To be heard, to be seen, to be encountered

Not everyone wants nor feels they need, to be heard, to be seen, to be encountered, but to have one’s soul touched is a serene and eternal gift, much as a gentle massage is.  It takes us into a comfort our soul always craves, much as it is when we’re mesmerised by a fountain or flame.

Those who bear trauma, and so many of us do, those who are open to going down there, into the fissures where pain resides, can find that those areas can be massaged into healing.

We don’t go there with any fabulous or trite formula, as if there are rules to abide by.  No, we go there by faith of unknowing.  Much as I do with my counselling process, I ensure I know nothing so I can be an instrument of God who requires empty vessels so they can be filled properly for the anointed moment.

Anathema for men is to go into the sensitivities of sensuality.  It feels like it’s for women.  But it’s for everyone.  True mysticism is entering into many varietals of the unknown, learning to trust the adventure as hazardous in no way.  Isn’t it ironic that those who put on the façade of strength cannot be weak enough to enter healing, for only in weakness is there strength in the paradoxical economies of faith and eternity.

There is so much healing to enjoy in the presence of many peaceful things, much that healing is not most of all a destination.  God is greatly good to the extent that we can experience healing, and the more we access it, the more we know our way there, and we can choose for it more and more.

A sweet wafting cooling breeze, a mist to buffer summer’s heat, a fly walking on the skin of the forearm, a gentle rhythm of song or melody, and so much more, is peace.

How shall I end this?

Everyone seeking healing will prosper from being heard, from being seen, from being encountered.  And that’s our privilege as we extend it.  When another enjoys it, the presence of healing is profound—not simply for the one, but for both.

That is to hold space.  It’s simply to empty me of me so not only God but the other can fill me.  What a great thing for the senses to be empty of oneself and fully devoted to another for a time.  Counselling is that unique relationship.  For a moment, a minute, ten, an hour or a day.

There’s nothing like being heard or hearing within the totality of presence.  There’s nothing like being seen, and by being seen I mean, accepted for whom one is, a complete lack of judgment, and no condemnation.  When there’s guilt, how could judgment help.  The shame and guilt are evidence that judgment and condemnation are wrong.

The honour of honours in this life is to be encountered, to have one’s soul touched by another soul, which is to be gifted something of the Kingdom of heaven.

Anyone who seeks healing shall soon see.  Find your wounded healer and allow the Spirit to teach you how to do it as you experience your wounds being healed so that you too can be that healer of wounds that your world needs.

The exhaustion that hides beneath emotional vulnerability

“Sometimes we can do more for people in our absence 
than we can do for them in our presence.”
— Ruth Haley Barton

Having endured the past two very challenging years, and perhaps having also endured some variety of other challenges or hardships in life, you may have arrived in a season where your emotional vulnerability bleeds out from within into your external world.

It may be frustration, irritability, fear, sadness, loneliness, a loss of hope, the need to withdraw in ways that neglects those who depend on you or, just as bad, violent behavioural responses of rage.

Not all of our emotional vulnerability is due to exhaustion, but a lot of it is.  Exhaustion comes from ‘being strong for too long,’ from being too accessible, from being unbalanced for an extended period.

Exhaustion drives down into your soul and ultimately it leaves you spiritually dry, and it all manifests in patterns of emotional vulnerability.

There’s a good reason why Jesus often withdrew into the wilderness.  He needed to reconnect with himself and be in communion with his Father.  Jesus modelled what we all need to do.  We all need our “ME” time, and we need a rhythm of it.  Such timeout isn’t just for introverts.

“ME” time can sound like selfishness, but if I don’t look after me, I have little resource left to care for the person who depends on me—and we all have people who depend on us, just as in any healthy life we depend also on others.

So, we can look at this “ME” time in the frame of whatever it is that replenishes—noting that much selfish “ME” time is NOT oriented toward renewal but sloth.  Time to reconnect, be it with a book, or time in nature, cherished fellowship with a mentor, exercise, or any other productive use of time is vital for each of us.  Good self-care requires diligent effort to plan and execute.  Blessed are those who take responsibility for organising this time.

