Tag Archives: Recovery

Recovery from trauma and abuse

Journaling confessions

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Therapists are obsessed with journaling. At first, I had no intentions of being sucked into this dubious practice, but — well, that’s the topic of another post.

A friend of mine journals like this:
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Yes, exactly like this since — being a true “trophy wife” rather than some bimbo or mere ordinary mortal — her entire life tends to look like a painting.

On the other hand, this was my journal this morning:
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Obviously I am not a trophy wife. (Oh, and by the way, that’s my granddaughter’s “biting toy”. Not mine. In case anyone wondered. And I had just finished eating “refrigerator oatmeal” in my nifty new glass storage container. Perhaps I’ll post the recipe some day. For the oatmeal, not the storage container.)

Now, on to the confessions…

I have a love/hate thing with journaling. Come to think of it, that is hardly a confession. I think that’s pretty much universal among therapy clients who journal.

Even though some therapists say that it’s far more effective to handwrite — and not edit — journal entries, I’ve done a lot of my journaling on my laptop or iPad. Sometimes my slow handwriting gets in the way of letting my thoughts really flow. Other times, editing what I’ve written helps me process things.

Sometimes I think that maybe I’ve done a crazy lot of journaling in the past five years.

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While I try to write as “uncensored” as possible in my paper journals, I almost always edit/censor when reading anything out loud to my therapist. I don’t recommend this. Besides, he caught on to my tricks early on, and usually calls me on it. “What did you leave out?” he will ask, even when I thought I was being so smooth and clever while skipping over words and sentences.

There have been things I couldn’t bring myself to read out loud. Sometimes I’ve handed my journal to Donny to read out loud. Sometimes even that was too much for me, and I insisted he read it silently.

One of the most difficult, but empowering, things I’ve ever done is read a detailed account of my rape out loud to my therapist. It took me the entire session, and I was a wreck at the end. Donny cancelled his next session so that we could get me grounded enough to walk out the door and drive home, where I collapsed in bed for the rest of the day. But it was powerful and freeing in a way that I still can’t explain or describe.

This past year, I have done way less journaling. I no longer feel the desperate need to “get it out”.

When I have journaled, I’ve tended to use my iPad or iPhone, and I have mixed feelings about it. There are some wonderful apps for keeping diaries and journals, and they offer features, like being indexable and searchable, or being available on my iPhone which is almost always with me, that paper journals don’t. But there is something about paper and pen…

Recently I’ve decided to take an entirely new approach. Although I’m completely lacking in artistic talents or abilities, I’ve found myself gathering art supplies and reading about art therapy and art journaling. Maybe I’m just trying to reconnect with my “Inner Child”…I don’t know. But I’ve found my journaling taking a radical departure from my usual “words only” approach. (I’ve already posted a few pictures of some of my latest “journaling” efforts.)

One thing that I read suggested using art or five minutes of writing — or both – to answer the question, “What is my hidden secret?” for 37 days in a row. I don’t think I’ll repeat it that many times, but I have done it twice already, last night and this morning.

Last night, I didn’t even have to think of it because an image immediately popped into my head. What was really exciting is that I knew it was something that I could actually draw. I was very tempted to just post the picture, and not what I wrote about it…but therapy is all about facing fears and no longer hiding, so…

My first real attempt at My first real attempt at “art therapy”.

What is your journal like?

Voices held captive

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On another blog, someone asked poignantly how long my voice had been held captive. This was my reply:

Robert, it was in college that I somehow got up the nerve to send up a desperate cry for help to a therapist I was seeing at the insistence of a concerned friend. Rather than asking questions, or seeking better understanding, my therapist seized on one of the things I’d stammered, and made a blaming statement. I walked out and never returned. I remained silent for about 30 years, telling myself that the long ago sexual abuse was “no big deal”, just “that weird thing we did”, and that it had no impact on the rest of my life. That’s if I thought of it at all.

After college, I was raped by two neighbors. My initial intent was to tell no one but my doctor; however, that didn’t work out. I wasn’t completely silenced, but close to it. Very few people knew, and I dealt with the aftermath of my ordeal pretty much on my own.

Time does not heal wounds. Most of the time, I thought I was OK. The thing is that I had no frame of reference for “OK”. Five years ago, the whole house of cards came crashing down. This time there was no more propping things back up and pretending all was well.

