My stomach doesn't know peace yet. I thought my heart did when I lay myself in bed.
I haven't been sleeping well since a conflict with a girlfriend. I talk to her tomorrow (oops, today - since it's 4:10 am now). My stomach awakened me at 3 a.m.
Sarah Groves sings about being truly alive. I love that song, but dang is it hard!
In my last counseling appointment we asked God to show me what early memories were associated with the intensity of hurt I was feeling with this girlfriend. An image came that has often come came again.
It was me kneeling be my bedside as a child, crying, knowing soon my mother would come and say, "Stop crying or I'll give you something else to cry about!"
I learned not to feel. I disassociated because the feelings were to painful and there was little comfort to be had at home after I was two years old.
When I last met with my counselor two weeks ago, I renounced the decision I made as a child to disassociate. After that images came of me at two and being six, but they were just outlines, two dimensional figures where I couldn't see my eyes, hands or nose. I was lying flat on the ground.Those two figures lay in a pond, head to head, as if dead. One small, one larger.
Gross. That's what I was as a child, dead inside. Then I saw those figures getting up and a series of such outline figures consolidating into each other.
I cried buckets then and the next day. I did meet Jesus there in the counselor's office. I sat on his lap and then He played with me. He let me slide down his knee and hide under his white long garment. I felt happy and safe, but the counseling time ended too soon. Another person had to have there turn and I wasn't ready to leave yet.
When I awakened the morning after meeting the counselor, I felt despair. I wanted to die. Fortunately I could go back to that image of being with Jesus and find some hope there.
Don't get me wrong, I don't often feel like I want to die - in fact, that may have been the first time ever that I felt that feeling. Perhaps it had been there all along, bottled up, pushed under. And the despair did go away. But I write it because it shows the powerful feelings locked up inside that came bursting out with those prayers to renounce the vow to disassociate.
I don't often want to go to those hidden, deep places of my heart and mind. In fact, last week I was baking a cake when the counselor called to say, "I thought we had an appointment." I wanted to be there, but some part of me didn't want to be there I think.
I go again tomorrow. For you praying types, please pray. Purity is hard work.
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