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You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
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This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
My boys are not that unusual from other kids their age. They love Thomas the Train, they are loud and spontaneous, and they don’t like eating their vegetables. When my wife and I set the table, they look at their plates and declare “I don’t like that.” We respond with, “How do you know, you’ve never had that before.” And they respond with clairvoyance “I already know I don’t like that.” Almost every dinner that same pattern repeats itself: their declaration, our response, their prophetic knowing, and the struggle persists.
The Pixar® Movie Inside Out has a great line that our family often quotes. The green emotion character, Disgust, is in charge of keeping her person, Riley, from being “poisoned both physically and socially.” When a foreign food is offered to her, Disgust takes control and says, “That is not brightly colored, or shaped like a dinosaur… Hold on guys… It’s Broccoli!” and she causes Riley to reject the food. That is JUST like our boys. Something foreign is not to be trusted and they will almost always reject what is being offered.
The same thing is true for most of us on a larger scale. New experiences, relationships, social settings, or responsibilities are great breeding ground for Disgust’s concern to pop up in our hearts. The unknown, the undetermined, and the vastness of possible outcomes can be overwhelming. It doesn’t take much, sometimes just a thought, and BAM! Anxiety is upon us. At the same time we experience Anxiety, we are again presented with all of our different strategies to try to get rid of it. In the previous Blog entries I discussed the two strategies of medicating and running away. We also have another unhelpful strategy: be like my young boys and stand your ground and determine your own fate.
In Adrian Van Kaam book, The Art of Existential Counseling, Van Kaam introduces three categories for experiencing events throughout your day: will-lessness, willfulness, and willingness. My boys are extremely Willful towards events like “dinner time” or “bed time” or anything that cause them to take a break from playing. In their minds they have pre-determined that whatever I may have to offer them cannot possibly be as good as what they are currently playing with. My oldest son’s first Thanksgiving, he could not be convinced that he would like Pumpkin Pie. There was another time I could not convince him that he would like an In-N-Out Burger Milkshake. Logic did not work. Talking through the main ingredients of a Milk Shake did not work. Appealing to our trust-relationship as Father and Son did not work. His expectations controlled his reality, and his unbending will kept him from receiving a real gift that he would have enjoyed tremendously.
I am just like my son. I want to eliminate as many surprises and foreign experiences as possible to avoid the unwelcome feeling of Anxiety. For this reason, when I begin my day I have largely predetermined its outcome. I know the meetings I need to go to, and I have desires for how they will go. I know the people I will talk to, and I know what I need to get from them. When I come home from work I have expectations of my wife and my children and how they will interact with me. When any of these events or people deviate from my expectations, rather than embrace it, I willfully force it fit my small expectations.
When I exchange what is for what I expect, I am no longer living in reality – I’m living in my ego. My children cease to be real people, my wife ceases to be a unique individual, even events are reduced to sitcom. In fact, everything becomes just another extension or projection of my own ego. God, in his limitless and infinite agency is not safe from being replaced by a much smaller projection of what my ego can more easily control. The limit of what can be hijacked by our ego knows no bounds. The reduction of unknowns in order to ultimately reduce anxiety comes at a great cost.
Of all the bad strategies to get rid of Anxiety, I think most people use this one the most. As long as there are possibilities in a day there is potential for anxiety. The danger with this strategy is that it keeps you from trying Pumpkin pie and In-N-Out Burger Milkshakes. It keeps you from enjoying the unexpected and unpredictable. It could open you up to heartache, but it could also open you up to love that you could have never conceived of with your small expectations.
I have to say that out of all the four strategies I use to not deal with anxiety in a healthy way, this fainthearted strategy is the one I use least and am less intimately acquainted with. But when I woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and realized I had a plumbing problem that couldn’t wait for the morning, I quickly adopted this strategy as an effective little way to combat the anxiety that was upon me at once. Fully engaged in this fainthearted escape, I went back to bed to pretend to sleep. Unfortunately, I laid awake unsatisfied thinking about a handful of things: (1) how angry I was that I wasn’t sleeping (2) how actively I was running away from an immediate problem (3) how this was a perfect blog illustration about depressing anxiety (4) and how similar this felt to other childhood experiences I felt growing up which I had long forgotten about. I was not expecting the last thought (it wasn’t a willful act of remembering or anything), and in fact there wasn’t even a distinct memory attached to the remembered feeling at all.
That’s how stored feelings and emotions happen sometimes. In some instances they are attached to a distinct memory and at other times they will come back all on their own if necessary. In some extraordinary circumstances I have experienced physiological manifestations of emotions when I was unable to remember a circumstance and my “feelings” were numb from overuse. In those cases I learned to pay attention to what my mind was trying to alert me to through my body. In those times of prayer, I would start to feel my body overheat, and I would take that as a clue that I was touching on something real and didn’t have the emotional capacity to alert me through normal means like sadness, nostalgia, fear or tears. I had to do the manual work of processing what I was dealing with in prayer instead of what would otherwise be done through the automatic work of existential engagement.
In addition to memories or physiological signs, anxiety is another way for feelings to be brought to our attention. Anxiety is a very helpful vehicle for memory recall, especially emotional memory recall. Time travel is one of the great benefits of anxiety that we miss out on when we do not give it a proper role in our life. Anxiety has the ability to transport you back 20 or 30 years in a millisecond of the subconscious. It has the ability to put you right back in your 1st grade classroom and feel things only a six year old can feel, things that your developed adult reasoning doesn’t allow you to feel anymore. This is God’s gift to you. To go back in time with Him to experience scary, confusing, and even traumatizing events to a child with the safety of an adult-reality and with a forgiven and accepted conscience.
I was never very athletic growing up. I loved playing sports but wasn’t very good at them. I was a much better spectator than participant. Things seemed easier and natural for other kids and I had to work much harder to be just average. I don’t find that to be true anymore. I would consider myself athletic, and now think that I am a better participant than spectator. I’ve always wanted to go back to my Little League days with my developed motor skills of an adult. I’d be so stinking good. I’d be the Babe Ruth of my team. Those 10-year-old fastballs would have nothing on me.
So today in the pitch black of the early hours of the day thinking about my plumbing problems, I laid in my bed feeling like the world just crapped on me again. I didn’t want to deal with what I knew needed to be dealt with. I was presented with feelings of inadequacy, helplessness and irrational young fear. I was trying to depress my anxiety by avoiding it, but God was using this too as an opportunity for greater freedom and relationship with me. He gave me the opportunity re-engage with unresolved childhood emotions, not by myself but together with Him. The plumbing was ancillary, the meaning behind the plumbing was central. There is a way I could have made the plumbing central, but that too would have been an unhealthy way to deal anxiety (I’ll go in to that strategy next Blog Entry). God was with me last night, and He was thinking about how to offer me greater freedom. He presented me with a paralyzing childhood emotional-response that still affects me today into adulthood and asked if I wanted a different result, if I wanted to be a Babe Ruth.
