Episode #17: What it looks like to actually grieve your wounds

 These posts were written beginning in the fall of 2024. However, I am posting them years back so that they are not at the top of my Blog, and if you want to read them, you need to go "find them"

 

Jessica Smit Mattingly painting*

Andrew Bauman released a film and a book called A Brave Lament. You can watch the movie on YouTube if you click here. Both the book and the movie chronicles the time of losing their son. You can listen to the entire podcast here: The Place We Find Ourselves: What It Looks Like To Actually Grieve Your Wounds. Bauman also has a book that just came out called Stumbling Toward Wholeness.

"Grief always exposes who we are." Andrew Bauman

I used to be terrified of losing JB. He was (and is) so much of ME. I've been with him since I was a teenager. How can I live without him? 

And then, in February of this year, I fell into a deep, deep pit. It was a pit SO deep, I truly thought it might kill me or might send me to the hospital in an attempt to save my life. 

And, somehow, in the. midst of healing FROM that intense depression and the wounds that had caused that depression, I actually found myself understanding that if I lose JB, I will know how to grieve. If I lose a child or a dear person in my life, I don't have to fear it. I will have to grieve it. 

Grief will expose where you are on your healing journey and how prepared you are for that grief. 

Grief is one of the most natural inclinations of the human heart, and yet, in our culture, especially our Christian culture, it's avoided at all costs. People do not want to grieve. Pastors want us to celebrate their life. But we aren't crying because they are in heaven. We are crying because we are going to miss them.

"The wailing of broken hearts is the doorway to God." Rumi

Please don't misunderstand me as I type this piece. I love Jesus. I love my Christian community. I think Church is incredibly important. And I understand that it isn't perfect. But I learned some incredibly damaging thinking accidentally through the church. I say accidentally because I really don't know that anyone meant to teach it to me. I want to believe it wasn't intentional, as I can't come up with any reason people would want to give that thinking over to me. 

But I learned, in general, that my body was bad. That I could not trust my gut. If I was sad, I shouldn't be. God didn't want me sad. He wanted me happy. He wanted only good. He wanted me to only confess good. He didn't want me to be negative. This was coupled with my elite athletics which taught me that my body needed to hurt. That I needed to remember, "No pain, no gain." And so, I avoided pain or I willingly sat in it. I saw crying or sadness as BAD. I thought it meant that I was weak.

And, as I was able to hear in this podcast, this therapist and his wife, when they lost their first child, knew that they could not run from it. And this episode chronicles their attempt at living through their grief. The Bible is full of scriptures that encourage us to grieve. And in fact, we watched Jesus grieve when Lazarus died even though he knew his friend would be coming back to life.

"Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted"

In fact, in Isaiah we find out that Jesus knew there would be broken-hearted here because he has come to bind up their wounds! He knew there would be people who would be broken.

In this movie, there is a scene where the author is on the ground, wailing, and his hand is reaching up for his son's coffin. He didn't want his son to be alone. He wanted to be able to hold him. And he needed to grieve in this way. This film is encouraging others to grieve your losses. To do it bodily, intentionally, persistently, and to allow for rituals for that loss. Small things matter. You are allowed to create a ritual to say "this matters" and "this is important."

We have permission to feel our pain, grieve it, and to grieve it publicly. They don't mean you have to grieve with the general public, but with your community. It is almost a counter-cultural experience to be allowed to grieve with people. They had people who chose to bear with them in their agony. They admit that the community they had around them wasn't usual, but that it should be. We need to lay our masks down and start showing our humanity and blessing our humanity. We have to let our wounds show. Church is not a social club. 

Sometimes, given the severity of our anguish, we are given no choice but to grieve in this matter. I know that that was sort of true for me in the depths of my depression. You get to a point where you don't care how uncomfortable you make people in your grief. We need to have integrity toward what we lost. Someone told Andrew in the course of his grief, "You are going to have another son." That isn't what he wants to hear! Sure, he might have another son, but saying that is saying we don't want to grieve. We want to fix their sadness. We want to get them through it as fast as we can. Grief in super uncomfortable.

A poem from Andrew's book:

Just touch me. 

Will you hold my hand? 

Though its cold and bony

Will you embrace me tightly?

Can you wail as I wail?

Curse as I curse?

Pray as I pray? 

I don't want to be fixed.

I want to be known. 

Once you are in that "suffering club" you have no choice but to be "in the club" and help people suffer. We don't know how to suffer well. And people don't know how to suffer well or they just don't know what it is like. What we actually need in these situations is to be with people where they are. Emmanuel, God with Us. You aren't asking for a lot in that you just need someone to sit with you. But what you are actually asking someone to do is to die with you.

I want your presence kneeling by my bed

Feeling useless

Powerless

Helpless

For then you will understand 

A small part of me

That few have had the courage to know.

I recognize this will cost you greatly. 

But deep down, I will learn my worth

From the measure of your sacrifice.

Do you hear the ripple of the gospel in this? Do you hear Jesus ask his disciples to DIE to themselves and follow him? You must DIE to fix others. You must DIE to fix other people. We must DIE to ourselves so we can suffer alongside someone who is suffering. We have to allow our bodies to be present next to someone who is in that level of anguish. And that is overwhelming. And yet, there is no possibility of resurrection  apart from that. 