I didn’t “find my voice”. Desperation and anguish drove it out of me in agonizing shrieks of pain, wracking sobs, and frightened whispers. It has been a difficult road out of captivity, but so much worth it.

May God bless you with freedom and joy.

May God grant us all the powerful, unrestrained voices He always intended us to have.

Prayer therapy, part 2

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Part 1 is here.

Today was my therapy session. I’ve spent the last week alternating between trying to get unstuck and trying to avoid thinking about it…between wrestling with God and feeling filled with gratitude for His goodness…between fear and anticipation.

Yesterday I spent time thinking about and meditating on the meaning and practice of trust. This has clearly been something that God has been trying to teach me over the past year or so.

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Last night, I barely slept. So much for resting in Him…

I went for a walk before my session, hoping it would make me feel more alert and awake. It did, but I also felt like bursting into tears, and couldn’t quite figure out why.

After catching Donny up on the past week, and reading him part of my blog entry from last Tuesday (which was the first I’ve told him about having a blog) I said that I was ready to pray. Then I corrected myself: No, I didn’t feel much more ready than last week, but I was going to pray anyway.

So I prayed about 10-11 year old me, and it struck me as quite silly that I’d been dreading this so much. Most of my prayer was thanking God for the many blessings I experienced during that time.

Next week, it will be time to pray about when I was in 6th grade. That was a good year in many ways, but also a troubling one because of a friendship I had. I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with an adjective to describe that friendship, and failing. Let’s put it this way — there were three of us, and one of us thrived on nonstop drama…and it wasn’t me. At the very end of the school year, she was absent and the two of us looked at each other and asked, “Why weren’t we just friends with each other instead of letting her always get between us?” I still have no idea.

I don’t have the answers but I’m gonna celebrate anyway

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A discussion today made me ponder the question, am I happy?

First, some definitions I found via Google:…

•feeling or showing pleasure or contentment
•delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy to see a person.
•characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.

•Definition: in high spirits; satisfied
•Synonyms: blessed, blest, blissful, blithe, can’t complain, captivated, cheerful, chipper, chirpy, content, contented, convivial, delighted, ecstatic, elated, exultant, flying high, gay, glad, gleeful, gratified, intoxicated, jolly, joyful, joyous, jubilant, laughing, light, lively, looking good, merry, mirthful, on cloud nine, overjoyed, peaceful, peppy, perky, playful, pleasant, pleased, sparkling, sunny, thrilled, tickled, tickled pink, up, upbeat, walking on air
•Antonyms: depressed, discouraged, dissatisfied, miserable, morose, pained, sad, sorrowful, unhappy

•Happy is a feeling of joy, pleasure, or good fortune — exactly how you’d feel if you learned that you won the lottery or got accepted into your number one choice of colleges.

•Happy hails from the Middle English word hap, meaning “good luck.” Many of the early European words for happy actually referred to good luck, rather than a feeling of joy. On its own, happy means an enjoyable or satisfied state of being.

I also found this online:

This devotional is based on Kay Warren’s new book, “Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough.”

Finding joy is a challenge for me. I’m not naturally an upbeat person; I’m more of a melancholy. When I talk about joy, I’m not doing so from the perspective of a generally peppy person who never has a bad day. In fact, it’s because of my own inability to live with joy that led me to explore why my experiences didn’t line up with Scripture.

My problem was my definition of joy. I thought joy meant feeling good all the time. That’s impossible! Even for those who are naturally upbeat and optimistic, that’s impossible. We have to start somewhere more realistic — and close to Scripture.

So here’s the definition I’ve come up with from studying Scripture:

Joy is the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright, and the determined choice to praise God in every situation.

You’ll find nothing in that definition about happy feelings, because, as we all know, happiness is fleeting and temporary.

We tend to think that life comes in hills and valleys. In reality, it’s much more like train tracks. Every day of your life, wonderful, good things happen that bring pleasure and contentment and beauty to you. At the exact same time, painful things happen to you or those you love that disappoint you, hurt you, and fill you with sorrow. These two tracks — both joy and sorrow — run parallel to each other every single moment of your life.

That’s why, when you’re in the midst of an amazing experience, you have a nagging realization that it’s not perfect. And while you’re experiencing something painful, there’s the glorious realization that there is still beauty and loveliness to be found. They’re inseparable.