When we find ourselves in a pattern of emotional vulnerability—and this is most underscored in the final analysis as anxiety and/or depression—we might be genuinely encouraged to identify the reason: exhaustion.

I say encouragement for this reason: we customarily condemn ourselves as less-than when everyone undergoes the same thing when exposed to a sustained overload of stimuli, whether it’s burnout, a cacophony of loss, conflicts that can’t be reconciled, abuse and trauma, and the like.

There’s no reason to feel alone in being emotionally vulnerable.  Given the same circumstances that you face, the next person would feel the same way.  And besides, there are just so many people who are emotionally vulnerable, again, because of degrees of exhaustion.

~

Here are ten sources of exhaustion, which is an adaptation of the work of Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God:

1.            Being too plugged in

It’s the curse of the modern social media and email age.  Most of us spend far too much of our lives connected to devices.  Without tempering this excessiveness of electronic stimuli, we risk burnout simply because we have a fear of missing out (a.k.a. FOMO).

2.           Trying so hard and juggling so much

Few of us truly want to disappoint people, because, let’s face it, even if we’re selfish, keeping people happy makes life easier.  We’re often prepared to do more just to keep the peace. And just because we do this doesn’t mean we’re “people pleasers.”  It’s often just strategically wise to keep people happy.  But the more we say yes, the more exhausted we become, unless we ensure that we always chisel out time to replenish our resources.

3.           Functioning out of an inordinate sense of ought and should

This is about listening to our language, or even what we’re saying to ourselves about making needs out of wants.  We place a lot of pressure on ourselves.  We should do this, or we ought to do that.  If you’re exhausted, you know how it goes.

4.           Finding it difficult or even humiliating to receive help from others

It is far easier for us to do things for others than to “owe” people.  But if we can’t receive others’ help, we will find life exhausting.  It takes humility to allow others to love us.

5.           Living more as a performer than the person God created you to be

We are human beings not human doings, but all the same, we act as if all that matters is our performance.  I know how hard this can be having had employers that I found impossible to please regarding performance—yep, just didn’t know how.  I know that conditioned me to see my worth in what I do and what I have to offer rather than seeing my worth as who I am.  God is far more interested in who we are than what we do.

6.           Few or no boundaries on my service and availability to others

Priding ourselves on saying yes to everything, without ensuring we have recovery time, is the sure road to burnout.  Let me just leave that there!

7.           Always feeling you should be doing more because there is always more to do

There will ALWAYS be more to do, and the more we do, the more we SEE the things that need to be done.  We don’t need to be the ones to do what needs doing.

8.           Carrying the burden of unhealed wounds – sadness, unresolved tension or conflict, toxicity in relationships

This one’s loaded.  Grief, unforgiveness and untenable relationships will do us in if we let them.  We will have grief.  We will.  We must take our sadness to God.  And we must find ways of resolving tension (which takes intuitiveness and courage) and putting in place boundaries in toxic relationships—or ending them.

9.           Information overload

Just about every adult alive at this time knows a world where information bursts toward us like out of a firehose.  We need to protect ourselves against the relentless deluge.

10.        Just being plain willful (as opposed to being willing)

This speaks to our narcissism.  Yep, it’s in us all.  Only the ones who can see it are those who are probably low on the narcissism scale.  Most of us know what we want and, if we’re honest deeper down, we insist upon having it.

You, your mental health and others’, this Christmas

It’s been a rough year.  Remember when we naively hoped that 2021 would usher in relief as we sought to ditch last year with true ‘2020’ hindsight?  2021 has been a doozie in many ways.

We did our annual drive around to see the Christmas lights last night (Christmas Eve – yes, it’s very early Christmas morning here).  As I turned one corner, I did what all of us drivers do, and I turned a corner and had headlights bearing down on me.  The driver sped up, put their high-beam lights on, and because they were driving aggressively, I sought to turn left at the next convenient corner, so then I got a blast from their horn.