Not everyone gets this, but everyone deserves the privilege of having people to grieve alongside them. And, even if you have to go back to work and can't take time off to grieve, will you create space to create a ritual to enter into the pain even if it is only in your bed at night? If you do not give yourself permission to grieve, it will come out sideways.

This is where this discussion crosses over into my personal journey through immense depression and anxiety. I had friends and family members who called me on the phone and listened to me sob. Do you know how uncomfortable that is? Do you know how horrific that is? My Aunt Connie once said to me after I had gotten through a particularly challenging time that she remembered me texting her I was "barely surviving" that day. And she, in turn, had thought about trying to tell me to go outside. But she didn't. She just sent me a virtual hug. And what a gift that is. There was no fixing the depths of my sadness at that point. 

What I needed was to be FELT. I needed to cry. I needed to be heard. I needed to be unavailable sometimes. I needed to grieve. I needed to be encouraged TO grieve. My cousin Cara was probably the most valuable resource I had during the six months of HELL that I endured. I am not a phone talker, and I don't think I had ever had a conversation with my cousin on the phone. But during a particularly hard day she told me she was willing to listen if I needed to call.

I remember immediately thinking, "Well I will never call her. How could I do that?" The thought of calling someone who I was only a little bit close to and simply sobbing while on the phone felt utterly impossible and ridiculous.

And then Cara called me! I remember seeing her name on my phone screen and thinking, "Oh my gosh! She is willing to sit here in this with me? She is willing to listen to my grief in heart-wrenching sobs." And I picked up the phone, and I cried. I cried so hard. I laid on my closet floor and simply allowed my body to convulse with sadness. 

And she just listened. Sometimes she'd offer an encouraging word that, since she had been where I was before, she felt she could offer. But sometimes she didn't say anything. And if she hadn't experienced the level of my sadness, she may not have felt qualified to offer words. 

But the gift she gave me in that time was simply beyond words. 

My Aunt Jan would occasionally pop by my house. I always knew that if I couldn't see her or couldn't talk or could only lay in my bed and cry, she would allow that. Jan was grieving the loss of my presence. We are dear friends and she was fairly new to Tennessee, and yet she willingly allowed me to sit in my sadness and she sat there with me. During the worst, I couldn't eat. So she brought a dessert one time and gave me a spoon and just encouraged me to take one bite. And I did. (I lost 45 pounds in the course of this beast of grief -- but don't despair -- good ol' Wendi gladly put it right back on when the journey got better!) (That sentence implies some humor and sarcasm.)

I had another friend, "Stebbs" that would just get on Marco Polo and encourage me. Some others sent cards. Another waited until I felt the need to call her to be reminded of truth. Some friends would patiently not hear from me for weeks or months but then, willingly, allow me to simply sob on the other end of the line. I remember my friend MaryKay and her husband Richard just praying for me and weeping with me and calling a relative who had battled depression for some advice in how to encourage me. 

"Sadness doesn't sink a person. It is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that." Barbara Brown Taylor

Oh man ... does that not resonate with me? I had  to not hide my sadness. Nothing was harder than going to church and pretending I was okay. Sometimes I would drag myself to church and just go collapse in the cry room and rest during the entire sermon. Sometimes I couldn't go at all. Faking it was simply too unbearable. 

It can feel like, if you go into the pain, you'll never come back. If you start crying, it'll never stop. A terrifying monster comes to our door. If we block the door and hide in the corner, the monster hasn't gone anywhere. It still controls us. What would happen if instead, when grief comes to our door, we have a seat with it on our couch, talk to it for fifteen minutes, and then say good bye to it for the day. What if we said to grief, "Why are you here? How can I help you?" 

The monster does not need to rule you. Can we become intimate with our shame? Our grief? Our self-hatred? Without the judgment? Without the part of us where shame rules us? 

It's the welcome of Jesus. Can you embody the Father in yourself and towards your own self? You need to let the parts of you that you have "shusshed" for so long, speak some words. 

This is another part of my journey that has been incredibly challenging. I had not idea the amount of shame and guilt and hard stuff that I had shoved down within myself. And, because I had refused to look at it, it was bursting out of me. It was coming out sideways. 

That's what I've learned here. The stuff you don't look at, will force itself to be looked at. If you don't allow it to be seen, you will find a way to cope. You drink. You sleep around. You eat. You battle depression. You yell. You lose your cool. You stress. You control. 

That's how it comes out sideways. 

If you want to heal completely, you MUST look at your past. If you refuse to do it, it will not ever fully grieve. You may find ways to cope, and I understand the choice to not look at trauma in the face. But every single person in the world HAS trauma. And by trauma I mean, things that have hurt you and messed with your perceptions of the present. You must look it in the face. You must grieve it. Some people will be able to do that without many issues whatsoever. But some people, like me, will be forced to do this in a really challenging season of sadness and anxiety because I refused to let it come out of me otherwise. 

