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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
If you are just coming to my diary for the first time, please read my introductory entry, where I share some background that is important if you plan to follow this diary regularly.
Please also visit my music page, where you can hear samples from my debut CD, I Believe, which features songs written based on experiences shared in this journal.
There is a difference between taking responsibility for our feelings and taking blame for them. Taking responsibility doesn't mean I have to stuff them up inside. It just means I have total confidence in telling someone, "I was hurt when this happened," even if it was something the other person did or said. And when I can take responsibility like that, I don't have to expect the other person to take the statement back or make up for the pain. I just have allowed myself the freedom to feel the feelings instead of trying to cover them or push them away because feeling them is "wrong". And only then can I reach a point of being able to work through or let God heal those issues.
Something has happened. I do not understand how, but I finally entered once again into that place of trust. There is a concept that I want to put into words but do not have the words for. I have known that I needed to surrender my will, to trust God with my pain and needs. But I have been locked in a prison of some kind of misunderstanding. Too often other people have spoken words of condemnation to me because of what they perceived as my failure to trust God. Too often, I believed they were correct. Their spiritual logic seemed to make sense. They quoted Scripture. They said they were Christians. They even claimed to believe all the right things. But believing their logic caused me to spend years condemning myself and feeling as though I needed to take the blame for all the problems in my life. This went right down to my inability to trust my friends.
One of the things I have been sorting through for the past year or two is a repeated cycle of attachment problems. I tend to develop deep relationships very quickly. I am a thinker, a dreamer. I am also very social. I attach to others who are deep thinkers and who also are social--and often they are other troubled individuals. In these friendships, there is potential for much healthy caring for one another. Often, however, there is also potential for pathological caring for one another. When the friendships take this turn, they generally end if one party is in fair emotional health and the other is not. But if both parties are very troubled, the friendship can develop into something very unhealthy. I've heard it called enmeshment. I've heard it called codependency.
This is the pattern of friendships I have been developing for some time. Only within the last year have I made an effort to learn to develop healthy friendships. It has been a strong and often successful effort, but the fears that promote unhealthy attachments still run very high sometimes.
It was these fears which led me into a particular discussion with a friend last night, and it was that discussion which pushed me through the door to the place where I could give my needs for companionship to Christ. We were discussing an incident which had triggered my fears of abandonment. The incident involved something she had done which she had every right to do and had needed desperately to do. I was very happy, but my happiness was overshadowed by an intense fear that my friendship would cease to be of value to her.
"That's my issue, not yours," I said when I realized that my confession was causing her to feel guilt. "When I'm free to feel it, then I'm also free to let it go."
When I made that statement, I felt as if someone had flung open the prison doors inside my heart. This was the key: allowing myself to feel the feelings that needed to be confessed! I had been spending my days trying to make the feelings go away on my own because I knew how wrong and immature they were. But how can I trust Christ to heal what I am trying to heal on my own? It isn't possible!
Immediately, the fear and hurt were stripped from me. I cannot say that they won't return, but I feel as if I've made a huge step in the right direction and am free to move on.
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