Pre-Written Prayers Are Reusable and Helpful Too

Growing up IFB(Independent Fundamental Baptist) I was taught that the only real prayers were those you prayed on the spot.  It was clearly said that any accidental recordings of prayers weren't able to be prayed again because they could only be prayed once.  Of course the Psalms were never seen as any type of prayer.  The "Lord's Prayer" wasn't a real prayer either; it was just a model of how we were to pray.  The older I grew the more restrictions and rules there were that applied to how to properly pray to God.  I didn't have to use thee's and thou's, but if I did evidently God required grammatical consistency in order to be pleased with my prayer, and I couldn't mix in a 'you' anywhere.

By the time I reached my early 20's I stopped praying.  I was too afraid I'd do it wrong and incur God's wrath for my presumption in prayer.  I would pray for specific requests for people in great need or pain.  Eventually pastors caught on that people prayed for things and weren't praying all the other proper sorts of prayers that were divided correctly into whatever the right way to pray was.  So for a while in my 20's and early 30's I heard more about how wrong it is to use God as only someone to ask things from, but not talk to him in any other way in prayer.  Big push on prayer, not prayer requests.  Once again I altered the way I prayed and only prayed for life or death issues. 

Imagine my surprise when we began going to a different church and I observed men going up to pray from the pulpit with their prayer already written out.  Now I knew that sort of thing happened at Bob Jones University in chapel, but I counted that as a speech requirement for the 'preacher boys' and never considered they were praying for real.  But here this was a real church and they had written prayers?  Baptist love to talk about the slippery slope, but seeing prayers written out and prayed in a meaningful way in public for the first time was a first step in a long theological journey away from fundamentalism.

I still don't pray my own original prayers, except on rare occasions, but I'm learning to pray the prayers that others have written.  Here is one that fits me pretty well right now.

Sustain Me in the Coming Then

O God, empty me of angry judgments,
   and aching disappointments,
         and anxious trying,
and breathe into me
   something like quietness
         and confidence,
that the lion and the lamb in me
   may lie down together
         and be led by a trust
as straightforward as a little child.

Catch my pride and doubt off guard
that, at least for the moment,
I may sense your presence
   and your caring,
and be surprised
   by a sudden joy
        rising in me now
to sustain me in the sudden then.

from Guerrillas of Grace by Ted Loder

A Perfect Easter Sunday...except

Easter Sunday... It's supposed to be a day of hope remembering Christ's resurrection.  In some ways I am participating in Easter, but I feel more like an outside observer this time.  Not belonging, but this time of my own choosing.  I made sure everything ran smoothly this morning and the whole family made it to the sunrise service on time and even a little early and then on to the breakfast at church and then the worship service.  Dinner is in the oven the potatoes are cooking and the gravy is standing by ready to be made at the last minute.  The boys are all down and actually sleeping for naptime.  It's been a perfect day thus far.  After naps then everyone will get their Easter baskets and then we will have our Easter dinner.

Sounds great and it is except...  I dissociated through most of the service which made me rather fuzzy headed afterwards.  Someone asked me if I was sick because it seemed I was walking like I didn't feel well and seemed off.  I thought I was hiding it well.  Evidently not.  I am out of practice in hiding how I feel.  People are used to seeing me fully engaged and not in shut down mode.  She also kept asking and guessing what was wrong until I told her the short version of the story, which was the PTSD is back and I thought I was over it because everything was so different this time.  I also told her about the two local counselors who couldn't handle my "multiple traumas" and one of them has been counseling for 30 years and has PTSD with trauma as a specialty.  Somewhere in the conversation I said a few times, "I'm done."  She asked what I was done with.  I couldn't give her a good answer.  I didn't want to.  Church? was one of her guesses.  I wasn't sure how to answer that question since that is something I've been thinking about.  She and another lady who came back into the conversation a bit later both hugged me and said they would pray for me and some other comforting type statements.

Another conversation in the parking lot with someone else, more hugs and encouragement to not blame myself or carry guilt for considering or deciding to not adopt the boys.  The only people who know at this point in my face to face life are the pastors and elders at church, and at least one of their wives. 

