So much negative stress and struggle in life is due to unresolved inner-personal issues: harms that we fear will happen to us because they happened once—or often—in our past; personal injustices and slights that we self-righteously continue to nurse, things said about us behind our backs that got back to us through a third party, and on it goes.
Oftentimes, when we were/are the brunt of someone else’s thoughtlessness, jokes or put-downs, we dysfunctionally respect their opinion of us more than the many other friends and family who do not put us down or minimize our person.
(Why would we fret or feel diminished because of someone’s snarky attitude, gossip or chronic negativity—it is their very coldness and lack of integrity that renders them unworthy of our paying them any mind at all).
Whether it was how we were raised within our family, our school, our social network, our church/religion, our culture—although all or some of it held sway over us at one time, as adults, that sway is now under our own control.
We no longer have to be swayed, because we also no longer have to be controlled by it: the pressure to continue to conform to its mandates is gone because we have removed ourself from its grip.
Or have we? Have we indeed left it behind physically but continue to grip it mentally and emotionally via resentment, critical sentiments and an over-correcting into behaviors and belief systems motivated by that hurt and residual anger? A sort of getting back at?
In other words, what we haven’t dealt with to the point of final closure (with learned wisdom the sole remainder), will continue to balloon into our life in other manifestations.
Let’s take me, for example:
Raised in an über liberal church with a hard emphasis on community social standing, I fled from this church as an adult when I experienced a spiritual crisis. I realized this church/denomination offered no underpinning truths to draw strength, perseverance and maturity from.
So when I found Jesus via the conservative church, and my life began to experience worth, courage and joy, I continued to seek and remain in that conservative, evangelical community. Until, that is, that same religious entity began to negate my courage, worth and joy and I began to find myself in the very same boat in which I had begun: peer pressure to be and believe a certain way, all under the guise of “love,” just like the liberal church I grew up in!
Ironically, it was the inner junk of having come to despise the liberal church for its lies and superficiality that had led me right into the arms of the conservative church with its own lies and superficiality. I had merely traded one for the other.
So I quit all church and religion. Instead, I set off with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit to do and accomplish, at long last, the difficult task of dealing with my inner junk.
I came to understand all of this by placing those who still attempted to negatively control me in their own context, and by initiating a hard, long, objective deciphering of why I was still allowing their power over me every time I obsessed over old or new wounds. How I was living out the emotional and behavioral habits I had developed throughout my lifetime became exposed so that I could begin to behave and think accurately and appropriately--independent of all the junk (theirs and mine).
I researched books online, ordered them and read them. I did not choose “Christian” books. I selected excellent books that did not promote any agenda or blame-games, but taught me how to discern the contexts of others (who have never dealt with their junk), as well as my own contexts along the way.
I filled out journals and workbooks, and answered honestly (the benefit of God being right there with me!! He knows anyway, so why lie?)
I didn’t read my Bible all that much. I just focused on the God-given gifts of authors who could explore and progress over rocky ground with me.
And I came out, finally, unscathed, after all these years of feeling scathed!
We’ve all read the interviews with famous folks who say, at the end of the article,
“I am more content now than I’ve ever been.”
I used to always wonder about how true that statement is for them.
But it can happen. It does happen.
I won’t say that every once in a while I don't have to check a rising resentment, or an angry inner frustration with one of the usual, unchanging suspects.
But I quickly go to their context, and the context I was in when I was forced to live and interact with them, and I find compassion for both of us: for them, because they know not what they are suffering from, and for me, because that was myself at one time.
I thank God for his insight and patience that nudged me time and time again to deal with my junk and then to at last, move on, begin anew and live in an entirely new, empowered manner.
copyright Barb Harwood
