never said that.”
“That never happened.”
“You must have misunderstood.”
I have been set up my entire life to doubt my sanity. I have been consistently told that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And now I barely know my head from my feet. I am having to fight with every atom just to grasp at any shred of truth, and sometimes it feels like I really don’t know what reality is. Did any of those things really happen?
I wish I could properly explain how it feels to doubt almost everything you think you know. People take for granted that the thoughts they have are their own, but for me it’s like there’s more than one person living in my head and I honestly don’t know what’s me and what’s not. I know what that sounds like, and I don’t think it’s that, so maybe that’s not the best way to describe it.
But right now, every day that brings a moment of clarity seems followed by the insistent voice that tells me I don’t know what I’m talking about — and I am in a desperate struggle to know which voice to believe. BEWILDERED DESOLATION.
That’s my address. To be “wildered” was to lose one’s way. They made my life one never-ending bewilderment, and people like the pastor I talked to do nothing but ensure that I continue living there.
I also realized today that my brain has convinced me that if I give myself entirely to the truth that my parents were not good parents, I will become a complete non-entity. I might actually cease to exist. If even the paltry crumbs of personhood they doled out are swept away in favor of the truth, what will I be left with? If I can’t even be a trained monkey, what am I? My brain is trying with all its might to convince me that I would be less than nothing — or, rather, my brain that was frozen in child understanding. It wants me to believe that I’m better off as a trained monkey than ceasing to exist altogether.
I thought I had come so far in these last three years. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on things and that I was actually making progress. But I’ve been knocked flat on my bum and I’m finding it monumentally difficult to find the desire to get back up this time. I know I will. I wonder how many more times this can happen before I just don’t, though.
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Dear Kathryn,
I know I just wrote to you, but I’ve had some more thoughts and I figured I should share them with you while they were fresh in my head.
It’s taken a super long time for me to be able to consciously recognize how I feel and what I need, but I think this is where I’m at — at least right now.
Paul said that the people of God are to mourn with those who mourn (some translations use the word weep). Thing is, that’s not such a simple and straightforward thing. Mourning with someone who’s mourning really isn’t the same as simply feeling sorry for someone. And it is definitely not superimposing your own feelings on top of someone else’s and calling it empathy. It is the deliberate act of feeling what the other person feels. Which is very much not an easy thing to achieve.
I used to think that what I needed was just for someone to believe me. To believe that I actually suffered, to believe the facts of my heinous life, to believe that it really was that bad. But now I realize I don’t need intellectual acknowledgment that I suffered. What I need is true empathy. I need for someone to mourn with me. I need for someone not simply to acknowledge and understand my excruciating pain, I need someone to feel it with me. Only then will my burden be eased.
Because it is precisely the abusers’ refusal to feel my pain (or anyone else’s but their own) that put me in the chaos I’m in to begin with — so other people doing nothing but acknowledging that I’m in pain does almost zero to aid in healing that pain. I have no doubt that abusers fully acknowledge that their victims are in pain. This is also why being told that “you have the power to believe yourself into health” is really a bunch of bunk. We were not created to be islands. If I am truly to find health, it must be in community. Just believing it or acknowledging it or “owning” it myself will never be enough.
~Sissy
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Hi, Kathryn!
Again I find myself using the woefully inadequate phrase, but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you (maybe if I say it an inordinately large number of times it will have more impact — heh heh)! I confess that I thought by now I’d be seriously regretting ever having brought any of this up with you. But in your astounding patience and compassion I see so much of my Granny as well as what I’ve always imagined and wanted Jesus to be like.
I do feel like I’m beginning to see the faintest glimmer of light again. I know I was in a very dark place the last few of times I emailed and I know you’ve been super worried. And not without really good reason. I’ve been slipping and sliding down Sand Mountain, as Granny called it, and I truly wondered if I would ever stop. I keep going over what you wrote me in your last email, though, clinging to your words. And I think the descent has definitely slowed if not halted altogether.
You brought up anger in your last email. It’s something I’ve been contemplating quite a bit lately so get ready — I have thoughts.
It occurred to me that we as a society have somehow made the word “hate” into a sort of shorthand for anger. The words have become conflated, especially in Christian circles, it seems, so that when one says “I am angry at…” the listener automatically hears “I hate…”. Which is why, I think, anger is so strongly condemned in so many church circles. And the casual way we use the word “hate” to mean “strong dislike” doesn’t help in any way.
That night I told you about a while ago when I thought my heart was going to explode in a literal sense and I almost let the words “I hate them” slip out of my mouth before savagely clamping down on the thought — my brain truly believed it had no other words to express what I was feeling.
But the watershed revelation is that I have been so indoctrinated to believe anger is evil that the thought of hatred was actually more acceptable. Of course, much of that has to do with the incorrect conflation of anger and hatred as well as turning hatred into a mere shadow of its actual self. But the thought still stands. And I was also so completely convinced that the expression of such an emotion was so hideously wrong that I almost stopped my own heart.
You also mentioned something about despair and I totally agree. Despair is more closely linked to anger than it is to sadness and sorrow — and it isn’t an expression of emotion, it’s actually a defense mechanism. A whole lot of people want to talk about mental health these day but one component that almost never seems to be mentioned is anger. We feel more comfortable talking about being sad and struggling with grief. Yet so few are willing to venture into the often terrifying maelstrom that is anger.