You may have longing for something in your past. We hate that we long for a relationship that we know we won't ever have. It's still god  in you that you do long for it. So avoiding the longing won't make the longing go away.  Contempt can block your desire. But do not hold your longing in. Contempt may cover up shame. But it will keep desire at arm's length. 

Sometimes we feel, if we can make the need go away, we won't feel so much agony. But as an adult, you need to reclaim the idea that desire is good. 

"If we can give ourselves permission to grieve, then daring, devoted friends will show up. If those people do not show up in your time of need, ask yourself if you are allowing your brokenness to be seen or if you are just breaking in isolation." Andrew Bauman

Sometimes we feel, if we can make the need go away, we won't feel so much agony. But as an adult, you need to reclaim the idea that desire is good. 

And if those friends, can't be there, you might have to kindly let them go. And that's okay. And there may be people that allow their brokenness to be seen, but they don't engage with those trying to help very well at all. But for many of us with trauma, the temptation is to hold the pain close and not let others see it. Can you hold it back from some people and have boundaries AND open yourself up to the right people and risk and be vulnerable as well. Your trauma is a pearl. Do you cast them before swine? 

How do we come to terms with the deep loss and tragedy that marks all of our lives? What do we do with that loss? How do we engage it honestly? How do we engage it in a way that allows for the movement of the spirit of God in the human heart so that we can get back into the stream of life? 

*This is a painting I purchased and is hanging in my bedroom. In this painting, a woman finds the resilience to persevere and overcome the wall creating a barrier between herself and a forgotten place of living and being. In Renaissance art, the peacock was a symbol of immortality, and in this painting, it is a guide to a forgotten garden. I discovered this painting done by a dear friend of my cousin Cara about 2/3 into my depression journey, and it became a symbol for the beauty I would find again.

Episode #27: Will you join me on the floor?

These posts were written beginning in the fall of 2024. However, I am posting them years back so that they are not at the top of my Blog, and if you want to read them, you need to go "find them!" :)

I recently stumbled upon an interview with KJ Ramsey which lead me to an article she had written entitled: "The Education I never signed up for".

"Sickness has an inelegant way of reversing relationships, and where I had previously played the role of comforter, I found myself learning the harder role of recipient." KJ Ramsey

This

was 

me. 

Two different times in my life, I have found myself crumpled on the floor of life, unable to function. My pain was in no way comparable to what KJ Ramsey suffers from with an autoimmune disorder called Ankylosing Spondylitis. But the pain was ... incredibly ... painful.

Both times that I encountered this horrific suffering, I've ended up in a position similar to KJ, however, in my cases, my suffering offered an ending. I was hopeful, in both instances, that it would not continue forever. KJ was not. Her suffering, most likely, will never end. That is incomprehensible to me. But it also indicates to me that if I am going to learn from someone, this is the person to learn from.

The first time my suffering brought me to my knees was when I was pregnant with the Pomegranate. My third pregnancy and fourth child, I had never had easy pregnancies, but this one was on a completely different level. I found myself nauseous nearly every minute of the day for the entirety of the pregnancy. Even worse: I couldn't throw up. No relief. Just dry-heaving. Nothing helped. I had to use medicine to sleep. And shortly after I found out I was pregnant, I began having panic attacks and then depression settled in. In the midst of it, I became nearly suicidal and truly did not know how I could endure nine months of this.

"In my life of daily pain, my body carries the inheritance of the education I never would have signed up for but have so desperately needed."

I was confident that when I delivered, the suffering would end. But my previous two pregnancies had included horrific bouts of post-partum depression. Would I trade in one set of suffering for another? Thank God that I did not. The moment she was delivered, everything left. The depression. The anxiety. The sickness. It was over. 

This past February, a new level of suffering settled upon me. I found myself the recipient of, well, I suppose the old-fashioned word is a nervous break down. Maybe mental breakdown. I fell apart. I couldn't function. It started with anxiety. That was bad. But then as that dissipated, the depression that came upon was like nothing I had ever experienced in my previous fleeting bouts of depression or in the PPD I had encountered with my first two pregnancies.

I found myself, literally, on the floor of my closet many times. Absolutely unable to get up. I remember one day, specifically, that I needed to get out and do sheep paddock. The sheep had to move. I had to get up. And it took me a solid two hours to get myself out to the paddock. Thinking back to it now, I can't even explain that level of pain. Of suffering. It was horrific. 

KJ talks of a similar experience. In the beginning of her illness, she would be unable to sleep from the pain, and eventually would end up on her floor, crying. One of her suitemates would often find her in this position. KJ says that, "Instead of turning the other way or quipping how early she had to get up for an exam, she would join me on the floor, massaging my aching hands as I sobbed into her chest."

"She would join me on the floor ..."

I love that statement. I love that statement for what it tells me to do for others and what it tells me that I need to do for others. 

I had people that joined me on the floor.

And truly, that is what this post is about. This is about the willingness to join people in their suffering. Oh we need community! Oh we need to let that community support us!

"Receiving other's care means you're exposed And it means you might be hurt. It takes courage to let people see you in this position. It takes courage to receive their care."