So, it's a perfect Easter Sunday.  We have the pictures to prove it.  I wish I didn't have a different narrative running underneath it all.  The one that says, "This is the one and only Easter you'll have with these boys.  The last holiday.  They will leave with their Easter outfit, but maybe will never want to wear it again because of the association of the last happy holiday with us.  Everyone sees how well they are doing and the improvement in behavior.  No one will understand why I can't do the mom thing, why I can't pull it together, why I have an inability to parent them all, why all of a sudden I can't handle the improved version of these boys or what my problem really is.  God is sovereign but why so much pain?  Am I supposed to tough it out and somehow stop leaning on my older children for help?  The more times a day goes well and I survive it, the more I doubt myself."

Then again, with the almost constant dissociation during church, dizziness, blurry vision and the lingering headache and evidently odd way of walking around afterwards, can that be called a successful day?  I am surviving it, but that's it.  And this day is going so well compared to others!  I just want to sleep it off, but if I dare go to sleep I will easily be out for the next 4-5 hours which would ruin the day for everyone else.  So I inflict upon a few people another rambling blog post chronicling my journey through life. 

My Regression in Healing After BJU's Response to The GRACE Report: What does this mean for our family?

I haven't mentioned on this blog anything about our adoption process or that we have four boys that are placed with us and waiting for us to sign the paperwork.  My little guy just turned four and fits right in the middle of the three younger ones.  They have an older brother with autism who is 11 that we also have with us.

I am so torn up about adopting these boys.  I have spent far too much time trying and not doing so well in being okay enough to do the mom thing.  It works to a point because of my older children, but they aren't the ones doing the adopting.  Its not fair to them or to these four boys or to my little bio guy.  Just last night my husband asked about signing the paperwork, and I stalled.  I can't say yes.  I can't say no.  I say it depends on the day as to whether or not I think we can adopt them, but its been a long time since I had a yes day.  I know it's not just about how I feel, but I don't really know what to do with these things called feelings.  How do they relate to life?  I just know that most days I want out of this adoption process.  I want my little guy to go back to the way he was before they came.  I want his smile and laughter to be his default, not a treat for me to treasure.  I want his dreams to be full of laughter and giggles again and not crying out "NO!" 

It took me almost two years to get back to a fairly stable place after I interviewed with G.R.A.C.E. and now after the official report and then BJU's response to it is out, I find myself almost back to how bad it was right after filling out the questionnaire and then interviewing.  I can't deal with four boys who need me to be okay in order to be the mom they need.  I haven't allowed myself to think about this, so I haven't even written of it until today.  I can't do this.  I can't keep these boys.  We've had them since August 2014.  I don't know whether I'd be ruining their lives more by adopting them or by not adopting them.  And my little guy...What do I tell him?  My older ones who I have woefully neglected during this time, what about them?  

I was doing okay and thought I was healed enough to manage adopting.  It's been something I've wanted to do since I was a child.  I don't know how long it will be before I get back to that good place again.  In some ways I am affected differently, but still badly by BJU's response to the G.R.A.C.E. report.  I need to get stable again, and I can't do that and add in adopting this sibling group.  It's too much.  My life is full of "if only". 

How God is Becoming More Real to Me

How is God real to me?  It sounds like an odd question to ask, maybe *gasp* like something a seeker friendly church would have a little pamphlet on.  I can't help any similarities there may be.  I must remind myself that God cares and look for those ways He shows himself to be real, not just a far off God who doesn't hear.  I can't reconcile my pleading prayers when I was being abused and His apparent deafness, to the teaching that God is present and hears our prayers and loves us.  When I try to think through both things I get trapped in a loop of flashbacks.  It's not a good place to be.

What I can do is to look for God's hands in my life today and then in the more recent past.  If I go back too much farther; I run into problems, big ones like: does God love me, did he love me back then, what about protection, is God really good, how sovereign is he anyway, and God was present but did nothing.  The way I can skip over those type of questions is for me to look at all the evil in the world being done to people of all ages and then remind myself that I'm nothing special to rate some divine protection.  There are Christians being murdered and abused for their faith.  I had it pretty easy in comparison. Somehow I'm not sure this is the way to handle it.  It ends up with me viewing God as a distant and uncaring God who is big into consequences.  So then I'm back to completely ignoring my own past, beyond the last few years, and disregarding today's present persecution of Christians unless I put it into a "suffering for Christ" category.