And I get it. Wisdom would seem to dictate that trying to get a firm grasp on anger is like trying to scale Everest in nothing but shorts and flip flops. We don’t want to expose ourselves to such raw elements. And yet we absolutely must if we are to achieve any semblance of true health.
I never noticed it before, but the one emotion Paul addresses in his letter to the Ephesians is anger.
BE ANGRY BUT DON’T SIN
DON’T REMAIN ANGRY
(deal with each day’s anger on that day;
don’t allow anger from one day to spill over into the next)
FLING RAGE and ANGER AWAY FROM YOU
With everything I’ve read about conscious and especially unconscious anger, it surprises me not at all that Paul would deal with it out of all the other emotions he could have mentioned. Other writers had things to say about fear. Both of them accumulate and turn into life-altering obsessions. Anger builds to the kind of resentment that will suffocate you in an almost literal way while fear descends into debilitating anxiety.
I don’t know that I can say for sure, but I do know that people write about what they know and teachers can’t help but focus on things they themselves struggle with. Might it have been the case that Paul had to wrestle with anger? Entirely possible.
He calls it out in more than one of his letters. And it would be ever so much more helpful and instructive to me if he did have an issue with it because I would know his words came not from someone who was simply handing out theoretical advice but from a person who intimately understood how crazy difficult it sometimes is to reign in the destructive tsunami of resentment that results from unexpressed and suppressed anger.
So if I take it from that angle, if I think of Paul as a man who experienced the remorse and guilt of anger spiraling out of control, then I can hear his words quite differently. Instead of hearing, “Do this because it’s what you’re supposed to do if you want to be a good girl” or even “Do this because it’s what will please God,” I can hear, “Hey, I’ve been there and I know what it looks like when your pent up resentment does a Mt. Vesuvius all over everyone in range, and I know how it feels afterwards...I don’t want that for you, God doesn’t want that for you, and I’ve worked really hard at figuring out a better way. This is what I’ve discovered…”
The word both James and Paul used for anger is a Greek word that is properly translated, “to teem,” indicating an internal motion, especially that associated with plants and fruits that swell with juice. And there is a distinction made between this word which denotes an emotion which has arisen slowly and settled in and another word which indicates more of a violent outburst. Paul uses both words in Ephesians 4:31, but James only uses the former. It seems that the anger which builds up in our internal reservoir is also the former. The things we just keep adding to and increasing until we have swelled with more juice than our brains can handle. That’s when they kick into protection mode and we make ourselves sick.
Another thought occurred to me the other day about what Paul meant. I don’t think the instruction was ever meant to be taken as a “just think positive thoughts” sort of proposition, nor a “just clamp down an iron will on your emotions” thing. Suppression is not at all what Paul had in mind. He didn’t explain things in modern psychological terms, but I am positive that by “get rid of” he most certainly meant we were to deal with it in a healthy manner.
My conditioning makes it feel so very wrong to say this, but I think this is a first step for me. I am angry. I am angry at those women not only for what they said but for talking about me without my permission. And I am beyond angry at that pastor. His utter lack of compassion and sensitivity and understanding made me feel like I wasn’t a true disciple of Jesus and God was sorely disappointed in me.
That…was…excruciatingly difficult.
I am at this very moment having to fight with every ounce of energy I have not to hit the delete button. So I’m gonna send this before I lose the battle.
~Sissy
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Hey, Kathryn!
I cannot tell you how overjoyed I am that you don’t think I will burn for all eternity because I expressed my anger towards those people. It is no exaggeration to say that I spent the past few days looking up everything I possibly could about anger in the Bible and desperately asking God to show me if I was wrong in any way. I was thankful beyond words that your email confirmed what I believed God had shown me.
I have to say that a great big “HA!” escaped my lips when I read the last line of your message because I had just written this in my journal earlier today:
So many people want to think that their pain is unique, that they have suffered greater and more deeply than anyone in history.
Why is that?
And why do we play the one-upmanship game with pain?
Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that your pain and my pain can exist in the same space at the same time?
I think for some it is varying degrees of narcissism.
But I also think, as I’ve stated before, that it’s because some of us have never had our pain validated.
Some of us have never been told that what we feel is entirely appropriate and more than that, absolutely necessary.
That got me thinking a lot about what you said. I hope you don’t mind if I just copy and paste from my journal again, it’s just that I’m not sure I can say it much better. These thoughts were written on different days but I think they all sort of blend into one another.
If parents could somehow find a way to help their child emote in a way that doesn’t injure themselves or others, there would be a lot fewer messed up adults in this world.
I want to feel.
I want to be unafraid of my feelings.
I want to believe that it’s safe to feel.
It was so radically unsafe to feel anything growing up.
I never knew when the bomb would explode in my face on the one hand, and I could never feel anything that didn’t reflect her back to herself on the other hand.
Throw in all the shame and confusion of how my body reacted to being sexually stimulated as a toddler and...yeah.
Feelings are the Dark Lord.
Oh, and throw in the teaching that feeling good was an absolute sin with dire consequences and you’ve got the makings of an even Darker Lord.
People got the wrong end of the stick.
It’s not having negative emotions that makes you sick.
It’s the inability or unwillingness to FEEL and express negative emotions that makes you sick.