We need to make the linkage between physical and emotional pain. Many people don't suffer from the physical pain KJ does, but many of us will face the emotional pain that hits this level. 

We all have weakness. But most of us try to hide it. This is often subconscious because most of us are running around scared, hiding how weak we really are. "We try to project that we are strong and that others need us. That feels safe to our souls and our bodies," KJ says, "but when weakness rears its head, when depression strikes, when anxiety makes you feel like you are going to crumble, when your body fails you ... you are faced with a level of weakness that you can't ignore. You can't run away from your weakness anymore and you have to let it be by someone." 

And it is perhaps one of the scariest scenarios we can imagine.

When I collapsed in February, I had to admit I couldn't function. I had to allow people to bring me meals. I had to let people take care of me. I couldn't help anyone. In fact one day I remember laying on the floor of my closet and realizing that I couldn't help anyone. I couldn't help my kids. I couldn't help my husband. I couldn't be there a single person. I could barely take care of myself. 

The portion of the brain that registers physical pain is identical to the portion of the brain that registers emotional pain. My emotional pain is no less intense than when I break my arm. Society will reject emotional pain as real. But your pain matters! Your emotional pain matters! Sickness (mental and physical) forces us to be vulnerable which forces us to need other people.

"I was ashamed of my vast needs even as I realized I truly was inadequate to meet them on my own."

But even if our needs aren't vast, human beings tend to be ashamed of our needs. There is an essential struggle in every human heart to be more than God ever intended that we would be. Do we think we are supposed to be God? 

We are frail. 

We are needy. 

And what we need sometimes it ... another person's care. 

Will you risk receiving care from another?

One of the hardest things, especially during this horrific six months of depression was to be completely vulnerable and let people help me. I had to turn to my in-laws, my husband, and a few key friends and allow them to carry me. I said yes to people bringing me meals. I had to admit that I was completely incapable of taking care of myself and especially not my children. 

There is something about being joined by another on our floors that is holy. It is holy because it is Jesus. He joined us on the floor of this earth. When someone is willing to join us on the floor, we experience the core of the trinity.

When someone is willing to join us on the floor, we experience the core of the trinity. Jesus. Me. And someone else. 

Infants, instinctually reach both hands up looking for care. But grown people are weighed down by their grief coupled with the care that they haven't received. They often have a belief that no one will care for them. Faith looks like being little children who reach out for care in the needs they cannot meet on their own. Faith is the belief that making that choice will provide for us something that our soul critically needs to be whole.

When we reach out and those needs aren't responded to properly, that can hurt on multiple levels. "It triggers our core wounds of the way we were not adequately received in our family of origins and by important people in our lives. It reinforces this belief that we really are misunderstood and alone." 

But the belief that we are not understood and we are alone is actually a lie. Because Jesus bore that scorn on the cross. We are part of a bigger story where God himself took on a frail body and had to feel our pain. That than changes how lonely we have to be when people don't respond to us. When someone minimizes our pain, we can remember that Jesus remembers our pain. And that can help us regain strength so we can try again. 

My suffering has resulted in a newfound intimacy with Jesus. And every believer can experience this.

KJ's second article is entitled: "God Made Our Brains To Need Others."

In the exposure of learning to receive love in my most broken places, I have found the deepest joy. 

We can allow people to respond to our pain even if they don't respond properly.

When I first came up upon this horrific beast of depression which gripped my in March of this year, my cousin Cara offered to sit with me in my pain. She fully committed. (And I've realized that full commitment is also really important. I couldn't afford for her to abandon me in the midst of my depression. I didn't realize that. But she did. So her saying "I'm in" meant she was in for the long haul. Daily texts. For what could be a year. Years. 

Cara told me she'd be there every day. She texted me EVERY SINGLE MORNING. She encouraged me. She'd call and listen to me cry. She spent hours on the phone with me. Her presence became a balm to my incredibly depressed soul. 

She stood next to me when I started therapy. She listened when I started revealing incredibly painful things about my past. She was kind. She was understanding. She looked at me in my pain and attuned with me. That's what we truly need. Someone who can look into our pain and say, "I see you. I see your pain. And that pain would hurt. I see that it would be painful. I'm sorry it happened."

I remember the first time she offered to let me chat on the phone. Cara and I weren't especially close, and I wasn't a phone talker. And when she suggested it, my bodily instinctively said I would never do that. I knew I would never call her. 

But she called me.

And I answered. 

And I sobbed. 

Not just cried. Sobbed. Deep, awful, horrific crying. Painful. To the depths of my soul.

And she just listened to me cry. 

Many times.

She laid with me on the floor. 

Cara knew something in that moment that I had not come to understand yet. We need people with us in our suffering. I didn't understand that. I couldn't imagine suffering with people. I wanted to suffer by myself. In my closet. By myself. I didn't see how integral community was to my pain. 

Pain demands a witness. 

I had no idea. But through this season of pain, I came to understand how much I needed her. And how much we need each other as people. It is crucial to our healing journey to do this journey with people. 

This post is two-parted. In other words, it has two goals. The first is to encourage you to allow people to lay on the floor with you. LET THEM. 

