I have been sharing several of my Celebrate Recovery testimonies lately. But before I started this 12-Step program, I went to see a counselor. Now, I have been to counselors before for various reasons. Some of them with great success. Some of them were mediocre experiences, maybe even pointless. This time, it changed my life! I’ll share his contact info at the end of this post for anyone who is interested but first I want to tell you about my experience.
The Experience
Have you ever heard the song Turn, Turn, Turn by the Byrds? The lyrics to the song are actually a good chunk of Ecclesiastes 3. The verses tell us that there is a time and a season for everything under heaven. Other work that I could have been doing on my own could have led me to this exact junction- where it was the right time for me to finally ‘get it’. Or perhaps this guy had superpowers. I believe that it was a little of both.
Terry, my counselor, happens to be an Anglican priest. (Now don’t check out because there is a religious affiliation or because his affiliation is different than yours.) He will discuss this with you at the very beginning of the session. You can choose how much or how little of this you want in your therapy. I, of course, wanted the whole shebang.
During the sessions, he uses a whiteboard to draw out a table. Then he explains how you and I don’t do anything unless we ‘feel’ like it. Your action is tied to an emotion. That emotion is first tied to a thought. Our thoughts are so ‘fast and furious’ that they happen in NANO seconds. So we don’t even realize that we’re thinking them. The next thing we know we’re down some bunny trail in our head… and getting worked up.
He’ll give you a formula to help you catch yourself. (And it will take a while for you to get in a good practice of using it. I certainly haven’t mastered it.)
THEN he starts working with your beliefs.
Everything that you and I think is first tied to our belief system. For a lot of us (probably all of us), we’re built on a ‘limiting’ belief system. The fear of failure, rejection, punishment, and shame. Then he talks you through the opposite of those beliefs in order of their contrasting partner: justification, reconciliation, propitiation, and redemption.
All of this is in the table too and in each session, you’ll pick back up right where you left off in the last session. He takes good notes and redraws the table every time. (You should take a notebook in case you want to take notes too.)
Now you’re probably like, how the heck is that going to help me? But LET ME TELL YOU…. He will blow your mind. Especially if you come in with some examples of ‘crap gone wrong’ in your day-to-day. He will show you how that’s tied to your faulty belief system.
I can’t remember every example that we worked through. There were big ones. There were little ones. But it got to a point where I couldn’t wait to tell him about some issue that I was having so he could show me what the heck was off in the scenario. And I’m kind of a mess so there is always good content to use. Haha.
Anyway, EVERY single time, it was fear of failure and I never saw it in the ‘heat of the moment’. In fact, one of the few scenarios that I do remember from our sessions involved my daughter, a hockey cleat, and a fit between both of us.
The Scenario/Example
Every time we left hockey practice, I would make Sophie put all of her gear back in her bag. I was kind of crazy about making her put it away before we ever left the field because if she carries it to the car, and drops or forgets something, I won’t notice. My mind will have moved on to the next ‘to do’ before ever leaving the field. So, for my sanity. I need to know that it’s where it’s supposed to be because she’s still trying to get a handle on keeping track of stuff too.
Anyway, so all items SHOULD have been in the bag before the next game day. I watched her put them in there. Then game day comes along. I tell her, Hey Soph, we have to leave in an hour. Please go into your room and get dressed. Double check your bag to make sure it’s all in there. (This sounds neurotic and sometimes it is. But sometimes they also pull everything out and lose it, during play, just for funsies, or to test my sanity. I dunno.)
Sophie disappears for a while. Then returns. She assures me that she has it all together. She’s wearing the uniform. It’s a positive sign. She runs out the door to play with her friends. 30 minutes later she comes in and I notice that she’s not wearing cleats. She assures me that she has them but she doesn’t want to wear them because they are playing on the trampoline. I’m hesitant to accept this but she’s already out the door again before I decide.
Five minutes before walking out the door. I tell Sophie to send her friends home and to go put her cleats on. After the friends leave, she disappears down the hallway to her room. Then hysterically comes back ‘I can’t find one of my cleats! I SWEAR I just had it, momma.’
(See what I mean…?)
Now, I’m still growing in my patience area. I try not to be a control freak and a helicopter mother but dang it I have no idea how to balance this ‘let you do it, but also make sure that it gets done…’ They’re kind of a contradiction. Haha
I’m irritated now. I kind of want her to know it. She did have opportunities to get it together.