Today I look for God's caring in my life.  I see it in the meals brought to us by families in our church; in the freshly mowed grass because all of our mowers are broken and my husband now works out of town; in the concern being shown to us as one of our children is suffering from head trauma; texts, phone calls, getting together to just talk; in so many kindnesses big and small; and the fact that I can't disappear from church or blend into the background because I have become a part of this body. All this and so much more are evidences to me that God cares.  I see it through the tangible touch and actions of Christians who are God's arms around me in difficult times, in times of change and in the mundane of everyday life.

Another aspect of God that I see is that of Him working in me to change in a myriad of ways. Something is said repeatedly over a long period of time in many different ways and places until one day I hear it again but now it is accompanied by that uneasy feeling of guilt.  It's a different sort of guilt than the one that goes along with being abused.  It's one that causes you to realize this is talking about me and this is my sin.  To avoid dealing with this sin guilt is not a good thing.  Slowly my eyes and ears are being opened.  I'm sure this is God at work showing me what needs to be confessed and repented of.  Easier said than done, though.

God is becoming more real to me through His church, specifically and mainly the church I'm a member of.  I'm thankful for mp3 players, blogs, facebook posts, email, texting, and twitter.  All this tech provides more ways for me to hear again what God is trying to tell me.  It doesn't sink in the first time around I hear it in a worship service or in counseling.  God is patient with me and I've seen His gentleness towards me in the last two years.  I can be in church now and rarely dissociate anymore, and the triggers are seldom a problem.  A lot has changed in the last six months from what my church experiences were two years ago or one year ago.  May God continue His work.

Can I Tell My Story, Uncensored? Should I?

What is the importance of telling your story?  I mean really telling it, from beginning to end.  The last time I attempted to do that was in the last couple of years and it was only the highlights, if you will, of a life time of smaller hurts and also of ongoing effects of childhood sexual abuse which still affect me today.  The statement that counselor made to me was that any one of these events would be enough to cause PTSD in someone.  For two or three, one hour sessions I briefly ran down the list without too much detail.  From the confident woman I first met, this counselor changed before my eyes into someone who seemed to be afraid to hear the next thing that would come from my mouth.  My trauma was causing her pain in some way.  I didn't understand how she could feel my pain.  All I knew was that she was having serious problems with hearing my bare bones story.  I felt bad to be hurting her, so I didn't go back.  My story remained untold.

Lately I've been googling, trying to find out if telling it in story form is a good thing, necessary or just a nice sounding way of wallowing in the past.  When I think of NOT telling my story as a whole, instead of in disconnected pieces; then a whole host of statements made to me by my abuser start playing in a continuous loop, joined by all the other not-helpful things people("friends", counselors, pastors, police officers and lawyers and toss in one ignorant doctor) have said to me over the years.  I often feel as disconnected as the way in which I've told my story to my pastor/counselor.  In the beginning he told me I didn't have to tell him everything about the actual abuse, so I didn't.  Along the way I disclosed small snapshots of what happened when I was abused.  I tested him at every turn, waiting for the words, "I can't help you. You need to find another counselor."  Instead he keeps on telling me that he's in it for the long haul.  I believe him now.

In spite of a non linear telling of events and staying focused, more on the effects of the abuse in my life today than a upfront factual retelling of the abuse, my pastor/counselor has the basic gist of what happened.  There is a bit of a problem with adequately addressing guilt and shame, since I've only barely brushed on those immensely shaming aspects of the abuse, in all the many hours of counseling over the last 18 months.  I don't know how to go there, or if I should go there.  It's pretty explicit because that's part of the story, and to sanitize what happened so its a little more palatable seems like its minimizing what really happened.  I lived through it.  No one sanitized it for me.  No one dimmed the horror by skipping what I couldn't handle.  Not one person has heard it all.  In order to cushion the blows my words have become to my hearer, I always skip around as I speak of the sexual abuse in counseling.  Past counselors have either been deeply affected to the point that they can't help me or have done other odd things that moved the focus from my abuser like: attempting to convince me it was a different person who abused me; or that my "real" problem was something besides the sexual abuse.  To a point, it has been a necessary cushioning of it for me too, yet I'm also acutely aware of my edits and deliberate minimizing of the abuse in order to talk about it and not harm or scare off another counselor.  There are times I don't say things because I'm sitting there contemplating whether or not bringing up certain aspects of events would be too explicit; and therefore would bring down some sort of rebuke for a gratuitous recounting of things about the abuse or its long term effects that didn't need to be said.