And the second is, be willing to lay on the floor with someone. This means not fixing it. This means just saying, "This sucks. But let me be here with you."

I feel like this post could go on forever and ever and ever. God is doing such amazing things in our community. So many women finding the same pain and looking it in the face and needing community. I have so much to share. 

Tune in!

Episode #56: Affect Regulation: A Mindfulness Practice (The Wheel of Awareness)

 These posts were written beginning in the fall of 2024. However, I am posting them years back so that they are not at the top of my Blog, and if you want to read them, you need to go "find them" :)

To listen to this complete episode, click here: Affect Regulation: How Mindfulness Can Help Integrate Your Brain

Trauma impairs integrative functioning in the brain. 

Neuroscience has demonstrated is that when you are a kid and you experience trauma or abuse is that your brain's natural process of integrating gets blocked. When you experience these things, the neurons in certain regions of your brain, are prevented from linking up with the neurons in other places in your brain. Integration refers to the connection between neurons. Trauma impairs integration in the brain. In other words, the various regions of your brain do not make enough neural connections with one another. 

When neurons are well-connected, your brain is more stable. And when you hear the word "stable" you should be thinking about affect regulation (go back to podcast episode #20 if this isn't familiar to you.) You know what it is like when you get unstable emotionally. It happens to varying degrees everyday for most of us. Affect disregulation happens when your brain is not well integrated. 

The brain is a complex system. These systems are most stable when their component parts are (a) differentiated and (b) linked. Your brain has 100 billion neurons. One neuron is connected to between 1 and 10,000 other neurons. This means there are billions and billions of connections in your brain. When you are disregulated, the neurons are not sufficiently connected! However, there is something you can do to promote integration in your brain. You are not bound by your brain's present level of integration. 

Today, we are going to discuss an exercise you can do to promote integration in your brain. When the brain heals, it becomes more integrated, and when it becomes more integrated, it heals. The Biblical term for this is the word Shalom. This refers to the webbing together of differentiated parts in a way that brings stebility, harmony, and peace. 

Dan Siegel wrote a book called Aware. In his book he uses the WHEEL OF AWARENESS. 

What does the word mindfulness actually mean? This means to paying attention on purpose to the present moment and doing this without judgment. For example: if you are doing a breathing exercise, and you get distracted, can you just come back without judging yourself for wandering? 

Mindful practices matter because they change the linkages between neurons in your brain. Repeated experience is why your brain acts the way it does right now. Aside from genes you were born of, everything is a function of the experiences you have had in life. Connections grow stronger by repeating the same thing repeatedly. What is practiced repeatedly, strengthens brain firing patters. With repetition, neural structure is literally altered. And if you do this each day, a state becomes a trait. 

The hipposcampus will actually GROW with practice and the amygdalia will SHRINK. Like for real!

 

Here is the WHEEL OF AWARENESS. 

1. The hub of the wheel -- this represents the knowing of being consciously aware of the knowns on the rim.

2. The rim of the wheel -- this represents all the knowns of life. Also includes your sense of relationship connectedness to other people. 

    A. Five senses -- what we we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch

    B. Sixth senses -- interior of the body

    C. Seventh senses -- the mental sea inside of us. 

    D. Eighth senses -- the relationships we have with other people (interconnectedness)

3. The spoke of the wheel -- the spoke represents attention. This extends out from the hub and survey the various knowns on the rim. 

At this point, you need to lay down somewhere calm and click on this link below. Don't think this is crazy. Just do it! Here is the link. It is 17 minutes long so give yourself time to do this.

Here is a recording for you to work through this mindfulness exercise yourself.  

Research has shown that mindfulness exercises: 

1. Increased growth in the prefrontal areas of the brain (which are largely responsible for regulating your affect) 

2. Increased growth in the corpus callosum which integrate your right and lefts sides of your brain

3. Increased growth in the hippocampus which deeply affects implicit memory (which I have spoken about before on my Blog.)

Here is a link to more information about this particular episode. You need to try to do this everyday. Add it to your morning devotions before you get up everyday.

Episode #57 How to know if you have Experienced Trauma

These posts were written beginning in the fall of 2024. However, I am posting them years back so that they are not at the top of my Blog, and if you want to read them, you need to go "find them!" :)

How to know if you have Experienced Trauma

I honestly think there are many people who do not believe they have experienced trauma. However, it is quite possible you've experienced more trauma than you realize. Today I am breaking down another episode of the amazing podcast: The Place We Find Ourselves.

What follows are my notes from listening to the podcast. However, I encourage you to listen to it yourself! These are SO eye-opening. I personally believe nearly every human has endured at least some aspect of trauma. You may have handled it well and not need help. But chances are you, or someone you know, is greatly damaged by it, and you understanding what it is could be greatly helpful. 

What is Trauma?

Trauma comes from the Greek word WOUND and it changes the physical structure of your mind and body. 