I know I keep going on about this topic, but I guess I just want to make sure I’m completely and thoroughly demolishing this particularly insidious stronghold.
Inhibiting and prohibiting negative thoughts and emotions does not lead to healing and health.
In fact, doing so achieves precisely the opposite.
Banishing all negativity is not only impossible, it makes you less human.
Jesus most definitely had a purpose for coming to this earth.
He was intended to bring God’s desires for all creation to fruition.
And part of that was to show us how to live.
Jesus was every atom and molecule a human being and not only did He not suppress His negative emotions and feelings, He let them loose in the world in full view of those around Him.
Inhibited He was not.
What would Jesus do?
I guarantee He wouldn’t sit in the lotus position and chant a mantra when He was upset or angry or frustrated or disappointed or discouraged.
He wouldn’t count to ten and hope His emotions got in line.
He most definitely would NOT arrange His face in a plastic smile and say, “Praise Me anyway!”
Nor would He teach His disciples to do any of those things.
He would give full expression to all that He felt.
He would cry out to God.
He would allow Himself to be fully human.
More than ever I am firmly convinced that in order to feel the pain of others you must first feel your own pain.
And I don’t mean feel bitterness, resentment, and rage.
I mean fully engage in feeling the grief, anger, and sorrow.
Because that’s what Jesus did.
It finally struck me forcefully why He was described as being a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
I’ve never heard anyone say this before (which, I know, is not saying much since I’m still a relative newbie to the whole disciple of Jesus life) but I think it is in part because He owned His own pain.
He didn’t stifle it or mute it or tell it to shut up.
He felt every single ounce of it.
The English translation doesn’t quite do it justice, in my opinion.
He was a Man of Pain.
He KNEW grief — it’s that Hebrew word, yada, which is the most intimate kind of knowing possible.
And I have no doubt that Isaiah was referring to His own pain and grief brought on by the words and actions of relatives and friends.
He was a Man of Pain.
But instead of dismissing and diminishing and denying like most of us do, He felt it all.
He didn’t hide from it.
He stared it squarely in the eyes and navigated His way through it with, as the writer of Hebrews put it, loud shouts and tears.
Which is what gave Him the strength to feel the pain of others.
Which is what gave Him the courage to extend compassion to others in pain.
God is Light and Truth.
God feels and feels deeply.
God is the only One who has the right to collect on a debt because He is the only One Who knows what is truly owed.
Granny wrote those words and I was thinking about them a lot the other day.
I think those three are connected in ways that really surprised me the more I thought about them.
The reason we begin trying to deceive ourselves about anything is fear of feeling.
We fear the pain.
We fear the remorse.
We fear FEELING.
We fear the pain others have inflicted upon us.
We fear the remorse we must feel when we have inflicted pain on others.
We fear that feeling will overwhelm and utterly annihilate us.
So we start hiding from the truth.
We begin saying that abandonment is love.
We become completely committed to saying that our parents were a little messed up instead of abusive.
We do everything and anything to avoid having to look at the evil committed against us in the Light of Truth.
Because we don’t want to FEEL.
Because we wish we weren’t like God.
We wish we didn’t feel and feel deeply.
The truth every single one of us so desperately needs to believe is that only when we FEEL and FEEL DEEPLY will we ever be free from the darkness that enslaves us.
Only by feeling all that we feel can we ever hope to be able to call things what they are and live in Light and Truth.
And only by feeling every last drop of sorrow and grief and anger can we get to the place where we can forgive.
I think that’s how we get sucked into the trap of being able to do the right things while neglecting what is truly important.
We convince ourselves that we can uphold the commandments of God through logical, rational, intellectual decision making alone.
But that is not the Truth of God.
We must bring everything we are to bear if we are to truly live.
We must FEEL it all.
And we must honor all that we FEEL.
Anything else and we are offering sacrifices without understanding.
We are tithing as is commanded but neglecting the weightier matters.
God wants us to be WHOLE.
He wants us to reflect ALL that He is, not just the parts that make the most sense to us and don’t make us uncomfortable.
There are three main tenets of wisdom taught in the Bible which have been used to imprison victims of chronic abuse and assault when they should have been used to set us free.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others.
Most pastors and teachers use those words to tell people that every single individual on this planet is a self-absorbed, self-centered narcissist who needs to be kicked in the patoot because all they do is think about themselves.
Otherwise, why would God have said those things?
And so those of us who have endured hideous crimes against us have been told that we should get over it, stop focusing on ourselves so much, forgive and pray for our abusers.
It’s the world that tells you to take care of yourself.
God wants you to die of complete and utter exhaustion in service to others.
It’s the world that says the path to health begins with loving yourself.
God says you’re a pile of dung and the only way to please Him is to treat yourself like the pile of dung He knows you are.
Yeah, I’ll tell you what the pile of dung is.
[Side Note: It occurs to me that a lot of church theology was formulated by people with complex-PTSD. How else to explain the teaching that God loves you but you’re nothing but a wretched piece of filth? That can only come from a mind that got imprisoned by parents who proclaimed love while at the same time degrading and demoralizing and dehumanizing. Those poor souls recognized the cognitive dissonance but never worked through it and it couldn’t help but seep into how they saw God and how they taught Him…to the ruin of thousands upon thousands like me.]
Here is the truth people like me are desperate to hear —
You absolutely CANNOT love anyone else if you do not first love yourself.
