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Gotta come, yes you do. www.southernchristianwomen.com
at the River City Christian Center in Washington, N. C. Saturday April 17th
Can’t wait to see you there!
This week we are dealing with the death and burial of my 92 year old mother. How appropriate that right here at Easter she would finally be at home with the Lord after such a long life journey. I’m going to be without internet access until next week, but will be back next week and will be posting lots of information for you. God bless and have a most wonderful Passover, Spring Break, and Easter season. See you next week!
I had to take a few weeks off because I didn’t have internet access down on the coast while I was working on my old rental house. But I’m back now and wanted to follow up with my promise to offer a bit of insight on how to tell when you are simply having mood swings related to hormones, stress in your life, or some other temporary problem, or when you have symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Since there is so much good information out there about bipolar disorder I prefer to send you to those sources for a full explanation. You can find the information you need at www.mentalhealth.org.
But in case you want the short version, here are the symptoms that you should discuss with your doctor.
1. A persistent pattern of changes in mood for no apparent reason. The pattern can be over months, days, or even within one day.
2. Extreme irritation, agitation, restlessness, anger, or crying jags not related to events in your life
3. Racing thoughts, continual ideas for new ventures but difficulty completing anything, always chasing the next “big idea” without regard for details or planning
4. Binges of risky sex, periods of intense heightened sexual arousal and emotional awareness, and periods of extreme impulsivity
5. Spending money without regard to consequences, running up credit cards in spending sprees, giving away money to others
6. Periods of deep gloom that mysteriously come and go
7. Suicidal thinking
8. Using alcohol or drugs to “calm you down”
9. Using alcohol or drugs to “numb the pain”
10. Decreased need for sleep, or needing too much sleep
11. Decreased appetite or voracious appetite
Not all of the symptoms of specific to bipolar disorder but can be caused by other medical conditions too. If any of these are causing you difficulty it is best to seek the care of a doctor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DzwMczS9iE
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The last post I talked about freezing in the face of fear and indecision, and how to get unstuck. But there is another side of the issue we need to talk about, and that is coming unstuck so fast and furiously that you hurl yourselves back into instability again. This is called “rebounding.”
Cycles and seasons are a normal part of life. Freezing in the face of grief, loss, and indecision is sometimes simply a dormant season in our life, like the seed experiences in the ground during the cold winter. It may be dark and cold, but in our heart we know we are working things out, fully aware there will be growth again. We may be miserable, but we don’t panic or feel trapped. We know that “this too shall pass…”
But sometimes, especially when our season has been prolonged, or particularly dark, there is a danger that when we come out of it, we move way too fast. Instead of being caught in indecision, we make decisions way too fast–even somewhat impulsively. Instead of procrastination, we meet everything head on, often barreling ahead without thinking enough about the consequences. We overcompensate for our long period of inactivity by doing way too much; taking on too many new projects, and trying to balance too much. Pretty soon we are overwhelmed, and we realize we are in way over our heads. Our lives, finances, relationships, and health become unstable, and pretty soon we’ve triggered another huge mistake, or sabotaged ourselves in unforeseen ways.
This is particularly true in relationships. When we are coming out of a bad one that has gone on way too long our release can send us headlong into risky or inappropriate relationships that are unhealthy for us. I’ve counseled numbers of couples at the end of a divorce, fighting for custody of their children, and their divorces weren’t even final yet. But they were already deeply involved with other people and planning to marry them just as soon as the ink was dry on the divorce decree.
This is classic rebound, and no matter what I said about the statistics of success in situations like that (they are about 80 percent failure) rarely would they listen. So glad to be out of the bad situation, they refused to see the mistakes they were repeating, all over again.
In my case, the danger is more benign. My danger is more in the area of work projects, proposals, and business relationships. I’m getting unstuck, but now I’ve got to watch that I don’t overcommit myself. In my fear that I’ve lost financial ground, I can actually run ahead of God, grab onto the first thing that presents itself, and waste valuable time and energy chasing “possibilibilities” that are only dead end trails.
