Sit in it

Several years ago, I had a sharp, recurring pain in my knee. Turns out I had some bone in my joint scraping the back of my kneecap. It was excruciating. When the pain in my knee would hit, my body would simultaneously do whatever it took to remove the pain. Call it a "knee jerk" reaction. Kind of like sticking your hand on a hot surface. You don't have to think about it. No one has to tell you. You just jerk your hand off that burning spot as a reflex. An unplanned response. Not pre-meditated, just automatic. My knee was like that. My body had an automatic response - when the bone hit bone, my knee would give out. In an attempt to relieve the pain as quickly as possible, the muscles, ligaments and joint in question would stage a coup on my brain and quit doing their job. "Release pressure to knee" was the message relayed along the front line of the rebelling body parts. "Do not follow through on the brain order to sit. Do not maintain standard procedure of muscle control in legs. All systems shut down. At all costs, stop this pain." More than once I crashed onto the chair, or toilet, onto which I had been lowering myself. I was concerned that my knee was truly giving out and that there was something anatomically wrong. The doctor explained that, other than the bone problem - which was remedied with some physical therapy - I did not have a knee weakness. It was psychological. It was my body's way of avoiding pain.

Along similar lines, I realize I have developed certain life-long habits to protect my right ankle. If you've been reading this blog long you know that I've had a weak ankle since I was a freshman in high school. (which, by the way, was in 1986!) You also know that God has done a healing in that ankle and it is stable and strong. In the year since my healing, I have noticed some habits I developed without really thinking of it. For example, I don't buy skinny heel shoes, because they're too tipsy. I hesitate to walk on severely bumpy surfaces, because their unpredictable slopes can be an ankle twister. When stepping down from a high place, I step left foot first, so the pressure is born on the stronger foot. Likewise, when walking on a steep slope, I always keep my left foot down hill. These habits are unconscious. Unnoticed. Unplanned. I did not decide to live this way, with a built-in protection for one body part that puts uneven stress on other body parts (hips, left foot, etc. . . ) I simply protected my weakness. I built structures around certain life activities in order to protect myself from repeated pain and injury.

I think the same can be said of me, and us, emotionally. Stay with me here. We all have emotional injuries: moments we haven't thought of for years, but which hurt none-the-less. Some of these are obvious - broken marriage, loss of job, accusation - and some are less obvious - a subtle shift in a friend's attitude, a childhood rejection buried for years, a dream surrendered, or even shattered. . . I'm not sure what it is for you, but I'm discovering what it is for me.

In the pain of our emotional injuries, we have some unplanned, not pre-meditated, knee jerk, "At all costs, stop this pain!!" self-protection responses. Something gives out. We withdraw from a relationship and pull our heart deeper into ourselves. We vow, "I'll never make the mistake of trusting so-and-so, or such-and-such, again." We build structures of self-protection around certain life activities and situations in order to protect ourselves from repeated pain and injury. These walls, or fortresses, can be invisible obstacles in the deepest part of our being. So we find, in our current relationships, that there are these odd places where we get stuck. They make no sense. The people in our lives now are trustworthy, kind, loving, protecting. . . yet we overreact in certain situations. We get angry. Or we withdraw. Or we become judgmental, impatient, critical, negative, insecure, depressed. . . We can objectively look at the situation and see that it does not merit the depth of anguish we feel, but we cannot make sense of it. OR we don't feel a depth of anguish, we are curiously removed from the situation. We know it should impact us somehow differently, but there seems to be an impenetrable wall separating us from our emotions.

How does this happen? What has happened? Here is my hypothesis: Like an acute pain, we have learned to jerk away from emotional pain. When we start to sense the inevitable progression of emotions, we turn off before we get too close to the pain. Various situations can trigger old pain, and we revert into default, self-protection settings. We are so good at self-protection that we can turn on a dime - divert the emotional traffic in contorted detours - and the amazing thing is that these detours can make sense to us, or be undetected by us, because it's all part of the knee jerk reaction that says, "At all costs, avoid this pain." In other words, "I've been there before and I'm not ever going back."