You cannot treat others in the manner you would like to be treated if
you haven’t got the first clue how you SHOULD be treated.
You cannot truly look to the interests of others if you do not first believe
that you have the right to look to your own interests as well.
And most important of all is this —
GOD KNOWS AND UNDERSTANDS THE TRUTH OF THOSE STATEMENTS.
Because He’s the One who infused them with truth.
So do what you need to do.
Walk the path to health.
Learn what to believe about yourself.
Demolish ALL strongholds including the ones which tell you that God is displeased and even angry with you if you don’t try to pray your way through and just rely on the Holy Spirit to mystically fix you.
Keep asking for healing and health.
Keep seeking true life.
Keep knocking on the door of hope and joy.
Because those who keep asking will receive.
Those who keep seeking will find.
Those who keep knocking will have the door opened.
It is not God who has abandoned you and left you desolate.
I know the things I am composing and designing for you —
it is a composition designed for your shalom, not for your ill,
not to crush you,
but to give you HOPE
and a future.
You will search for Me and find Me if you search with your whole heart.
I will be found by you.
LOVE YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEING AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF.
I AM THE LORD.
I was meditating on why God continually used the phrases “I am the LORD” and “I am the LORD your God” so much in Leviticus 18-20 when a couple thoughts struck me.
Maybe He was telling the people of Israel how they treat fellow human beings is inextricably linked to how they see God.
But even more than that, maybe He was binding humanity and Himself together in a subtle way so that we would come to a fuller understanding of what Jesus meant when He said, “When you do it to the least of these, you do it to Me.”
And yet I think there’s an even deeper layer that just struck me.
I never really considered the truth that when we say that how we treat our fellow human beings is how we treat God and vice-versa, I am included in that.
In other words, how I treat myself is how I treat God and how I treat God is how I treat myself.
And yet it’s really right there in Leviticus 19:18 — there is a tri-unity that I never saw before.
GOD — ME — FELLOW HUMANS
We are all bonded together into one unity.
And I can’t really neglect and mistreat any one of the unity without also neglecting and mistreating the whole.
I have ignored myself and my pain for so long.
I have shuffled my needs and longings off to oblivion for so long.
I have believed that paying attention to taking care of myself equaled utter selfishness for so long.
And the truth is, I’ve been treating God in much the same way, and I’ve really been doing the same to others while at the same time thinking I was putting them first.
If I’m not extending grace and mercy and compassion to myself, I am not truthfully extending it to anyone else, either.
Love others as you love yourself.
I’m not really sure many people truly comprehend the radical nature of that statement.
As I’ve written before, so, so, so, so, so very many pastors and teachers have led people to believe that every human being on the planet is exactly the same and every single one of them suffers from extreme self-centeredness and selfishness.
They blithely label people narcissists without having a true comprehension of that word and then proclaim that we all must stop focusing on ourselves and spend every ounce of energy on others while completely and thoroughly ignoring our own needs.
Better yet, claim that you have no needs or wants because Jesus has met them all.
What they refuse to acknowledge is that things are never that easy.
I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it as long as there are people who don’t and won’t believe it.
YOU CANNOT LOVE ANYONE ELSE IN THE TRUEST SENSE OF THE WORD UNTIL YOU HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF.
You may have affection for others.
You may appreciate them and enjoy them.
You may even do things for them.
But you will never truly love them as long as you hate and dislike yourself.
Another thing that will never happen is true repentance for sin and transgression against others.
You cannot feel the weight of the pain you have inflicted on others until you have felt the weight of the pain others have inflicted on you.
And until you feel that weight, true repentance simply isn’t possible.
Apologizing isn’t repentance.
Apologies are mostly about making you feel better.
And when you don’t love yourself, you are constantly and consistently trying to make yourself feel better.
I cannot prize another above myself if I do not prize myself at all.
I cannot love another as I love myself if I do not love myself.
I cannot grasp the worth of another if I do not have any sense of my own worth.
Until you firmly grasp and comprehend the truth of those statements, you will always struggle to see the line between indulgence and care, between blame and genuine responsibility, between false obligation and compassion.
I hope all that made sense and didn’t get lost in translation from my brain to my pen. In any case, I should let you get back to your life now. As ever, thank you so much for listening to me ramble on. And on. And on. And on.
Your Friend,
Sissy
P.S. One more thought. I remember promising myself way back when I began this journey that the resolution of all this wouldn’t simply be everything back to the way it used to be except I would be healthier. I wanted to somehow make a statement about all I had endured, all I had suffered. I didn’t want to allow anyone, be they relative or friend, to diminish, dismiss, and deny my pain any longer, and I didn’t want to allow them to silence my voice any longer. I wanted to be fully heard even if not actually listened to. I wanted what I’ve always felt that I wanted where my mother was concerned — all cards on the table, no prevaricating, no softening anything. I wanted TRUTH.
And I would have to say that I still want that but it definitely looks much different to me now. Achieving the goal of living out of truth instead of the hideous lies my entire life has been founded on doesn’t really seem to be about the same thing as it did when I first put my feet on this path. Back then I felt like I needed to scream my pain in their faces because they had bound and gagged me for so long. They had turned away and deafened themselves to my agony and by golly goodness, they were gonna hear about it.