I understand the anger.  And I understand the frustration of someone ahead of you not going fast enough – we just wanted to look at lights when on suburban streets.  Anyway, that said, we meandered home.

There’s a lot going on these days in people’s emotional worlds.

There’s a lot of fear and there’s also a lot of scepticism and cynicism, together with frustration, loneliness, and just plain tiredness and exhaustion.  Many, many manifestations of garden variety anxiety that pounces and pushes hope to despair.

The only thing that can help in all these situations is a little kindness.  Just a little bit is all it takes to execute grace, to forgive the mistaken instant, to issue a smile instead of a frown.  But we must make that agreement first; it needs to be arranged as an intention.

Your mental health and mine is tenuous at present.  We’ve all been pushed that little bit harder this year. We’re all just a little more fragile.  And this is not to mention the losses going on in so many lives that I’m aware of right now.

We need to go gently with ourselves and with others.  When we’re gentle with ourselves it tends to work out that we’re gentle with others, so let that be our bearing.  “I’m not being kind to people at present, so does that mean I’m not being kind enough to myself?”

Worth pondering.

Christmas is symbolic as a time of peace and goodwill to all humanity.  But it’s also a real pressure point for just about everyone.  Most people either have too much busyness going on or the opposite reality bears down – forlorn loneliness.  Lonely Christmases are the pits, so if that’s you, receive a portion of my empathy, please!

Let’s take care of you and me this Christmas, hey?

The very best thing about death

There are many different directions I could take this article, and many of them would be true.  But to be faithful to the vision given to me, I must limit my focus to one.

The very best thing about death is the life 
that emanates out of the imagination of it.

When I go to funerals, I don’t hear people saying, “life’s not precious.”  To a person, I hear people awestruck in many manifestations of wonder for the certainty of mortality.  Death brings us to attention.  Being something we cannot resolve, there’s benefit in resolving to accept it.  Once we’re there, there is a cosmos of blessing to be had, because our life purpose is activated.

The end of a person’s life is the most incomprehensible thought, and there’s nothing like it to motivate the right kind of action.  “I must be here for something!” becomes the soul’s catchcry.

One thing Sarah and I discovered when we were losing Nathanael—through an anonymous friend, actually—is there was life in making every effort to make the very most of every moment we were given to have him, there, alive, in the womb, with us.

It’s like the title of a recent article I saw but hadn’t read (didn’t need to): “I’m thankful to cancer for one reason – we did so much living while my husband was dying.”

It wasn’t until my first marriage failed and my father had had a serious and debilitating surgery that both of us—brought to our knees by the circumstances of our lives—were able to embrace each other in a manly hug.

When life breaks us, those feelings of loss connect us to a deeper empathy and intimacy.

Again, in the specific context of funerals, I’ve so often seen the real person emerge, even momentarily, because they were ravaged by grief.  Masks and facades fall and smash in the brittle oblivion of irrelevance in the sight of loss.  Only those who are truly shells of humanity won’t bow to the ‘weakness’ that reveals authenticity.

One of the best gifts we can give ourselves is to live out of the frame of the imminence of death.  We take others we love and care for must less for granted.  We watch what we say and do and are more compassionate toward others.  We recognise the immortal wisdom of reconciling our restorable relationships.  We don’t delay important things.  We stop doing things that really don’t matter.  We tell people that we love them.  We say our yeses and no’s with much more sincerity than ever before.  We imagine that all we possess will soon pass into other hands, so we covet less, and we become more generous.  We begin to allow ourselves the freedom of wonder about things we cannot explain, like questions science and philosophy cannot yet answer.  True wisdom and understanding begins to take hold in our lives.

Another thing, if we can get over our fear of death and dying there literally is nothing else left to fear in life.  Think about it.  If the fear of ceasing to exist in this physical realm is stopped, we’re free to live the days that we have left, and perhaps we afford ourselves time to reflect over precious memories.

We cannot shake the reality that we’re only here for a certain length of time, and it’s our opportunity to make the most of every moment of every day.  Besides, if we can just imagine what’s eternally in the divine eye—an unconditional love beyond human comprehension—we might just believe in the reality of ‘heaven’ that so many who say ‘rest in peace’ believe in.