So, I am trying to be careful here. I need to discern what is being driven by God and what is being driven by fear. Honestly, sometimes God uses our fear to birth new things. That is how writing started for me. When I was falsely accused, neither my husband and I had jobs, and we were broke I turned to writing, never dreaming where that would take me. But during another bad time, I tried without success to turn my skill as a sculptor into a business, and still cringe at the amount of time and money I spent chasing that pipe dream.
For some people, this pattern is present, but it is not extreme. But for others the pattern is so exaggerated it interferes with functioning well in life. We call this pattern of extreme mood and behavior swing Bipolar Disorder.
We will look at that in more depth next week in Part III….
I’m going to make a confession. I’ve been struggling in the last few months–with food, exercise, staying on top of my paperwork, getting housework done–just about everything.
I’ve been going through a lot of change and loss in the last few months. My father’s illness and death was traumatic for me, especially the last few hours in a hands on role of actually helping him die. My mother’s response to her grief has been to vacillate between bittersweet tenderness, and raw grief that is excruciating to watch. Other times she just has huge vacancies in her thought process. I lost my father, and now I’m losing my mother too, although far less dramatically.
There are other losses. My work is changing, and I’m being forced to do some things that bore me just to pay the bills. I’m coming to the end of the Stupid About Men campaign, and though the book is good and helps a lot of women, my publisher crashed and burned right after it was released. Valuable momentum was lost, and that hurt sales.
But even saying that feels silly. I’m so blessed to even have gotten published and having experienced the things that I have. I am so fortunate to have choices, and the ability to earn a living doing what I love, even if it is not quite in the way I imagined.
The most overpowering emotion, I suppose, is fear. I am afraid of what lies ahead with my mother, the economy, and the health of my husband and son, both who have serious conditions.
So in the face of those emotions I tend to freeze. I cannot bring myself to exercise, forget to pay bills, waste valuable time on unimportant projects, procrastinate on the big ones, and crave heavy comfort foods.
Actually, this is a common response. We have been told about “fight or flight” but we don’t talk about the most common response in a crisis–that is to ”freeze.”Disaster experts know that the reason so many people die during earthquakes, fires, and tsunami is that they don’t run, or fight for survival. They freeze, and are lost.
The same reaction happens in the face of bad news, traumatic loss, or unusual fear. Say we get fired, we are told by the doctor we have a serious illness, or our husband asks for a divorce. Our first reaction is shock, denial, and disbelief. In most cases that passes, but many people get stuck; we freeze. A client of mine told me (he’d been diagnosed with a terminal debilitating illness) that he felt “caught like a deer in the headlights”. That’s a perfect description. To a much lesser degree, that is what we all experience when we are faced with situations where we don’t know what to do.
Of course, this affects our relationships too. We get angry easily, are very irritable, moody, emotional, and often we withdraw. We may cope by demanding ever more attention from our men. We gain weight, hate ourselves, and take it out on others.
So how to do we get out of it? Talking with those who will support us helps, and journaling, as I’m doing a bit here. Staying away from people who only feed our indecision, or use our indecision to manipulate us. And then there is scripture, prayer, and reading devotions. Prioritizing, making lists, and eating the elephant of insurmountable tasks “one bite at a time.”
Getting “unstuck” from the ice of indecision and fear is work; hard work. The wisest thing I’ve heard anyone say (I think it was Elizabeth Elliott) is “when you don’t know what to do, praise the Lord.”
So I am praising the Lord. Slowly, I’m getting my mojo back. I’m getting organized in my office, recredentialing myself with insurance carriers, and applying for grants for my nonprofit. I’m letting go of the things that are not working in my life, and focusing on what does. I’m beginning to get excited about what the Lord may be doing, particularly with missions work in El Salvadore and Haiti.
But there is a risk here, and it is common for us overchieving, perfectionist women who are strongwilled. However, you are just going to have to come back later in the week. You’ll find out what I’m talking about in Part II…
Just wanted to make a quick post to tell you I saw an extraordinary movie last night. The Book of Eli, though extremely violent, moved me in a way few movies have in a while.