But here’s the thing. I’ve learned from experience and from watching what’s been going on in the world that when you scream your pain, the only ones who hear are other victims. The abusers and perpetrators continue to stop up their ears and you’re left with no satisfaction and certainly no resolution. Just a raw throat and frustration.
So now I’m left with the question — what does living out of truth even look like?
When you know that no matter how loudly you scream, you’ll never be heard, what do you say? When walking away is not an option, where do you go? After reading several articles, I’ve found some interesting and helpful stuff. First and, I think, foremost is that living out of my true self means not just going along with what everyone tells me and allowing them to do whatever, expecting me to be okay with that. It means not putting everyone else first and me not even on the list.
And yeah, I totally get that most church people I know would greatly object to the above statements on the grounds that they are wildly unbiblical. They would rush to quote 1 Corinthians 10:24, Philippians 2:3-4, Romans 15:1-2. So those are the only three verses in the entire New Testament I can find (and believe me, I’ve looked A LOT) that specifically state that thought. As usual, people teach the sound bite Bible rather than the full counsel of God. In Romans and 1 Corinthians, Paul is talking about the weak versus the strong and that the guiding wisdom should be that neither group should look only to their own interests. In Philippians, Paul is telling them how to have the mind of Jesus. But there’s a crucial word that some translators seem to blip over for whatever reason. It’s definitely there, they just seem to ignore it.
“Also.”
Look not only to your own interests but ALSO to those of others. Seems to me that’s the message God is really communicating. It is definitely NOT “ignore and deny everything about yourself because anything else is prideful and selfish and narcissistic.” The truth is that God laid down some guiding wisdom but He left it to each individual to figure out how His wisdom should be worked out in their lives based on their experiences with Him as well as the personality and character He gave them. Would it have been nicer if He’d been a little more explicit? Not gonna lie. Right now I’m leaning that way.
I also understand, however, that I’m in the state I’m in partially because too many Christians have tried to make the Bible explicit when it simply isn’t. The manner in which truth is played out will look different in each life. Because each person has been given a unique personality and character. And even if circumstances are identical, each individual will process them differently. That in no way means that God’s truth and wisdom are relative. A canine is a canine. But a poodle is radically different than a wolf. Yet both are canines.
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to the truth and wisdom of the Bible. Which is where so many church goers get completely tripped up, in my opinion. You can’t set down guidelines for people in pain and expect that every person will then be helped by said guidelines. Truth and wisdom remain absolute and constant. How that truth and wisdom are expressed needs to be determined by each individual’s experience and pain, though. That’s why Jesus healed in so many different ways (spitting, touching, speaking, etc.). He understood that each person would respond differently because they needed to be taken care of in different ways. That is precisely what I don’t see in churches especially when it comes to people in mental and emotional anguish.
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Hi, Kathryn!
I hope you don’t mind that I’m writing again so soon, especially after that last novel I sent you. It’s just that I was listening to a podcast this morning on the way to work and I heard something that rattled me. Quite a bit. The podcaster said that Job had to suffer what he did because obviously God had to deal with some sin of his and that statement just sent me hurtling back into the nightmare of believing that God allowed me to be emotionally abandoned, abused, and assaulted because He knew I was a bad seed and I needed to be put in my place.
That still feels so true.
What I need is for THIS to feel untrue:
God allowed every single thing to happen because HE saw how
bad you were or would become and HE gave you what you
deserved so you would learn your lesson
What I need is for THIS to feel true:
They were dreadfully abusive to you and their behavior
caused you to grow into an adult who believes she is
nothing and doesn’t deserve to exist
And I need THIS to feel true:
YOU DID NOTHING TO BRING THIS UPON YOURSELF.
It finally hit me that if you don’t have anything substantial to replace the lies, you’ll fall right back into the old ways of thinking. I so desperately want to be able to make choices based on truth not fear, but unless I know what truth is, I’m gonna keep repeating the same patterns and behaviors.
And it’s more than just “don’t listen to what other people say about you” or a “sticks and stones…” approach. At least it is for me. I need to know why I shouldn’t pay attention or believe the judgements of others. Are they simply wrong in all their assessments of me? Are they not to be listened to about anything? Is the issue with them or am I meant to ignore them in favor of believing something else about me?
I guess what it boils down to is this—my fear was born out of neglect and outright abuse, so I can’t really just talk myself into ignoring what other people think of me. It’s not that simple. John wrote that fear has to do with punishment. As I think about it, that makes total sense. I mean, what is it that we really fear when we think about how others will treat us? What exactly is it that they do? They sit in judgement on us and the mete out punishment — whether through a look, a comment, an action — they are punishing us for something they decided was a transgression (whether it was an actual wrong deed or not); we fear the punishment others rain down on our heads and in most cases, perpetrators know that and they use our fear against us.
That’s how bullying works. And the thing is, that’s what makes bad parents so devastating. They use the emotional control they have in order to force their children into making them happy (or at least what they perceive as happiness). They don’t discipline in order to teach their children wisdom. They punish in order to maintain emotional control and make sure their children never make them unhappy. Bad parents use fear as a weapon to control. They are narcissists and bullies. And in most cases, they never even realize what they’re doing, much less recognize and take responsibility for their actions. Because narcissists and bullies act out of their own suppressed and repressed pain.