In order to experience trauma you must have: 

1. A feeling of helplessness combined with

2. Abandonment by those who could have helped but didn't. 

The event itself is not what determines whether something is absolutely traumatizing. Trauma does not reside in the event proper. Trauma involves not being able to use your body or voice to make the bad thing stop happening. This is followed by the realization that you are utterly alone and there is no one that you can run to or talk to and be there for you and understand you and help you process what happened. You may look back and not even realize these emotions exist. 

Trauma introduces a pair of agonies into your heart. It says: "I can't say or do anything to make this awful thing to stop happening. And the people who are supposed to be protecting me aren't there to engage with me and protect me and protect my devastated heart."

You are alone. 

What DID you need as a child?

So what DID you need a child? Well, this is another episode entirely but Polyvagal Theory is a big thing that can give you a lot of information on this topic. 

All kids need their BIG SIX needs met by their parents (Visit Episode 2 for more information about the BIG SIX.)

1. Be attuned to them. 

2. Be emotionally responsive to them. 

3. Engage their hearts

4. Be willing and able to regulate their affect

5. The parents need to be strong enough to handle child's negative emotions

6. The parents need to be willing to repair when they harm their child

If there is a poverty of any of these things, the brain does not develop properly. 

For example, think about some abuse that may have happened in your life. When you ask the question: "Who did you talk to first about it?" If your answer is that you didn't go to anyone -- that indicates a problem. Abuse victims often couldn't go and ask either parent. 

You will probably be tempted to think "that wasn't my parents' fault. I withdrew from them and didn't tell them." But you are wrong. The most basic human instinct is to run home and tell your parent when something bad happens to you. If you did not run home and tell your parents when something bad happened, there is a very good reason for that. 

Individuals who were present for 9-11 and went home and properly digested with their family, did better than those who did not. This is why trauma at home is the worst kind of trauma. It is developmental trauma. 

Symptoms Do Not Lie

Symptoms don't lie. If you have the symptoms of trauma, you probably have trauma even if you can't remember it. Here are three of the common symptoms of someone who has had trauma in their past? 

1. Problems with affect regulation. Do you get disregulated often and have a hard trouble bringing your body back to.a place of comfort and rest. (Episode #20) "The byproduct of trauma is an unregulated body experience, an uncontrollable cascade of strong emotions and physical sensations. Truamatized people frequently experience themselves at being at the mercy of their sensations as well as their emotions, having lost the capacity to effectively regulate these emotions." People will either fall into (a) panic, terror, rage (b) shame or hopeless despair. Do you feel anger bigger than the circumstance warrants? Do you have disproportionate fear or anxiety that just feels bigger than it should be given the situation? 

2. Problems with interpersonal regulation. Developmental trauma results in insecure attachment.(Visit Episode 5 and Episode 7 for more information on attachment). This can even be that you do NOT have difficulty with people because you avoid that difficulty at all costs. OR there is tons of debris in past relationships. The mark of a healthy relationship is the degree to which the two people can navigate conflict. How does the relationship do after there is relationship rupture? If you have trouble with #2 there is a history of broken relationships or there is never any issues because you have avoided them. When you are deregulated (Symptom #1) it is hard to stay connected to another person (Symptom #2). Disregulation makes us either super clingy because we need the other person to regulate us or it makes us isolate from others so we can self-regulate. Healthy relationships allow you to remain as an individual. But when you are insecurely attached, it is difficult to stay connect to and differentiated from another person especially if there is conflict between the two of you.

3. Problems receiving kindness, care, and comfort. Difficult receiving kindness from others and especially hard giving yourself kindness. (Check next episode 58 for more information about your posture toward yourself in trauma). You will tend to long for kindness from others but at the same time you are suspicious of this kindness or you will feel this nervousness and discomfort about it. Is it hard for you to receive compliments? If it is hard for you to receive offers for kindness and care for others? People with a history of trauma, they have a MASSIVE WAR with being kind to themselves. When you are struggling, what posture do you have toward your heart or body? Or do you tend to push through or endure or push yourself harder or beat yourself up? Is it difficult for you to be kind toward your own body? 

Some of you may be opening to the possibility that you experienced more trauma than you realized. It is very common to get derailed by minimizing your story. "I feel like what you are calling my trauma is relatively small. I'm not starving. I wasn't beaten every night. Those are the kids who have trauma." 

There are people who have experienced more severe trauma than you. Does that mean your trauma is not worthy of engagement? Does a broken arm hurt any less because it is not the worst pain you could be in? 

Episode #109: Anxiety: What It Is and How to Repsond to it

 These posts were written beginning in the fall of 2024. However, I am posting them years back so that they are not at the top of my Blog, and if you want to read them, you need to go "find them" :)

 

 

INTRODUCTION

This is episode 109 on The Place We Find Ourselves podcast: Anxiety: What it Is and How to Respond to it. I encourage you to listen to the episode for yourself. If you EVER battle anxiety, this will help you understand WHY.

Oh, how I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was younger and my anxiety started popping up. I wish they wouldn't have just given me medication and instead would have said, "There is a reason you are feeling this. Let's find out WHY!"

WHERE DOES ANXIETY COME FROM?

 "Fear is an emotional reaction in the presence of genuine or perceived danger in the environment. Anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding important emotions." 