And like a recurring injury, we build habits into our lives that help keep us from coming close to that kind of pain again. We walk a different way. We stiffen our back at the right time. We close our ears and minds to certain conversations. We avoid certain people and situations. Perhaps we harden our heart during worship because we know if we are vulnerable, it will open a floodgate. Perhaps we keep ourselves busy because if we don't have time to examine our hearts, we won't have to face the pain. Perhaps we spend our days critiquing others, being quick to see their weaknesses and failures, because to look at our own is too painful.

The reason I'm writing about all this is because I've discovered a hidden pain in my life. I mentioned last week that my weaknesses are showing, and that I've been struggling. One of the emerging truths is that, while I have finally created space in my life by taking control of my schedule, I do not know how to use that time and space for true rest. I divert to the internet, or iPod games, or a good book, or. . . rather than sit still. I've suspected for months that there must be something I'm hiding from, if I so astutely avoid personal introspection. I can do spiritual introspection. I can do Bible Study. But to simply be still, doing nothing - leaves too much room for painful past experiences to percolate to the surface. The funny thing was, I had no idea what it was I might be hiding from. I'm well aware that my life has been far from painless. I have no delusions of perfection. In fact, I have several areas that have already endured serious soul-searching. However, I could not, for the life of me, begin to sort out what the root of this lack of rest might be.

This weekend God began to expose a piece of it. Just the hem of the garment, I suspect. Silly as it may sound, much of it goes back to my grade school years. Even high school and college. A recurring thread of "Jennifer, you're not cool enough to be my friend." The not-so-secret crush who asked me to "Go with him" and was eagerly accepted, only to declare it a joke and reveal the hidden presence of several of my "friends" - who ran off laughing. The "best friend" of one month who declared, "I thought you were the one to be friends with to be cool, but I was wrong." The roommate who moved in expecting we were a social hub, only to find it fairly boring and move out, in search of a living situation more to her liking. Small things with big emotional impact. I found myself weeping over memories of loss and rejection. Yet why would even this have an impact in my life now. I have friends, a wonderful husband, lovely children, success on several levels. Why now? Why this way? And how in the world is this related to my inability to find rest?

Because I'm hiding. I'm hiding the deepest part of me from myself, and others, because it's too hard to have my true heart rejected. It's terribly painful to be told over and over again, in various dialects, "You're not enough." It's terribly painful to wear your heart on your sleeve, an eager friend, and come up short over and over again. As this began to come clear, I asked God, "So now what? I see the pain. I believe it's a piece of the puzzle. What do I do with it? How do I get over it, be healed, and be unstuck?" God lovingly, gently said to my soul, "You sit in it. You sit with the pain until you can see it clearly." In essence, He was saying, "You stay in this place until you can feel it fully. You resist the knee jerk reaction to withdraw from pain, and you stay long enough to discover the walls you've put up in order protect yourself."

For the walls erected to protect my heart, also keep out life and light, and God cannot touch and heal what is in the dark. When it is brought into the light, then He can heal it. Pain that we hide from because it's too hard to face, is pain in the dark. It's festering, hurting, impacting us in unseen places, popping up in unpredictable ways. Pain left in a dark corner of our heart, behind protective walls, is often the root of other problems in life. Shame, perfectionism, compulsive behaviors, drivenness, depression. . . I wonder how much of it could be traced back to hidden pain? Pain that on the outside we say, "Oh, that's no big deal, I'm over it." But just like my healed ankle, we have a lifetime of habits set up to work around the injury and protect it from further aggravation. Those protection strategies worked well for the original pain, but they wreak havoc on life as we know it. We think we're "fine," but the truth is we're anything but fine.

I'm not recommending that you go get an emotional shovel and start digging for trouble. I am suggesting that if you, like me, have some stuck spots in your life - if you have a knee jerk reaction to avoid to certain issues in your life, or if you're a professional at emotional detours - you may want to look a little closer. Do the risky work of asking God to expose any hidden pain, and then sit in it long enough to see your way out. That's where I'm sitting these days, so you're in good company.

p.s. Did I tell you all I'm going back to STEPS? It seems it's time for a refresher course.