We’re just going to gloss over how many opportunities God gives me to do the same.
She completely shuts down in the hallway, crying like the world is ending. Meanwhile, I am swiftly overturning the universe in her room looking for a NEON YELLOW cleat that should be on the surface somewhere if we really ‘just had it’. –And I hate being late.
I find the cleat.
Would you like to know where it was???? I know you do…
It was under her bed.
But not just under her bed. It was all the way back, by a wall, behind a village of trolls and protected by the frontline of clothes and stuffed animals or something. I mean really, I have no idea how the heck it got there. The trolls weren’t there so I couldn’t ask them. I have no idea why they would take her cleat and put it there in the first place. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do. Especially before a game…
But we’re both in an emotional tizzy now because I cannot figure out how to get my kids (or life) together without being responsible for it all…
Next session- I CAN’T WAIT to tell Terry about the scenario. “–What the heck just happened here??? This happens all of the time. Can you please help me???”
He smirks a little and says ‘Sure. That’s fear of failure.’
I’m confused: ‘Wait- ‘What? For me or for her?’
Terry: ‘You.’
Me: How’s that failure for me over her cleat. I could care less about cleats. That was on her. It was hers and she couldn’t find it? Just stating the obvious.
He goes onto say that he would have taken her barefoot to the game. And before I can say it, he adds [paraphrased of course] that we know she wouldn’t be able to play. She’d have to sit on the sidelines. This, of course, would ‘let the team down’ and since I am her mother, I should have her ‘more together’. So her ‘not being ready’, is a reflection of my not doing what I think I ought to be doing right… ahem, failure on my part.
**poof** mind blown.
Then he says that if I let her go without the cleat. We would have been on time. AND she’d either be so embarrassed about not having her cleat, or disappointed about not getting to play, (or both) that she’d be sure to have it next time, or she’d get the hang of it pretty soon.
I am speechless, while slightly relieved AND annoyed.
This happens over and over again in my sessions. (You can trust that we talked about more than hockey.)
Each time, he draws on the board. We track it back to one of those ‘nanosecond thoughts’ that was connected to a belief. –And because that thought, led to a feeling, I reacted…’ grrrr.
But I also learned that some things that I thought were failures on my part, were actually just natural consequences or results of other things that may not have been my responsibility or sole responsibility in the first place.
RELIEF like I have never felt before washes over me.
Then another wave of anger about how much I torture myself over things that may not even be my fault.
Heck, he even told me that I knew more scripture than a lot of the people that he counseled and that we could go deeper than some other sessions but that I didn’t ‘use it right’. **Slap in the face** It turns out that even though I am a pretty spiritual person, I am also a rule follower which makes me a little legalistic in a few areas. Even though, I try so hard not to be…
Now, switching gears for a minute
I shared a post recently about how our beliefs can become masks. And boy are they! They are also like filters. Our belief system colors everything that we see, hear, think, feel and touch.
Everything gets processed through that filter. –The mask of how we see the situation.
Just to be more specific, it filters the way that we interpret conversations and dialogue in relationships like feedback. It filters how we decide what someone means with their actions or intentions. It even translates what we take in and interpret from sermons, scripture, and the internal voices that we listen too.
Our masks/filters can have a lot of blind spots/blockages too.
As a friend recently said, you can’t get away from yourself, and it’s true. Your belief system is with you everywhere you go. So, if your belief system has a problem or glitch in it; then when you’re trying to come up with a solution to something, your original problem [belief system] is going to be in it. It can throw the whole calculation off. -That kind of ‘equating’ will be in everything that you do, everywhere you go. (Not just hockey cleats.)
Shift again
Now I’ve only been chewing on this next ‘aha’ for about a week. So, hopefully, God can put the same punch behind it when you get to it.
If a faulty belief system can make you doubt yourself, God, or God in you. Then when we face situations, we can allow those events to mold or define us. Then we’re giving other events and people more power to influence our life, instead of us learning from and becoming the influencers ourselves. -You know, using what we’re born with [and honing in on] our heart, our instincts, intuition, and faith.
[The punch is coming, tune in]
This is especially important to note when it comes to a negative event. If we let a negative event define us (or cause us to shrink back); is it possible that we’re shaping ourselves to fit perfectly (or even better) with more of those kinds of events?
Could it be that our vessel becomes an easier device for capturing those kinds of things…Gah!