Eli, played by Denzel Washington, is a quiet yet extremely powerful man directed by God to walk from the east coast to the west carrying the last remaining copy of the King James Bible in existence, where he has been told “things are different.” Everything along the way is dead except a few humans and feral animals: all vegetation is dead, and water is a commodity for which many often die. A tube of ChapStick is like a bar of gold. I will say that the violence is not gory or gratuitous and there is little sensuality.
The faith message is incredibly powerful, without ever using the word “Christian” or any of the jargon we associate with the church at all. In fact, no reference is made to church or to Christ, but the message of the cross is loud and clear.
All I can say is that I will never look at my Holy Bible again ever the same, and actually, I’m thinking of wrapping a copy in a waterproof container and burying it somewhere no one would think to look.
The movie made me realize that if Bibles were to get in the wrong hands and all copies destroyed, or rewritten by those who worship false gods or no god at all, within fifty years our descendants would never even know what it
actually said.
I don’t believe God will let that happen, but it gives one pause to think that, certainly, we should never take the Word for granted. I worry now that so many children aren’t being taught. So, read the Bible to your children, and teach them the power of faith and God’s protection over the soul. With recent rumblings being picked up that Iran is plotting something “to show the world” on Feb. 11th, we all need to remember whom we serve.
I admit it. I’ve got a bit of a bad habit, if you can call it that. I play Free Cell.
Free Cell detresses me and calms my nerves, especially when I’m angry and need to stop my
mind from grinding over things that have happened.
To avoid a true addiction, I limit myself to three games a day, and usually I play no more than one or two. I’m a pretty good player, and have learned a lot from the game. In fact, I’ve learned so much that I never lose. That is because Free Cell is a lot like life, and if you are willing to be persistent you never have to lose. So take it for what it is worth. Here’s tips for winning, both at Free Cell and at life.
1. The more difficult the game, the more I grow as a player.
2. In order to win, you must be willing to undo your moves, go back to where you took the wrong direction, and then make new choices.
3. Sometimes you have to start all over.
4. The sooner you admit you are backed in a corner, the sooner you find the solution.
5. Don’t panic or get discouraged. There is always a solution.
6. The hand you get is random.
7. The King likes to see you win.
8. If you do get discouraged and quit, you lose.
9. Watching the glass ceiling shatter is a fabulous feeling.
1o. Sometimes the victory is only move away
I have a tendency to look for meaning in everything, and most of the time I find it. Hope you enjoy!
I’ve just come through an experience that has taught me a lot about relationships that I think relates to finding the right kind of person to marry.
I couple of years ago I hired a webmaster. Obviously, based on what you see here he is very talented, and from what I hear lately, is landing some really big gigs. I’m glad for him.
But I had to part ways with him. It took me two years to come to this decision, but in the end I had to accept we simply had different ideas about a lot of things. We were incompatible.
It took me a while to understand the problem, which came down to the fact that I outgrew my original dependency upon him. Rather than teaching me how to do much that I could easily have done on my own all along, he preferred to do all the work himself. He needed to earn money from my site. I needed to save money. Neither of us were necessarily wrong; we are just at cross purposes.
Many marriages are like this. At first, because we feel insecure and lacking in confidence we may choose someone who makes us feel protected; who tells us how wonderful we are all the time, and does all the hard stuff for us. But unfortunately, as time goes by and we grow up and learn a few things on our own, we begin to realize we’ve traded off learning and growth for security.
This happened to my mother. Of course, she grew up in an age and time when women were expected to be dependent on men, so I’m not dissin’ my Mom. But my father was very controlling, and over the years my mother deferred to him on all fronts. But now that he is gone, she is devastated, and barely able to function without him at all.
I have a new webmaster now, and already he has taught me how to add my own events (a simple but transformative internet skill) make minor changes, and because of that success I’ve gotten brave enough to add a plug-in all by myself. Now you can share my blog posts with others and put them on your blog too.