Anxiety is what you feel when you push down core emotions like grief, sadness, anger. 

If you are feeling something that feels like fear but you are not in any danger in the moment, than you are most likely experiencing anxiety. 

Our experience of anxiety is often linked to early experiences of emotions. Suppose you were sad a lot as an eight-year-old boy and your Dad got frustrated with you or didn't listen to you. The little boy learns to push the sadness down and suppress it and avoid it. As a result, the sadness will not be able to flow through his body. Little boy can't deal with the sadness. And in time, this boy will begin to feel anxiety whenever sadness bubbles up. 

Please note: Everyone has this in their childhood. EVERYONE has some sort of trauma from their childhood. Much of it was not intentional. Some of it just happened. It could have happened from an innocuous comment someone made one time. This is not about blaming the people in your past. This is about naming what happened so you can heal from it.

Why does this little boy feel anxiety?

This boy's brain has paired sadness with: Dad withdraws or Dad gets upset with me. Also, he begins to accumulate a reservoir of "unfelt" sadness. He should have been able to process through this sadness, but now, as an adult, he is overwhelmed by the cumulative "unfelt" sadness that is in his body. Now, when he feels all that "unfelt" sadness inside his heart, he feels anxious. 

Many children may be taught that if they feel fear or anger, they are bad.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

Ponder a few questions for me: 

1. When you felt fear or sorrow as a kid, were those emotions welcomed by your caregivers? 

2. Did your parents sit with you in your fear or sorrow and help you process through it? 

3. Did you somehow get the message that your fear or sorrow was bad or weak or simply, unwelcome? 

4. What about anger? Was that anger welcomed by your parents? 

5. Did your parents make space for your anger? 

6. Did they hear you out and let you express that anger? 

7. Was there room in your home for your anger?

The avoidance of his sadness is not this little boy's fault. And as he grows up, he is not making a conscious decision to avoid this sadness. But if the parent can't tolerate the sadness, avoiding sadness is the little boy's only option. He has learned to do this subconsciously. And it worked for him. Until it no longer worked anymore. 

THE PROBLEM WITH A CHRISTIAN'S EMOTIONS

Here's another BIG one that may have come into your home ... accidentally ... and this one is very common with Christians.

Feeling sadness, grief, or anger can also conflict with other beliefs that are important to us. As a Christian, what should be your response when you feel one of these emotions? For many Christians, feeling sadness conflicts with their beliefs about what they should be feeling. They should be "rejoicing in the Lord always." Or what about fear? We are taught that we should be strong and courageous and trusting in God and not fearful. Feeling anger does the same. They aren't supposed to let the sun goes down on their anger. 

As a result, when these emotions bubble up, you shove them into the basement of your heart because you feel like they are ungodly things to feel. And that shoving LEADS TO ANXIETY.

Anxiety is caused by avoiding feelings that your body is TRYING and NEEDS to express. If you are angry because you have been wronged by someone and you shove that anger down because the good, Christian thing to do is not get angry ... you will eventually experience anxiety. Your emotions don't go away because you ignore them. 

What happens when you start to feel anxiety? Very often we respond the same way we responded to our sadness, grief, and anger. Instead, we feel guilty for feeling the anxiety. I say, "Wendi, you aren't supposed to be anxious. The Bible says not to feel anxious about anything. Stop this. Just trust God." 

Here's the problem with that. 

You are attempting to push your real feelings down. But remember! That's what causes anxiety in the first place. The Bible is far more complex than we want to acknowledge. It cannot be reduced to a single sentence. This means, yes, Paul tells us not to be anxious about anything. But, two chapters earlier, Paul talks about his own anxiety when he discusses having to send his friend back to a previous church saying," ... that I may have less anxiety." Paul felt fear! He says, "For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn — fighting without and fear within."

He was afraid. For many Christians, anxiety is caused by not expressing the anger that is inside you. Christian men can have a little anger. But Christian women aren't permitted anger at all. 

THE LINK TO YOUR STORY

Anxiety is almost always linked to "your story" which is your past .... the story of your past. Are you anxious about your child being ostracized? Others finances. Others work. Why are some people anxious about one thing and someone else is anxious about something else? There is a reason that you are anxious about the things you are anxious about. And that reason is rooted in your story. 

Anxiety needs to become a prompt for you to be curious about your story. Especially your story from -18 in your family of origin. Your anxiety is almost always connecting you to unfelt emotions from your past. Especially those that you experienced in your 0-18 years and that you weren't given space to feel. Anxiety is a light on the dashboard of your heart that says something isn't right with your emotions inside. You have unfelt emotions in your engine that need tending to and needs your attention. It wants your attention!

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE FEELING IS ANXIETY?

How do you know you are feeling anxious. If you experience any of the following, you may be feeling anxiety:

• increased heart rate
• sweating
• dizziness
• chest pain
  
• shortness of breath
• muscle pain
• tension 
• tightnesss (especially in the head or neck or face)
• felt sense of nervousness or restlessness in your torso
• or a sense of doom in your throat or chest

There are lots of other things that can cause the bodily sensations above. But, if you are experiencing one or more of these symptoms, it might be your body's way of saying you are anxious. 

