Do not let me fool you. I know I am by no means in the clear here. Not in the clear of my journey out of grief…especially since the next module in my Life Skills class is on …of course, grief. While it has been nice to be healthy and more or less tear free for a few weeks…I know they – the tears – are by no means gone for good.
My nerves are in no way completely tame as change continues to fly at me…sometimes at delightful paces and other times at breakneck speeds. While some of these changes are good and life giving – change is change and it takes energy and bandwidth to deal with it…and it is still seen as a stressor to the body.
Some of these changes are simply the brain chemistry going on in my own head as I learn to rephrase my thoughts and those pesky voices. An excellent thing to be changing if I do say so myself….yet…
Change is still change.
I am not out the clear when it comes to dealing with my shame.
Looking back on my wishing to “rewind” certain embarrassing moments, I realize that this has less and less to do with what I did or said or didn’t say or do…and more about where the root of my embarrassment comes from. It comes from shame …more specifically, the shame of my past. Not so much anything I did as a child, but about the fact that so much – well so much just happened that seemed out of everyone’s control.
But since a child tends to believe everything revolves around them, and since as a child I couldn’t fix my world – I couldn’t fix a nice little home for me with my real mommy and real daddy …I grew up believing subconsciously that I didn’t have a place in the world because…because people just didn’t know what to do with me.
The scary thing is how I came to this realization: I kept hearing these words go around and around in my head….and when I finally took a step back to look at them, I realized I wasn’t just hearing these words – I was making them come true in my own life. Either by my words or actions, I think I have quite possibly made situations more awkward and uncomfortable not so much because these other people don’t know what to do with me – but because I don’t know what to do with me. [Insert a big sigh here.] Is this where I get to ask which came first: the chicken or the egg?
I am certainly not out of the woods of still hearing those voices compare me to what they want of me and from me.
No other place is my shame louder than those pesky voices you now know I hear. Voices that continue to scream ever louder at me as I become more aware of their misplaced presence in my life. It’s like a multitude of kids that have been shown a new boss is in town, and they of course don’t just roll over and become obedient right away. No, they push back at the new boundaries I have set…they try different ways to get to me, more subtle and divisive.
They try to entice me to just slip up a little bit – to fall into old familiar dreams and fantasies. These dreams are like that ol’ favorite pair of jeans, tried and true – worn and loved. Yet, you know they don’t look good on you anymore as they have lost their shape, their color is all faded and the fabric is thinning in places you would rather not show to the world. Yet, they keep persisting that I look good in their company…that I am better off with them.
I find now that I am not only having to fight these voices about what they want of me and from me…no I also have to fight the other ones that remind me that I am never going to escape those voices. That every time I mess up and allow shame to rear her ugly head…other voices point out that I didn’t get it right…that I am far from perfect and that I might as well give up.
So, how have I been doing at this battle? At the war waged in my mind?
I won’t lie…I wouldn’t even pretend to love to tell you anything but the truth.
It is a daily battle; at points – a moment by moment struggle. Changing a thought pattern of 30 some odd years is not going to change over night. I have known this…that negative thought patterns take time to break and replace with the positive. That is what Practice Joy is about, what my series on rephrasing is all about, right?
When I got downcast last week realizing I was still prone to those voices, when I could feel myself hinging on the brink of more grief and sadness…I had a moment of clarity where I heard another voice…a voice that is newer but becoming stronger pipe up and say, “Of course you aren’t going to get it perfect every time, right out of the starting gate. You are going to fail, and fail a lot you might do. But you are recognizing those failures at least, recognizing those voices are still there and still needing to be silenced. You are doing better all the time. You are not yet the person you desire to be, but you are becoming more of her every day.”
Much of those above words are positive affirmations that Life Skills has us start on almost right away. Before we even start working on drudging up the old stuff that keeps us stuck…Life Skills has us speaking truth to ourselves, the positive statements because they know that those words have to get down deep into the subconscious in order to take root, to take a hold of us. Why?
Well, for examples just as above. So that when the old grief, guilt, shame and ugliness of our past comes flying out at us as our eyes become unveiled, as we start to see the world through God’s eyes and not our own skewed misconceptions – those affirmations will be what replaces those old patterns of thoughts, will be what keeps us moving towards the goal we have for our lives, will be what keeps us trekking along on the hard, narrow path of moving towards adulthood.
This, to me, is the nitty gritty work of renewing the mind. The mind is where the war is waged…it is the mind where the soul is won or lost…and it is the mid where we must meet the challenge. I thank God that He has given me such amazing tools to do this with. Tools that help me rephrase my mind, that help me see that my reality is not really the life God has for me…it is not the reality that God would have me live in. I thank God that He continually shows me how to drown out my voices of shame and replace them with voices of clarity, of hope and of meaning.