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Um, God didn’t make us for THAT!
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Then Romans 12:2 hit me. ‘Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
I think it’s fair to say that most of us take ‘conforming to the world’ to mean ‘do not be like the ungodly and/or to let our fleshly desires run our lives’.
But from another angle wouldn’t backing down because we’re afraid of what people think, or because we don’t want to hurt feelings, also be conforming to the world?
Wouldn’t letting insecurity (I can’t do) or even our pride (I deserve this) be letting the ego run our course? And wouldn’t that also be like conforming to the flesh in another way, instead of leading with the divine light within?
The other part of that verse says to renew your mind. Since our beliefs and thoughts happen in nanoseconds, we need to be on point about renewing it as well. So this is not just a daily thing but it could be a minute by minute thing. –And your emotions could be a spectacular queue that you haven’t checked yourself in a little while. –Ahem, or checked that filter and cleaned the goop out. At the end of this post, I will include some things that have really helped me renew my mind in the last few months. They’re pretty stinking amazing when I remember to put them into practice.
For now, let’s wrap this up.
I don’t know what, if any, part of this resonates with you but we all have some sort of issue that we’re working on. We all have something off in our belief system too. (I know that I still do even with this new revelation.) This post isn’t just about personal limiting beliefs. Sure, you may already have a set of beliefs about how much you can handle or what you think the solution is. But it’s also about our limiting beliefs regarding others. You may have beliefs about who God is or is not, or how you expect him to handle things. You probably also have beliefs about what counseling can or can’t do.
It’s also true that Counseling, a 12-step program, or even a savior won’t fix all of your problems in one fair sweep. In fact, many of our issues get a little messier, at least at first. –Because we start unpacking things and have to get a little dirty. But it has to start somewhere….
Maybe like the Byrd song, your time is now.
And getting to the bottom of something…. Despite the help or mess that it took to get there, isn’t that a reason to celebrate?
I’m celebrating with you. You can do it! Here’s information about my counselor and also about a Celebrate Recovery Step Study Program that you can still join for a limited time.
Insight Neurofeedback and Counseling
Terry Troyer
354 McLaws Circle, Suite 3
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Williamsburg, VA 23185
757-345-5802
Celebrate Recovery Step Study
Taking place at Northside Church
Women’s class – Sunday nights at 5:00pm
Men’s class – Tuesday nights at 6:30pm
1300 George Washington Memorial Highway,
Yorktown, VA 23693
757.595.5890
As for those ways to renew your mind, print out the following questions or take a picture/screen shot of them in your phone. The next time you’re in the heat of a moment, run through the list. (I am trying to do the same. Remember, it’s a practice.)
- Ask yourself if it’s true? Do you know for certain that the thing you’re ruminating over is true? A lot of times we make assumptions, even judgments, about the situation, about others, and about ourselves. If it’s not a fact, then it may not be true at all. There is no reason to waste time on something that isn’t even real. If you’re getting wound up, stop and ask yourself if it’s true. (That’s part of that calculation from Terry!)
- Are you in the now? The following quote comes from the book ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle and it’s a rich one. “All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.” The next time you’re all worked up also ask yourself if you’re in the present moment or are you going back to the past or leaping into the future. If you can just focus on and be in the moment of what you’re doing now, that helps a lot. It also makes life more enjoyable.
- Are you judging it? When something negative does happen, even if it’s a result of your actions, don’t beat yourself up for it. It’s now in the past. Judging yourself, others or an event is a sin but it often takes you down that ruminating path again. Ask what you can learn from it, then figure out how to apply it. (That comes from a different book called ‘Change Your Questions, Change Your Life’ by Marilee Adams)
- Slow your life down. Part of the problem is that we’re too darn busy. (Kind of like leaving the hockey field with my daughter and I’m ‘in the future’ thinking about the next to do.) Sometimes life offers no spare time. But more times than not it does. We’re the ones creating such busy schedules. It takes just as much effort to clear it. It has been much easier for me to ‘check myself’ when I am not in a rush to something else. Which means that it also helps me not react because there’s time to process or take a break when I need to.
- Prayer and Meditation. There aren’t enough things that I could say here. Whether it’s meditation on scripture or meditation by stillness, there are benefits to both. –But that’s a whole separate post. Prayer is also one of those things that should never be a last resort. At least for me, it’s the first place to start.
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