We need to be familiar with our body and inparticular, the sensations in our body. Emotions are FIRST bodily sensations. If you arne't familiar with the sensations in your body, then you can't name what you are feeling and you can't engage it well. 

DYSREGULATION

When most people say, "I am feeling anxious," what they are confessing is that their body is in a state of DISREGULATION. 

Affect is the felt sense of what is happening inside your body. It refers to your inner emotional and bodily experience. Affect exists on a spectrum.

If you are in a restaurant and a man holds up a gun, most people will get dysregulated. But what about if you get dysregulated but something very different like just someone not liking them. If you have a history of trauma, you will get dysregulated more often than other people AND you will also have a much harder time getting regulated again. 

Not everyone's brain has the same ability to self-regulate. 

HAVING CURIOSITY & KINDNESS

So, what do you do about all this? What do you DO when you are dysregaulated. The TWO most important words as you begin engaging your anxiety are: 

CURIOSITY: Will I be curious about what this anxiety might be telling me?

KINDNESS: What would it look like to be kind to my body right now?

What do you think God wants for your body when your body is suffering with high levels of cortisol. And sustained levels of cortisol are not good for the body or the brain. When you are feeling anxious, YOU ARE SUFFERING! I think God wants: 

1. You to experience the comfort that kindness brings, and in time ...

2. God wants you to take your body seriously and wants you to think about what your body is feeling and why. 

So next time you feel anxious, do the following: 

1. BE AWARE! Notice the anxiety. Notice where in your body you are feeling the anxiety. Where is it? Tune into it. Just notice it. 

2. ASK YOURSELF: WHAT WOULD KINDNESS TO MY BODY LOOK LIKE RIGHT NOW? Part of kindness is doing some things that bring regulation back to your body. Pressing your feet into the ground and mindfully taking some deep breaths. You can approach with:

• Top-Down approach: Use your thinking brain to calm your anxiety -- self talk to try to calm your anxiety. You know this often doesn't work very well. This is because top-down doesn't usually work nearly as well. 
• Bottom-Up approach: Uses your brain stem to calm your limbic system. Breathing. Slowing your breathing. After you have breathed a little, you can ask yourself what else would bring you a deeper sense of calm. Music? Smells? A bath? You have to find out what those things are that soothe your body. 

3. WHAT EMOTIONS MIGHT I BE PUSHING DOWN OR SUPPRESSING? WHAT MIGHT MY ANXIETY BE TRYING TO TELL ME? Be curious about what your anxiety might be protecting you from feeling? Are you sad? Are you angry? Do you feel grief? 

THE GOAL: LET THE EMOTIONS FLOW

The goal is to let your emotions flow. The goal is to experience and express the emotions that are underneath the anxiety. The unfelt and avoided emotions. If your emotions are a river, you want your emotions to flow, freely down the river. You want to express is fully and feel it freely. 

When rivers can't flow freely, bad things happen .... like FLOODS. It is the same thing with emotions. So, if you are sad about something in the present today, you need to let your body feel that sadness and express that sadness because it MATTERS. 

If you have unfelt sadness from your past, you must let your body feel that sadness and express it. You must bear witness to the suffering you endured as a child (which we have ALL felt!) There is a part of us that needs to pay attention to this and take it seriously. There might be an angry part of you from middle school that needs to have some space and take that anger seriously. 

WE NEED COMMUNITY!

It is especially helpful if you can do this with one or two other people. We are designed to let this happen in community, with others. Many cultures have communal rituals for the expression of sorrow and rage. You need at least one person there to bear witness to your expression of sorrow. This is what the spirit of God does. Jesus says, "Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted." God will bear witness to your story and your suffering. 

EMDR

If I could go back in time ... 

I would have done EMDR when I was 12. Or even twenty-one. Sometime. Way earlier. I would have met my depression and anxiety head-on immediately and gotten to the root of it then!

I am telling you right now. If you have a child who is suffering from anxiety or depression:

DO

IT

NOW!

Find a faith-based EMDR therapist and stop the madness before it begins. It is not crazy. It is not Kooky. Trust me. My husband doesn't put up with things he can't understand. This isn't like that at all. It is not hypnosis. This is backed up by pounds of research.

We did EMDR with our daughter Abigail recently. I believe she only did three (maybe four?) sessions. She had been battling sleep anxiety for many years. We had no idea what to do about it. And as she got older, it was keeping her from feeling free to be able to spend the night at a girlfriend's house (although we aren't big "slumber party" people.) 

This past weekend, she spent the night with her youth group's small group. (At First Christian, the kids are in groups based on their age and sex.) This was a monumental event and honestly, truly, life-altering and transformative. 

And if you are an adult who battles anxiety or depression, please DO NOT hesitate. And don't let money stop you. There are many places where you can obtain counseling through insurance or even through free opportunities.

Don't suffer needlessly. I will tell you that without the intervention of my counselor, I am not sure I would be alive. I mean that. And I am not sure that my marriage or relationship with my children wouldn't deteriorate beyond recognition at some point.