I don’t know if you’ve done much with Job, but I would really love to hear your thoughts. I am inclined to think that the podcaster is like so many other Christian pastors and teachers I’ve heard, I just want to make sure I’m not missing something.
~Sissy
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Dear Kathryn,
Wow. My heart and mind are still reeling a bit, trying to take it all in and process what I just realized after reading Matthew 18:1-14 as you suggested. I’ve not heard a pastor or teacher connect all fourteen verses as a single thought, but it so clearly is, in my mind. And yeah, whoever wrote Matthew may have put these particular words of Jesus together in just this order to make a point, but if it was a point God didn’t want made, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have made the cut.
Both Mark and Luke have variations of this speech, but only Matthew connects the dots in such a forceful and unmistakable way. Jesus begins by talking about an actual child, but then He uses a different word and refers to the “little ones.” The small. The seemingly insignificant. The ones people don’t give a second thought to (and sometimes not even a first thought). He uses some of the strongest and most intense imagery to describe what God thinks of those who cause the little ones who believe in Him to stumble. He then uses some of the most graphically violent imagery in the Bible to tell anyone who is tempted to cause a little one to stumble that they need to NOT go there. The thought is finished by Him declaring that the angels of the little ones are continually in God’s presence and God is not willing for a single one of them to be lost.
I understand why I see what I see now in these verses, but that just makes it all the more world-rockingly wondrous and stupendous. It was there all along, waiting for me. Waiting until I was ready. The words of Jesus will speak truth into people’s lives in the way they need them to and they will see what they need to see depending on their own experiences and pain. What I see now in His words are comfort for people like me who have been forced to endure the most hideous assault at the hands of completely bent and twisted individuals who don’t really deserve the title of human being. I think whoever wrote Matthew most likely had this in mind, too, because they were so careful to repeat what Jesus said about removing any appendage or eyeball that leads into iniquity. The other place they used it? When He was talking about gazing at a woman in lust. It’s the only Gospel that repeats those words.
What’s really rocking my world, though, is what He said about how God treats the little ones who have strayed. Because I struggle to believe that Jesus didn’t have it in mind that many little ones would stray because they had been made to stumble. Matthew turns the parable of the lost sheep into a brilliant, dazzling beam of Light and Grace, aimed directly at people like me. Not simply a generic “God loves sinners” tune. A symphony of Hope.
God has indeed seen me. And He was unwilling to let me remain lost and devoid of hope.
Thank you, Kathryn. Thank you for gently leading me to what I needed without smashing my face in it or pre-digesting it for me. You truly are a gem.
Your Friend,
Sissy
P.S. Speaking of gems, I can’t really remember why I did this but I took a pretty deep dive into gemstones at one point in the not too distant past. Maybe it was because I was looking for something tangible I could use to remind myself of some of the things I had been working on at the time.
Anyway, I discovered that gemstones are classified by, among other things, their hardness and their tenacity. Hardness has to do not only with how easily any given stone will get scratched but also how it will scratch other stones or objects. Tenacity is all about how gemstones respond to stress such as being hit with a hammer.
Diamond will scratch pretty much everything it comes into contact with but nothing can scratch it, which is why it has a hardness of 10. I know some would consider that strength, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it really isn’t. Being able to scratch and cut without being scratched is hardness for sure. But it isn’t true strength. Because if you look at a diamond wrong, it will shatter into pieces. That’s called fragility, not strength.
I read a saying that goes—
If you take a hammer and hit a diamond,
the diamond will shatter
into a dozen pieces.
Hit a piece of quartz and
it’ll split in two.
However, if you hit a piece of jade,
it will ring like a bell!
Tenacity. That is true strength. The ability to be hit with a hammer and respond with beauty. You might get scratched and battered and bruised, but you won’t be shattered.
So now I have a piece of jade sitting on my desk next to my computer as a constant reminder that strength comes from tenacity, not hardness.
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Dear Kathryn,
Your kindness and compassion will never cease to be brilliantly magnificent. On my darkest days when I question my grip on reality, you unfailingly shine God’s Light in exactly the way I need to see it.
What you wrote about your favorite sports movie resonated deeply with me and made me realize that I need to move away from the language of “I wish…” — as in, “I wish this had happened differently” or “I wish these people were different.” I need to move towards, “This is my story — this is what happened.”
“I wish” will never allow me to move forward. It is a mindset that keeps me firmly rooted in the ruinous and benighted pain of my past. “This is my story” allows me to embrace the pain and recognize that it will always be part of who I am. It isn’t a celebration of abandonment, abuse, and assault. It isn’t saying that those things were in any way acceptable. And it most certainly is NOT a belief that it was all part of some grand plan of God for my life. Rather it’s bringing everything into the Light of God and His Truth and Love and Grace so that nothing can hide in the shadows, anymore. It is a declaration that these horrific and abominable things happened, but I am still here. I am alive. And I will flourish.
Life has to go on. It doesn’t mean you stop remembering. It doesn’t mean you move on and try to pretend nothing bad happened. That wouldn’t be truly living. Living means you find a way to honor the past while remaining in the present and hoping for the future.
Some people get stuck in the “I just want to move on” mode of thinking. But my question is, what does “moving on” really mean? Too many people see it as doing their utmost to push pain so far down into a hole that it will never again see the light of day and they can get on with their lives. Get back to “normal.” They don’t want any reminders of their pain because they think it will rip through their being with the force of a thousand tsunamis and they will be utterly destroyed. A position I understand all too well.