This fear of rejection runs in me so strongly that I can't think reasonably about the chances of such a rebuke occurring.  Technically, rejection of me as a person, and not listening to the details of my story are not the same thing.  In my mind I know this, but the part of me which fear controls can't make that distinction.  Crawling under a rock and face hiding shame dominates my thinking and instinctive self protective behaviour.  I would contaminate another person by going into the shame filled details.  Why wouldn't anyone not look at me with disgust if they knew everything?  It's not like I want to put out all the details, or even any of them, to everyone who knows me.  I just want one person on earth to know everything and not turn away from me.  That hasn't happened yet.  No one yet knows everything.  I don't blame them for not being able to handle hearing it, but still, I had to live it.  Isn't there anyone who can listen to me say everything; from the sound of the stairs, the creaking open of the door, the smell of concrete, the taste of fear and helplessness, to the things I did to provoke him so he would just get it over with?  Or is it just too much to put on someone else?  When it's all put together it is horrendous and explicit in all the details of what he did to me and what I did, felt, saw, and thought at the time.  Is is wrong for me to tell my story, uncensored?

Writing In Order To Do Battle

I can't find the answer to this, but I've been wondering about it for the last several days.  Wondering to the point of almost panicly worrying.  Does PTSD come and go?  For me that has been my experience, but I can't find anyone else saying the same thing.  I've wondered about this for years now, ever since a doctor gave me a word for what was happening to me.  I'm a bit funny with the way I describe things not realizing its something "real" and enough other people have had the same thing going on that they gave it a name.  Just this past year I discovered the word dissociate and what it was, and lo and behold it's what I've been calling "zoning", "being gone somewhere" or "losing time".  I have a great fear of re-entering the battle and once again ending up in those dark places where I lose my way.  I stopped writing when I got to a comfortable place.  God is held at arms length, but I can catch glimpses of Him in church on Sunday and through the overwhelming kindness of my church family.  It's a safe place in my journey, but I'm being nudged along to go farther.

I haven't been writing, anywhere, and that concerns me a bit, in the sense that it should concern me, but it doesn't--not really.  I write when I'm actively dealing with things and I haven't written in months.  I've been asked to make a list of fears and concerns to work through in counselling.
I would say "challenged", but that just sounds too baptist to me.  Of course to me it's not just a list, it's the contents of the boxes I've been dragging around all these years.  In some ways its the monsters in my closets that have come so close to destroying me in the past.  I use the word past in a way that includes not only my personal ancient past, but my recent past too.  Just yesterday I read two bloggers who posted on the topic of writing either directly or indirectly.  One of them sounds like he is fairly close to where I am in my own journey while the other one is in a place that often seems unattainable to me.  Both of them are writers that speak to me in the deep places of my soul.  http://redemptionpictures.com/2014/09/12/when-writing-is-an-act-of-hope/
http://messytheology.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/when-there-are-no-words/

Writing for me has always been cathartic.  I started my first little diary in third grade.  I still had it, up until almost four years ago when our house burned down.  As an adult, reading that first diary I ever kept, brought back memories, good and bad.  Almost all the good things in there involved going to my grandma's house, the food she made, the stories she told and helping her hang out laundry, pick apples and watch her work in her garden.  When I was old enough to not pull plants instead of weeds, I was actually allowed to go in the garden.  Other events I wrote about I remember writing carefully in case my diary was ever stolen and read.  My careful writing at age 9 wasn't careful enough and I got in trouble for what I wrote.  I didn't keep a diary again until 5th grade.  I learned my lesson and wrote carefully and left out the most ugly parts.  Yet years later reading my diary from elementary I again saw those events I so carefully edited in my writing, and the memories invoked were not edited.
The power of the written word is incredible.  And those were just my own childish writings, yet they held the key to my memory, to my own story.