The very best thing about death is what it 
causes us to do when thought of death is close.

When we carry about ourselves the concept of our death, it literally is the spark in the eye for appreciating the moments of life that we do have.

Being at peace with the past and having peace in the present

Of recent days, God has broken through and spoken powerfully, and it means change is coming.  The first of these is I’ll deactivate from Facebook.  The second is I’m embarking on a writing project.  Both of these combined are interconnected.

The theme is as follows:

“Life is in letting go of what’s not ours and embracing what is.”

Life, real life, is in the letting go and it’s also in the embracing.  Simple as that really.  The hard part is making those two aspects stick.  If you’ve ever struggled with either or both, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  They’re probably the hardest things to do in life.

Letting go is hard, yet so is embracing.

What I mean is letting go of those things that have happened to us—our hurts, habits, and hang-ups—can seem a journey we wrestle with for years.  Forgiveness and recovery can seem so elusive.  Embracing is also hard a lot of the time, especially when those things involve situations in our lives that we’re reluctant to be enthusiastic about.

Think of the situation where you’re wondering, “How on earth did I get here?” or perhaps it’s, “How did it get to this?” or maybe it could be, “How do I get over or through this?”

I’ve had a few situations in my life when I’ve genuinely asked those questions.  You can probably relate.

Letting go by itself is hard, and so is embracing that which you don’t want to take hold of, but it’s especially hard when we find ourselves in a situation where we can’t let go of the past and we also can’t embrace the present.  Life can seem so unfair.

But imagine being in that situation where you reach such a crisis that you just know you need to change; you need to embrace the present you hate and let go of that past that continues to consume you.

And suddenly, the miracle occurs—you’re at one with the will of God for your life.  You get a sniff: being at peace with the past and having peace in the present.  That sniff is enough to follow the scent, that aroma of the abundant life in acceptance.

You might remember a time in your life when you never thought you’d face such challenges.  But you find you’ve descended into a place where both past and present seem to thwart you.  These experiences grace our lives for a very important reason.  These challenges deepen us, they push us, they mature us.

~

For those who follow what I write, as I said above, I’m deactivating my personal social media accounts soon, though my Facebook ‘pages’ will remain with a separate administrator (my wife).  I want to focus on a writing project and on more immediate areas in my life.

The key area in my life is living out of the experience of what I’ve written here and writing about it in a form that might be a comprehensive blessing for those who would read it.

To do justice to such a project, I need time to research, to write it, to hear from God, to write the divine will, to do a good job.

14 years and 15 days I’ve been blogging, initially on the single platform, and since 2010 it’s been three of my own, apart from ezinearticles.com and other platforms I’ve written for like Godspace and Kingdom Winds.  Nearly 9,500 articles and approximately 20,000 hours (and only two books) later, it’s nearly time to focus on what always had to come.  Something deeper.

It could go without saying that I’d value your prayers.  I would.

What it was like on the wrong side of addiction

Whether it’s dependence or addiction, for me, is a moot point.  When taking a substance or engaging in a practice becomes something you can’t stop, that’s a problem.

For me, I cast my mind back to September 2003 and beyond, especially the previous two years when I was focused that much on my career, I used alcohol and at times cannabis and tobacco mainly at weekends but occasionally during the week to manage the stress of many work pressures.  It was a cosmic irony that at the time I coordinated an alcohol and other drug program for the oil company I worked for!

