Addiction- A perfectly normal response to unhealed, unacknowledged, unsupported, long-term, ongoing trauma.
Trauma is an experience that overwhelms our capacity to process and integrate what is happening.
Shame is confirmation of emotional and spiritual unwellness. I know of no other thing which will so swiftly turn a person to unkindness, dishonesty, and fraud: desperate to do and say anything to offload or escape the shame of feeling less than--to deny the unbearable sense of unworthiness. Over the weekend, at a wrestling match with peers, my younger son said something diminishing about his brother to their group. The comment was 100% intended to make big brother feel small and…
This past Sunday, rather than attending the regular service, I sat in on the Middle School Group of girls at a new church, with a larger Youth Program than the church which we've been attending. The girls were precious: wholesome, courageous, and vulnerable, as they shared about belonging, and not belonging. Their innocence was grand and it literally made me weep. I cried for myself and for my boys and for all people whose innocence was neither protected nor prioritized…
Natural consequences are outcomes that happen as a result of behavior, which are not planned or controlled. For example, if a student cuts in front of another student in line, the natural consequence may be that the other child won't play with the “cutter” at recess. If the student who was cut in line, decides to harm the cutter- to get revenge: That is not a natural consequence, that is retaliation. I know this seems basic--- but there are literally…
Discovering that there is a name for this disease of perceptions and relationships, was the beginning of my healing. Every meeting offers the gift of hearing and sharing about matters, which once defied articulation and remained off limits for discussion. Finally!! No longer alone, ashamed, guilty, terrified. I began to heal. In each meeting we are reminded that we don't cause it and cannot cure it. We slowly let go of the painful myth which insists that we imagine, cause,…