By 7th grade I was writing furiously and unedited, except for the terrible secret I carried that I couldn't write about even in my own journal.  The raw anger flowed from my pen and filled spiral notebooks.  Anger, hurt, and betrayal, along with the pettiness of junior high drama, were my themes. I wrote for me and only me.  I wrote to keep my sanity and a place to siphon off the anger and rage that threatened to tear me apart.  My anger grew as my understanding of what had happened to me grew.  I never gave it a word until 2003.  I couldn't name it.  I was too afraid.  The anger was too powerful and I barely kept it in check through my writing.  By 9th grade I was learning to control the anger through other means and harness it.  I made good use of it and the abuse at home finally stopped, for me.  Still I wrote.  My survival depended upon it.

I wrote all through high school and into college at Bob Jones University, where I again looked for help and thought I found it.  I would have been better off to have kept writing and skipped the counselling.  The times I stopped writing were the times I was being successful at locking down all my boxes and shutting off emotions.  But of course anger was a main component of all the boxes and anger can only be contained for so long.  Thus the cycle of writing while depressed, angry and trying to close back the boxes that another counseling attempt had opened began.  I haven't written anywhere for a few months.  It's been different this time though.  At least one of my monsters has been destroyed and not all emotion has been cut off.  I think I've been experiencing life the way that other people do, to a point.  Real emotions have still been in play.  I've cried and didn't shut it off with anger.  I can't remember doing that before.  It's been incredible to smile and cry and not have to do my usual routine in order to "be normal".  I like it.  The problem is that this is only a plateau and there is a long journey still ahead.  I've been content here for long enough.  It was a nice break from the battle, but it's time to re-engage.  Once again, I write.

Forgiveness Without Coercion: What does it look like?

If anyone would have told me 6 months ago that I would be in contact with a former counselor and forgiveness would be brought up, and the end result would be a good one; I never would have believed it.  For the first time in my life someone asked for my forgiveness and didn't try to avoid responsibility or turn it back on me and make it out to be my fault in any way.  I am still in shock.  I've never experienced anything like this in my life. (There has been one other person, but that happened outside of the IFB/BJU world and the whole process was much simpler.)

Forgive  It's one of those major trigger words that can easily lead to full blown flashbacks.  Except this time it didn't.  I'm not say it wasn't triggering and that I didn't have flashbacks, but because of the other persons response to me the flashbacks didn't become debilitating.  I did lose some time( the name I've used to describe dissociation for 20 years, before I knew there was a name for it) but overall it was just a beautiful demonstration of what the process of forgiveness and reconciliation can look like.  This may not sound like a positive experience, but it was and is.   It was hard work and took the better part of three days.  At the beginning of this renewed contact  I had no inkling where it would go.  At first I received a somewhat generic request for my forgiveness without the other person really comprehending what it was they were asking my forgiveness for.  Back and forth we went until I was concise and specific enough that the only option left would be to dodge it, turn it back on me, or accept responsibility.  Amazingly, the responsibility was accepted and forgiveness still asked for and then granted.  By the end, I actually wanted to forgive and I wasn't guilted into it.

Wow!  If this were to happen for everyone; what a different world we would be in.  Granted, this is only one person and not even my original abuser, but the effect this persons counsel had on me was far reaching and life threatening.  For this person to acknowledge the harm, is such a huge deal for me.  I never thought it possible.  Maybe, just maybe, others will follow suit for me and for others.  And maybe the hurt, and the fear, and the never ending guilt can begin to be assuaged, for all of us.  As to the teacher that abused me in elementary school, I doubt he would know genuine repentance if it ran over him, but that is a topic for another post.

Maybe someday I will be at a point where I can read the Bible without being severely triggered and spiraling into either dissociation or flashbacks.  For now I'm ok with enjoying the good things in life and being thankful to God for the beauty I see.  The GRACE investigation set off a chain of events in my life that is truly life changing.  I have to face the past or be crushed by it. It's a slow road to healing and agonizing at times, but I think I have hope that it is possible.