These are some of the costs I bore in those times:

§     I compromised as a father and always felt guilty that I drank more than I should have much more often than I should have

§     I let down a marriage partner who held out year after year that I’d reform my ways and not continually spend hard earned dollars on the drink

§     the cycle of guilt that would ravage me on Monday and Friday mornings as I drove into work in the company four-wheel drive knowing, that though I would have registered zero BAC, I was feeling the after effects of drinking the night before

§     though I never really got the jitters, I’d be seriously concerned that co-workers could smell the alcohol on me, through my pores, and this meant that subconsciously I felt like a hypocrite

§     ironically, it was most when I was inebriated that I dreamt of being in control of my life, and I knew as long as alcohol was a part of my life those dreams were just that—dreams, that may never have been realised

§     I constantly planned the next ‘escape’, never realising I wasn’t escaping work or finding my way to peace, but I was escaping the pain that simply needed to be faced (as soon as you face the pain, though it hurts, you realise you CAN do it)

The worst thing that happened to me proved to be the best thing.  The moment my first marriage dissolved in an instant (that’s a whole other story) was the very moment that GOD got my attention.  I’d been faking it for nearly 13 years.  Suddenly I was in a position where—having lost basically everything—I set a 180-degree course correction.  I’d toyed with the idea of doing AA for years, always rationalising that I could stop drinking on my own (I never did).

Upon submitting to the complete AA way of doing things, I learned the value of community (I desperately needed to be around others who knew what it was like to be broken!), my need of a boots ‘n’ all recovery, and the heart that resides behind service.  Once I’d engaged wholeheartedly in the Steps, I soon realised that I was on the most ardent of spiritual journeys.  I was embraced by the church, then put into leadership where I could be mentored and guided, where I was surrounded by much wiser people than I was.

I never looked back once I worked out that there was really no way back to that old life.  I simply had to move forward.  Not that I didn’t hate it.  It was the worst grief I’ve ever experienced.  BUT I was propelled forward on a journey (at the time I loathed the word ‘journey’!) that insisted on faith.

The weirdest thing about that journey was it was a homogenous blend of brokenness and victory.  Brokenness because of the grief I suffered in losing so much, but victory through a spiritual conquest that saw me go from strength to strength because of my weakness.

If you have a problem with alcohol, drugs, addictive practices, remember the role of guilt and shame in the cycles of impulsion and compulsion will make it impossible for you to overcome these problems in your own strength.

Overcoming addiction is the easiest hardest thing.  There’s a way that works every time.

The more we seek help in humility, 
the more we depend on a proven recovery process, 
the more truthful we are about our pain,
the more we hold ourselves accountable,
and the more do it one day at a time,
the more we reach out for help when we’re weak,
the more we forge for ourselves a brand-new path.

Why do I write this kind of article?  It’s for those who now are like I was 18 years ago.

I prospered because people invested time in me by listening to me.  They helped by supporting me as I did my work.  Like it is for us all, it’s only me-myself-I who can do the work, but we do need support.

When you receive support when you really need it, you want to sow that support forward.

Why pain in grief and trauma is so repetitious and listening is so important

My best counsellors were available exactly when I needed them.  I’d just lost just about everything that ever mattered to me and would ever matter to me.  They were there, and they continued to listen, time and again, to the same confused utterings, and they were just there, and they did what was required to love me back into shape.

It took months and months and months.

There were times we’d all sit there bewildered for what to think or how to respond.

It was the very shape of loss and of grief and of trauma, because loss propels us into grief, and I’m sure with all I have in me that grief is trauma.

There are so many situations in our lives that leave us devoid of rational response, like there are no words, or the words just don’t make a difference.  There is a place for just holding space, for containing, somehow, the mess that flows out of a person in a traumatised state.

I know first-hand having experienced such a lengthy bout of grief—patterns that would recur—involve the process of repetition, for repetition shows us what is not so easily wished away.  It lingers for a reason.  It remains because it refuses to be digested.  What’s unpalatable just sits there, like oil on water.

So, for me, it doesn’t necessarily take patience, but empathy carries a counsellor much further, for it shouldn’t be about patience.  And the empathy I mention here is a FELT experience of having been there.

When you’ve been there it’s not hard at all sitting in the pain with another who endures.  It’s the most natural thing in the world, I find.  Why would you not sit there with another person who is a brother or sister by the designation of their pain?  Especially when you’re the one who’s been there but has processed all your pain appropriately given time.

The emotions and the words circle around the mind, and the concepts seem brutally abstract yet altogether so concrete.  The words are tried in different order, the narrative shifts ever so slightly in wondering ‘what if?’ and the same old ‘why’ questions emerge.