If you look down train tracks into the brightness of the horizon, the tracks become one. You can’t distinguish them as two separate tracks. That’s how it will be for us, too. One day, our parallel tracks of joy and sorrow will merge into one. The day we meet Jesus Christ in person and see the brightness of who he is, it will all come together for us. Then it will all make complete sense.

I like this analogy! It makes a lot of sense to me.

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Maybe it’s just my temperament…after all, God made me to be that 3 year old who could skip happily through the house singing my made-up song of “Life is miserable!”…or maybe it’s my oblivious non-attention to detail that keeps me from seeing every imperfection and flaw…or maybe it’s being raised by parents who modeled gratitude rather than whiny complaining…or maybe it’s because so much of my early childhood was idyllic and happy…or maybe it’s because a friend once encouraged me to look for a blessing every day…or maybe it’s because I’ve never grown up enough to completely lose my childish sense of wonder…or maybe it’s because I need joy and beauty so much, almost as much as I need food and water…but it takes a lot — as in a LOT — for me to remain in a constant state of unhappiness for very long.

Yes, it seems contradictory. After all, I am no stranger to grief or sorrow. I am the same person who once penned reams of poetry with lines like, “melancholy has stolen my heart”, and who described myself as a “child of sorrow” in a never ending gloomy rain. I’ve experienced clinical depression so severe that it made me overcome my extreme aversion to antidepressants. Despair has almost killed me. Literally.

But joy always broke through.

Always.

The darkest of nights has always, eventually, been followed by a morning when joy came. The “eventually” may have taken excruciatingly long. Sometimes it was a somber joy. Sometimes that “determined choice to praise God in every situation”, as Kay Warren describes it, involved some initial teeth-gritting and an amazement that such great sorrow, and such heights and depths of joy, could exist in the same heart and mind in the very same instance.

But maybe it’s not me at all. Because the bottom line is that I can’t praise God for very long — I mean really praise Him rather than mouthing words — without remembering what kind of God He is. I find my perspective changing from “woe is me” to realizing that, even in the most horrific of circumstances, I have reasons for thanksgiving, even if I can’t think of one beyond, “Heaven will be better than this nightmarish horror.”

But then I remember Jesus. And He melts me. And He opens my eyes. Gratitude comes trickling into my spirit as I begin remembering Scripture passages that speak to my pain. It may not happen quickly enough for me, but it is the gratitude that re-orients my thoughts and feelings. Maybe I am just unusually blessed, but it is rare (impossible?) for me to sit in God’s presence for very long without feeling enormously thankful for His extravagant, scandalous grace and generosity towards me.

Eventually more of my feelings follow. There have been valleys in my life, despite the truth of the train track analogy. But, as Corrie ten Boom loved to remind us, there is no pit so deep that Jesus’ love is not deeper still.

Today, incredible as it seems even to me, I thank God for the pits that threatened to consume me, because God’s love won out, every time. Even when I doubted or denied Him, He never gave up. Besides, for every pit there have been mountaintops — a few times, I have felt joy so overwhelming, so extreme, so powerful, so beyond description, that I thought if it lasted any longer with such intensity, my heart would give out and I would die. Seriously.

Because I choose to be grateful, today I choose joy. Today I choose happiness. Today I reach out with trembling, fearful, overly-inhibited, weak and puny little hands towards the abundant life God keeps showering on me. How can I walk with Him, talk with Him, and listen to Him without — once in a while — experiencing a joy that spills over into a happiness that at least borders on giddiness?

A dear friend of mine promised me that, when I first recognized my true freedom in Christ, I would feel almost giddy about it. He was right; I still remember the moment it hit me and I wrote him an email that ended with, “Excuse me while I go out and dance in the streets.”

I know, I know. Happiness should not be our goal. It is a fleeting emotion. In many circumstances, it would be completely inappropriate to feel happy. We should seek holiness, die to self, etc., etc.

But today I choose to celebrate. I won’t dance in the streets, because I’m still too shy and inhibited, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s somehow more spiritual to ignore all of God’s present blessings and put on a serious face just because I’m not in Heaven yet.

Little 3 year old me had it right. Life is miserable. But that’s no reason not to sing and dance at least some of the time — because God is good.

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Note: I don’t know why, but I’ve had to edit this umpteen times. The formatting got scrambled. Entire sentences and paragraphs disappeared. And I kept getting interrupted by life. Very frustrating! I’m no longer feeling quite as celebratory. Haha.