Thursday, June 26, 2025

Sitting in it

We have to SIT IN THE DISCOMFORT. 

Seriously?

Really?

I've known for most of my life that I was a chronic people-pleaser. I didn't think that was a bad thing. I didn't understand that it was a trauma response. I thought it was a good thing to be a people-pleaser. 

Hard truth: IT IS NOT. 

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to be nice. It's great to be kind. But people-pleasing is NOT being truthful. It is doing EVERYTHING you can to keep peace. This meant I wasn't speaking complete truth to people. I was telling white lies. I was doing anything and everything to make sure there was peace. I would manipulate in order to keep people happy.

For the last year I have been working to heal from chronic and toxic behaviors. I naively thought that I had done it! I had been unable to sit in some discomfort and so I thought that I had conquered it! Bravo Wendi. Time to go on with your life. 

And then, someone actually told me they weren't happy with me, and I felt everything crumble. My counselor told me very early on that my healing journey would be an upward spiral. This meant that I'd never drop as low but that I would have to be stretched and grow over and over again. I, again, naively, thought that I was through this! Ohhhhh, how wrong I was


I'm in a low dip. But it is just a dip. But I hate the dips, and I want them to be OVER and DONE WITH. 

Here's the other thing. In the past, if Wendi thought someone was mad at her, she would feverishly and ferociously try to fix the upsetness. Call. Text. Email. Write a letter. Show up. Do something nice. Fix it! Because only through fixing it could she feel better inside. 

OR

Old Wendi also used medication to numb the feelings of someone being mad at her so she could function. (Please don't get me wrong, sometimes meds are needed. No doubt. But I am now at a point where I know numbing the feelings is no longer serving me.) 

New Wendi now sees that those were just hits of heroin. Get everyone not mad, feel better, move on. The next day, do it again. She sees that the desire to please man was NOT A SIN. She wasn't trying to do it. It was hard-wired into her nervous system. She needed to unwind the wires. And that takes a LOT of work. 

In the course of this journey, I have been blessed by some amazing women who are standing alongside me on my path. One of those women was my mother-in-law. She wrote me something beautiful and combined with a phone conversation I had had, opened up my eyes to what was happening. I haven't even shared the story of my pain, but it didn't matter. She was able to encourage me in that. 

My Aunt Jan shared a selection from Mere Christianity: 

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide....


Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the       "wrong" notes. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another.


...decent behavior ...does not mean the behavior that pays...but means things like ...doing school work honestly when it's would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her... telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool. 


"Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason, namely because we care so incomparably more what God thinks.


Imagine yourself as a living house... God comes in to rebuild this house... but He is knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought.  You thought you were going to he made into a decent little cottage. But He is building a palace!





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