The shapes of grief move and shift, yet the methods and patterns of pain remain the same.  These shapes of grief are anger one moment, resignation the next, then perhaps depression, and then maybe a little dread of anxiety, before some bargaining.

It’s exhausting, yet inescapable.  It’s the same cycle of pain rehashed and regurgitated over and again, and the afflicted are sicker of it than anyone.

When you’ve been there, you know it’s all beyond choice.  A journey of a million miles is worth every courageous step, for you will get there!

So, being there, sitting in the mire of the pain with them, that’s not hard.

Mental Fracture and Emotional Fragility in Depression

The pages of my journal in the latter half of 2007 are bare for the most part; quite uncharacteristic for me during that period of life.  There is a story to be told, which those pages allude to tellingly.

I was in a murky depression.  Embarking on my forties, in a crisis of vocation, having recently married, surprised how unanticipated my life had become.  Life deconstructed.

This depression came as a Fujita-5 tornado, rapid and sudden; its signs only clear from hindsight.  Those symptoms appeared, unwittingly and unfairly, on our honeymoon.

Here is one story of how depression involves fracture of the mind creating enormous emotional fragility and spiritual crisis:

On an innocent enough Saturday morning I changed the engine oil in my Hyundai.  I’d done it dozens of times.  The job done, I started the engine.  Checking everything was working as it should I was shattered to find oil running all over the driveway.  I shut the engine down and ran inside absolutely broken, sobbing tears like a baby.  I met Sarah in the kitchen and fell into her arms, before flopping to the floor.  She didn’t know what had occurred and it took her a little while to find out.  I was inconsolable.  Normally I might react angrily that the job went badly; but in my depression there was no agency for such fight.

The fracture in my mind had contributed to the spilt oil in the first place; with depression it’s so hard to keep the mind on task.  I had failed to remove the old O-ring.  With a clear mind I would never make such a fundamental error.  Yet, as I recall doing the task, my lack of self-confidence was poignant.  Neither the mind nor the emotions could hold me up.

As I reflect over that initial period of our marriage, I quickly feel for the plight my new wife must have found herself in; her new husband completely insecure of identity, warred upon from within, defences down, a victim of a broken mind, that ran unchecked according to its own will, and a heart vulnerable to the cognitive chaos it sat under.

For a period of just over three months I had a daily battle.  I was in a paid ministry role and felt completely inadequate to discharge that duty most of the time.  Many times I had to put my depression to one side and pray that the Lord would uphold my mind and my emotions whenever I was ministering with the youth.  God was incredibly faithful.  My senior pastor, too, graciously allowed me to continue in the work.  To have to continue to show up helped.  But there were days, also, when I couldn’t function, and nobody could make me if I couldn’t make myself.

Coming Out of It

What ultimately drew me out of that depression was Proverbs.  I began reading a chapter of Proverbs per day, and remained on that plan, meditating on chapters of about twenty verses daily, for eighteen months.  That book of the Bible saved my mental, emotional, and spiritual life.  I read little else of the Bible during that time.  Those maxims of King Solomon (predominantly) were the spiritual staple in that season for me.

Focusing on Proverbs got my mind engaged and steadied my emotions as the Holy Spirit spoke encouragement’s life into me.  It showed me how important the steadiness of studying one book or section of God’s Word is.  Proverbs gave me the character of God as a structure for the wisdom I sought.

Through these precious aphorisms, God was able to steady me enough to heal the fracture in my mind, and that helped fortify the fragility of my emotions.  Through the patterns I could see in those 31 chapters, I began to restructure my thoughts, emotions, and prayer life.

Thankfully I came out of this depression about as quickly as I entered it.

And, for the record, I took SSRI antidepressant medication.  They were important; about as important as recognising the signs and symptoms and admitting I was out of control.  As soon as I have recognised I’m out of control, quickly I’ve been able to address the confusion and start on getting well again.  Antidepressants help re-establish the biochemical balance in our bodies so they can be a vital therapy.

May God sincerely bless you as you go gently with yourself.