Finding me

Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.

Lord, help me feed the life I’m trying to live
and starve the life I’m trying to leave
Help me believe the old is dead and gone
and I am a new creation

Casting Crowns ~own worst enemy

In my previous post I mentioned how not long ago I realized how much of my life was controlled by fear and that fear fed into my need to control.

Around this time last year I found myself in a dark place.

As I look back I was definitely in a funk. 

  Between just having a baby, my mom’s addiction spiraling out of control, and the past rearing it head into the present……I was lost.

 A couple years prior {2008/2009} I had experienced something similar. 

 It was around the time I had lost our first baby and my mom had just attempted suicide.

As I began to put two and two together I started realizing both of these experiences left me powerless and searching for something I could no longer control. 

  No matter how much I tried to find control and piece it all together I couldn’t. 

 Life was happening and I was barely hanging on.

I found myself consumed and barely breathing.

I wanted nothing more than to make it all disappear and to be ok.  If I could have continued to suppress everything that was surfacing and that I was facing I would have, but I couldn’t anymore.

I couldn’t hide from it.  

I had to face {fear} because everywhere I looked it stared back at me.

Our fears establish the limits of our life ~ Pete Wilson

So I began a journey that has forever changed my life since.

I stopped hiding the pain and I got help.

Facing the truth was the hardest part for me because it meant it was real.  

 It meant I had to feel the ache I had been hiding from for years.

My own coping mechanism {control} was no longer working; I couldn’t hold it together anymore.  Control had become an illusion that I believed for the majority of my life.

From the outside things looked good.

 I was happily married with two beautiful daughters.  Had a deep connection with Christ and was involved in bible studies, etc… But there was something wrong inside.  I was functioning at home and at work, but my mind was consumed.  It began slowly but eventually everything began to trigger these panic episodes.  I felt out of control and the scariest part of it all was I was beginning to remember things from my past that had been locked away for years.

Days turned into months and it progressively got worse. 

 I will never forget Christmas of last year. 

I wanted to be happy and there was a part of me that was, but there was an even bigger part that was broken and left searching for something more.

Everyone around me seemed so put together and I was struggling to feel like I even existed anymore.

 I had become so hyper aware of my surroundings.  

 Everything I read or watched on the television threw me into this obsessive behavior of connecting it into my own life and making it real.

I felt as if the world and everything around me was falling apart and the end was near and I was freaking out because I had no control over it.

If someone told me a sad story or some sort of terrible news I would worry that it was going to happen to me.

If I closed my eyes too long this life I knew could disappear and I wouldn't even know it.

I remember sitting at our family Christmas feeling like life was happening around me and I was stuck in another dimension. 

Was I even there or had it become a fragment of my own imagination.

I learned some time later that I was experiencing a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome that was tracing back to my childhood.

As I look back I can see where God was whispering into the pain but I wasn’t ready to let go.  

 Letting go meant surrendering a pain that I didn’t want to believe was there. 

  It meant finally being OK with being weak.

Weakness was not a part I allowed myself or people to see.   

Weak meant I was a failure.   

That I had become like her. I couldn’t be like her. 

  She was the very person I built my life around and I couldn’t even see how much I functioned for her. 

 You see I had become so focused on not becoming her that I lost sight of who I even was.  

 The lines were so blurred I couldn’t see where I ended and she began.

My counselor drew a diagram for me and it absolutely broke me {the truth}. 

 Basically what the diagram explained is this……

I------past------I---------------the now------------------I

I thought I was living in the now. 

  I had built a life that was different from the past.  I wasn’t like her, I was strong, the bad stuff never affected me and I left it all back in{the past}.  But the truth is this, I was working so hard to not be like the past, I had become so fixated on not being back there that I actually was still living{the past}.

My past was beginning to rob me of my life in the now. {What a travesty}

So I began to relive certain areas of my past.  

 To feel pain I never allowed myself to feel. 

 I went back to that innocent little girl and was able to look at her and cry for her. 

 Ache for the pain she felt back there. 

 Live out the pain for her in the today so I could move on and no longer live back there.

I looked that innocent second grader in the face and told her it wasn’t her fault he touched her that way.  

 I held the trembling little girl as she sat and watched her mom be beat and thrown to the ground in fear she was dead.  

 I ached for the teenager who watched her mom begin spiraling into an addition that almost took her life. 

Friends there can be healing in the deepest wounds, but we need to allow Him to meet us where is hurts. 

I loved God and I knew He loved me, but I never allowed Him into those painful areas.  Once I was able to allow Him into those parts of who I was I finally felt a love that I have never experienced before.

 We need to be willing to allow ourselves to feel the pain, to cry out to our wounds of the yesterday and ache for the loss that came from it.

It has been the hardest thing I have had to do.

It absolutely broke every part of who I believed I was, but as I began to pick up the broken pieces I found something even more beautiful.  

I found me.

Not who I pretended to be or what I wanted to see, but who I was created to be.

A broken life pieced back together by the very creator that breathed His life into me. 

 He was and still is showing me the laughter in heartache, the sunshine when days are dark, strength in the weakest moments, and the beauty that comes from a broken past.

Friends we all are broken in someway or another don't let the smiles deceive you. Somewhere deep there is heartache, but somewhere deeper there is beauty.

No matter how well put together the people around you may appear, I promise you, EVERYONE needs healing. ~Pete Wilson

Healing. Hope. Laughter.

These are things that define my life. 

Yes, I’ve experienced pain; but through it all, I have gained more than I have lost. 

I write so that when you see this is true for me, you can believe it will also be true for you.

~Heather Gemmen Wilson, author of Startling Beauty: 

A journey from rape to restoration.

  

Ben Rector ~ When a heart breaks

I woke up this morning
And I heard the news
I know the pain of a heartbreak
I don't have answers
And neither do you
I know the pain of a heartbreak
This isn't easy
This isn't clear
And you don't need Jesus
Til you're here
Then confusion and the doubts you had
Up and walk away
They walk away
When a heart breaks
I heard the doctor
But what did he say
I knew I was fine about this time yesterday
I don't need answers
I just need some peace
I just need someone who could help me get some sleep
Who could help me get some sleep
This isn't easy
This isn't clear
And you don't need Jesus
Til you're here
Then confusion and the doubts you had
Up and walk away
They walk away
When a heart breaks
When a heart breaks
When a heart breaks
Oh, when a heart breaks
This isn't easy
This isn't clear
And you don't need Jesus
Til you're here
Then confusion and the doubts you had
Up and walk away
They walk away
When a heart breaks