The Avoidance Of Pain

"For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!'" Rm 8:15

The last time I blogged was back in October. There's a reason for that.

If you know me, you know that I am a woman of struggle. I've always been someone to actively engage in bettering myself, in introspection, in trying to get the best out of life. I feel a lot, but I had never let it get the best of me.

To get really personal, really quickly, around Christmas time last year, my feelings finally did get the best of me. I got slammed with the biggest onslaught of anxiety I've ever experienced in my entire life. A kind that stuck around for weeks--complete with a constant, gnawing stomachache, feeling like I was in a fog, detached from myself and from others, memory loss, the inability to concentrate and generally just feeling like I was stuck in a bad dream. It felt like I had been transported to a kind of hell. If you've ever experienced anxiety, you know it literally feels like you've been sucked out of the present and plopped down into a wasteland of swirling fear and dread that you feel like you have zero control over. I never saw it coming. It just happened, without my permission; it was entirely out of my control. This was extremely hard for me to accept, as I spent every day trying to numb the fear, squelch the thoughts and relieve the pain. I tried everything to get unstuck--you name it, i tried it. Because that's how I'm wired--I have a need to restore, to fix, to make things well again. With anxiety, I couldn't; I was stuck, and I had exhausted every attempt at getting better.

It's been months now since that happened and the reality is, I still carry this anxiety with me every day. It's not nearly as intense--but behind every single thing I do, anxiety is nagging at my heels, screaming at me worst case scenarios, and reasons to be afraid. But thank God that He has been speaking to me amidst the chaos of my emotions and thoughts. From His Word, as well as from wisdom from counselors, authors and friends who know much more about anxiety than I do, there have been a few truths that have stuck out to me and kept me afloat in this process.

1. The avoidance of pain will make things worse. 
This is a truth I've heard before, but never have I been forced to apply it to my life more than in this season. I have always thought that I really do have control over every feeling and thought that I have. When feelings and thoughts come up that I don't like, I frantically fix them--troubling thoughts, worries, unpleasant feelings--I get rid of them. I avoid feeling "bad". My anxiety grew out of control because I continually shoved down all of my "bad" feelings, which made them silently grow into monsters. When they finally reared their ugly heads, I was so used to repressing it all that I was jarred and shocked that I even had the capacity to hold so much crippling fear inside of me.

 "It is better to go to the house of mourning

than to go to the house of feasting,

for this is the end of all mankind,

and the living will lay it to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter

for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, 

but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." 

Ecclesiastes 7:4

2. If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.
We've all heard this one before. And it packs a punch when you're faced with a struggle you've carried your entire life. What have I always done? Avoided. Repressed. Fixed. A change in my thinking and my actions needed to take place, or I would continue in the same patterns.

"I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Romans 12:1-2

3. Chasing "feeling good" will keep you stuck.
Anxiety does not feel good--in fact, it is highly unpleasant. So are other things in life--choosing to love someone you don't like, choosing to serve, eating well when you want to eat like crap...basically doing anything that requires you to make a conscious action that is the antithesis of what you are currently feeling. Living my entire life to maintain a sense of "feeling good" really backed me into a corner that blocked out anything in my life that made me "feel bad". And I am now seeing that those things that "make me feel bad" are a lot of the time things that I truly need in order to change and grow--to get unstuck.

  

"The discerning sets his face toward wisdom,

but the eyes of a fool are on the ends of the earth." 

Proverbs 17:24

Since my anxiety set in, I have been actively trying to apply these truths to my day-to-day, to transform my patterns of thinking that have, over the years, caused me to operate in a very small framework of thinking. I feel as if I'm at a crossroads every day. Do I choose the easy path of feeling good, or do I choose the difficult path of getting better? Every day is different--I don't always make the best choices. But my choices are adding up to my future, and that is a scary truth that always jumpstarts me into action. I create my own destiny and future. I'm not alone--God is with me, ever nudging and whispering, helping me to make the best choices. But my life is in my own hands. God is not absent from my life, even though pain is highly present. God is taking me down a new path, one of painful growth and restoration. And this time, I'm not just talking about it--I'm actually doing it.