On the other end of the spectrum are those whose pain has never been honored by anyone—including themselves. For them, existence has become one never-ending funeral, but the depressing irony is that they are neither truly honoring nor truly remembering their pain. They are merely suspended in a wretched state of miserableness, often mostly of their own making. They wallow in the ashes and can’t understand why so few want to join them.
I’ve decided that I’m not dwelling in either camp.
And can I just say that I absolutely love that you get me when I say I get so much truth about God from every book I read and every TV show and movie I watch? That was one thing I did happen to put out there with those two women I told you about and let’s just say the crickets were in full voice.
It finally hit me as to what’s really wrong with the way media and entertainment portrays mental and emotional disabilities. I used to think it was that they show it as a one and done type deal.
And that’s true but it goes deeper. They make it all about the moment of revelation. They communicate loudly and strongly that revelation equals HEALED. Then they take it a step further and communicate that said healing equals a new life wherein you are able to make all healthy choices and never stumble again. And that’s what kills people.
So very many people don’t make it once they so courageously make the ridiculously difficult move to try and fight their way towards health and life. When they discover the lie and realize that the rest of their lives will be spent fighting and fighting hard — and some days losing the fight — they crumble and give up.
Be prepared for the pushback. Be ready for the rebellion. No matter how much you practice the truth, your brain will most likely ALWAYS have a serious problem with each new revelation and each new truth you attempt to incorporate and embrace. As monumentally difficult as it is to come to the realization of truth in the first place, it will be exponentially more difficult to hang on to it. The war does NOT end with revelation. That’s only the opening salvo. Your brain does not simply surrender once you become aware of truth. If anything, it gets more devious.
Modern Western entertainment is almost solely about resolution of conflict, whether internal or external. And that’s a real problem for people like me. Because for us, there is no resolution. Not in this age, anyway. But I’m beginning to see and understand that God totally gets it. That’s why the Bible is written the way it is. This life is not about resolution. It’s about the ongoing struggle. And sometimes in this struggle, things aren’t wrapped up within thirty minutes or less in a neat package with a bow on top.
That’s why we have the stories of Dinah and Tamar. Both Tamars, now that I think about it. None of them got a fairytale ending. About as far from it as humanly possible. Because for people like me, that’s how it goes.
We do not live without hope, though. And I think that’s why we have the entire Bible. Because God totally gets it.
My eternal thanks and gratitude to you, my dear friend, for totally getting it, too.
Your Friend,
Sissy
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Hey, Kathryn!
So yeah, I think you nailed it. I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of thinking that resolution means a cessation of emotional turmoil. Three excruciatingly painful years later and I’m still having to fight that lie.
I’ve been cogitating quite a bit, lately, about the emotions and feelings other people have caused me to endure and about emotions in general. I used to be a firm believer in the idea that no one could make you feel anything, that your emotions were always a choice. And while I see the kernel of truth in that, I think I understand now that it’s a little more complex.
Emotions are produced based on your perception of truth and reality. Your perception of truth and reality is based on all the things you ingest — conversation, entertainment, media, food, etc. So yes, others can heavy influence the way you feel (and I use that word in its truest sense meaning a total hijacking of your ability to think in a rational and coherent and intelligent manner), if they are feeding you lies and untruth.
This may sound like I’ve gone completely and totally off the rails, but please bear with me for a moment because it really seems like the closest thing to emotions in a physical sense is cholesterol. Both have been demonized based on very little actual understanding and yet both are absolutely vital to life and true living and wholeness.
The liver converts fat into cholesterol. The fascinating thing is that it produces both kinds of cholesterol — healthy and not so healthy (if it’s too abundant). But even the “not so healthy in over abundance” cholesterol is necessary. Also, cholesterol is produced in the body but we do get a portion of what we need through the food we eat. I see a mirror to our emotions in that as well. We produce plenty of emotion on our own but we also need to experience and ingest the emotions of others in order to be healthy and whole. Just like cholesterol, however, what we ingest and where it comes from will directly affect what type of emotions we’re producing.
I guess the difficult thing for people like me is that my perception of truth and reality was so massively warped that for decades, I thought I had a handle on things but all the while I was existing in a darkness so pervasive that I didn’t truly know what Light actually was.
So helping us is not as simple as throwing truth in our general direction and expecting us to lap it up like a dehydrated dog. That’s what most people really don’t get. They think if they speak truth, the doors to the prison will be flung open and people will dance out in delighted freedom. But it’s not opening the doors that takes work and dedication and commitment. It’s convincing the imprisoned that they are, in fact, chained to the wall in a dungeon. That the reality they thought they were living in is nothing more than a construct of their abusers’ own pain. Starting anywhere else will, I am convinced, end badly.
I think more than anything, that’s what I wish people understood.
~Sissy
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Hi, Kathryn!
Welp, I’ve done it. I’ve lived through another Thanksgiving. It was, admittedly, slightly less excruciating than past years, but I still felt like I didn’t exhale the entire time I was at my mother’s house.
I rewarded myself when I got home with a viewing of one of my favorite Christmas movies and something dawned on me while I was watching. For a while, now, I’ve been trying to figure out why I have such a ridiculously strong love for Christmas. Definitely not nostalgia because I barely have any pleasant memories of childhood Christmases. I just figured it was the “magic” that’s hawked for the season.