This empowers me. I want to learn how to do more. I am excited about using my blog and website to grow my ministry and counseling work more.
This is what a good marriage should feel like. We need to choose mates who will empower us; who understand that fostering our dependence will only kill the relationship in the long run. Find someone who teaches you things, isn’t threatened when you ask questions, and understands that if you grow, so does he or she. See yourself in a partnership, not in a protectorate.
Grow together and I promise you that you won’t grow apart. Come on, blog with me!
Unloved and Feeling Lonely
Over the last year, I’ve had quite a few emails from women of all ages (and some men too) who query me about how to deal with feelings of loneliness and abandonment by God because they’ve not been able to find someone with whom to share their lives. So that is what I want to address here, keeping in mind that everyone’s story is different. You may be divorced, widowed, or never have married at all. But instead of dwelling on why this happened to you (most of you already know deep in your heart) I want to address how better to deal with the reality you find yourself living.
That said; let me say unequivocably, loneliness, for whatever reason, is tough. So don’t think that I don’t understand. Just because I’ve been married for forty years doesn’t mean that I’ve not experienced intense loneliness from time to time; especially when my marriage was in trouble or at times when I felt like an utter failure because of abusive bosses, periods of clinical depression, or after losing a loved one (like my brother’s suicide in 1990).
I will be honest and say that in each of those times I was not close to God. I may have prayed and done things for God, but I didn’t have a relationship with him, because I was angry, depressed, and hurt. I felt he’d allowed terrible things to happen in my life and I was feeling more like an abused orphan instead of a beloved child of God.
But at some point along the way, it hit me that I was creating God in the image of man, instead of the other way around, and attributing to him human character flaws. We confuse God with our earthly parents, and forget that He is spirit, and that spirit is infinite and eternal.
The Bible says that God is unchanging, and that there is “no evil found in him.” He is incapable of being unjust and unloving, and cannot violate his own nature. If you only understand that one Truth in your entire life, that has to be the foundational one. Without that knowledge and basic understanding, then you will be subject to every ill wind that life sends to try to knock you down, including loneliness. Every time something bad happens you’ll think God has forgotten you.
But you must also understand that God’s greatest concern for us is not our temporal happiness here on earth–it is our spiritual growth and relationship with him for eternity. That is the second most important attribute of our relationship with him that we must accept. God uses unhappiness and loneliness to bring us closer to him so we can become the person he wants us to be. That may seem cruel, but in the larger perspective, it is the highest form of love. Ask any parent who has had to withhold something from a child out of love.
That may seem to conflict with that scripture about God wanting to give us our “heart’s desires.” We just don’t understand that our desires are supposed to line up with his desires. I find it terribly easy to forget to ask God what he desires, especially if I don’t want to hear his answer. My experience is that when I do, he either fulfills them, or I find out I didn’t desire some things quite as much as I thought I did.
If you’ve not found someone to love then it probably boils down to one of the following reasons:
1. There is some emotional block in your life you have not addressed and this block would prevent you from having a healthy relationship even if you found someone.
2. There may be something you are supposed to do with your life that hasn’t been birthed yet, and you are resisting that leading.
3. You don’t really want a relationship as much as you think, or you are afraid. If that is the case, then these issues might sabotage the health of a potential long-term commitment.
4. You are idealizing love and romance, and when you think of them rarely consider if you have the strength and courage to deal with the loss that often attends marriage and having children. That is the “happily-ever-after” thinking that I see in many women these days–largely a myth perpetuated by romance novels, books, and movies.
5. You are waiting for a man to give you a life instead of trying to find a life of your own. Get on with your life and I have a feeling a man is going to show up just when you least expect it.
Trapped in the Magic Mirror is available in PDF from my website…I strongly suggest you buy it as it will help you…and the price is being reduced to $9.99 for my bloggers. Just send me an email and I’ll make arrangements for the price reduction and email you the ebook. One of the “five fatal flaws” identified in that book is equating the love of another human with the love of God, and struggling with feeling unloveable in general because of unrequited love in our human relationships
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