But it crystalized Thanksgiving night in one simple montage. At first I thought it was because the little girl found exactly what she wanted outside her tent when she woke up on Christmas morning. It was something wondrous that happened to her and it was beautiful. Then the truth hit me with unexpected force.
Christmas movies are all about magic and “miracles” (or what a lot of people erroneously call miracles). The wondrous and special. And yeah, the little girl receiving what she wanted was wondrous and special. But it wasn’t magical or miraculous. It was three individuals who thought she was precious and worthy enough to go to great lengths to figure her out, and then give her what her heart desired.
The wondrous thing wasn’t the physical gift. It was the fact that those three spent time and considerable effort and energy to show that little girl that she mattered. She mattered A LOT. And the result was a wonder to behold.
Now I understand why I feel the way I do about Christmas. It’s the never-ending hope that someone will do something wondrous for me at Christmastime. That someone would bother listening to me and work at figuring me out instead of assuming they know me. That I would mean enough to someone that they would spend that much time and effort and energy on me to make me happy.
Even as I type all this out I can hear the voices in my head telling me that it’s no wonder I am the way I am and I should stop focusing on myself and if I want someone to do that for me I need to do that for other people first. Do unto others. Except as we talked about before, I think too many people don’t quite get what that means. When it comes right down to it, what is it that we all want other people to do for us? To think that we matter. To think that we’re special. To spend their time and effort and energy listening to us and genuinely getting to know us because we really are all that to them. If each one of us did that for the people in our lives, well, it truly would be the most wonderful time of the year…all year round.
~Sissy
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Hey, Kathryn!
I can’t believe it’s finally happening! I keep checking my phone to make sure the flight hasn’t been cancelled. And please let me just say that my last email was most definitely NOT an attempt to get you to…you know, do what you did. I’m half surprised my neighbors didn’t call 911 when I opened the envelope from you and Jack. Because there was definitely screaming involved.
So I know we’ll be seeing each other in a couple days, it’s just that I wanted to share something with you now so that we can talk about it in person, too.
I was thinking about Jesus being the Light and what that actually means in this world. We are surrounded, smothered, and suffocated by darkness every day. And this world offers no true respite. Only more darkness and doom and despair. It is a truly lovely thought to think that people can lift themselves out of the darkness with nothing more than a strong desire to change, but truth and reality fairly scream that simply doesn’t happen. Because dead people can’t change. All they can do is shift their bones so they look a little different.
So what does that mean for those of us who claim the name of Jesus? Do we do what it seems so many of the women in that church I went to do — hide in our houses and huddle there, doing nothing but wait for God to end it all? Do we take false comfort in words and songs that move us emotionally but don’t actually feed our hearts?
Or do we do as our rabbi did? Do we push back against the darkness? Do we refuse to allow anyone to throw a wet blanket over our Light? Do we shine brightly even if no one wants to look?
Here’s the thing I’ve realized. In order to answer those questions, we absolutely must address our mental and emotional well-being first. If we don’t, our instinct will take over, our brains will hijack us, and we will take refuge in the familiar even when we recognize that the familiar is unhealthy.
I know this is just my opinion, but I really do think that we have lost the plot in a devastating way. We’ve chosen to see our existence as “spirit” trumping all else, only we have almost zero understanding of what God even means when He speaks of our spirits. My recent experiences have taught me that people in at least some churches have tried to pretend that our mental and emotional well-being either doesn’t matter to God or that He will miraculously cure us so long as we “really know Jesus.” They’ve denied that we are a whole, choosing to believe instead that we are fragments that ultimately don’t matter that much because “spirit” and “spiritual” have taken the place of God. We are indeed new creations, but it’s not magic. We aren’t given brain and heart transplants. We must work every second of every day to bring that new creation into its own.
For me, part of the hard work, I’ve discovered, is that I really need redefine the words “healthy” and “whole” for myself. I used to think that healthy meant “without pain or illness” and whole meant “without emotional pain or struggle.” Can a person be healthy and whole while having missing limbs? Before I would have said an unequivocal “NO WAY” but now I’m having to reassess my stance.
I really am beginning to think there is no coming out on the other side, at least not in the way I’ve always defined it. But God promises healing, and not just at a later date. Rapha is the Hebrew word usually translated as “healing.” Its literal translation is to sew together, to mend. Plus, the word shalom is best translated “wholeness” (not “peace” meaning absence of all conflict or the eastern philosophy of tranquility).
A piece of fabric that’s been ripped to shreds can be sewn together and mended, making it whole and sound for use. I have to believe that a person’s mind and heart can also be sewn back together and mended. A person can be made whole and sound.
There will always be pain. There will always be memories.
THIS WILL FOREVER BE MY STORY.
But I will fight.
I will fight every day.
I will fight to continue believing the fight is worth it.
I will fight to hang on to hope.
Not the hope that I will one day be fully healed.
Because that won’t happen in this age.
My hope is that I will be able to honor my pain and fully embrace my story.
That I will find a way to live, not just exist.
And maybe I will have a positive impact on someone else in this world.
Someone who knows the same crushing agony.
Someone who understands and yet continues to fight.
Just like me.
Until soon,
Sissy