You are a masterpiece that you are perfectly created everything about you by your perfect creator. And God is that perfect creator who considers you a beautiful masterpiece with wonderful gifts to go serve Him with. We're going to talk about the story that gets distorted, right? We have this beautiful story that God has written for you. And then in this fallen world, things kind of can smack into us sometimes and they can smack into us with lies about us. They can smack into us with things that hurt emotionally or physically. They can smack into us with doubts and fears or neglect, right? There are all kinds of things that could have happened, and your story gets impacted by those unique things that happened in your life.
When the Nervous System Goes Astray
Ideally, God has designed the nervous system so that you can shake it off and regulate and be okay. You've survived and made it through the pain, and you go on. But our nervous systems need to get the timestamp that says that's done. It's not happening anymore; it's no longer going on and we can relax. Instead of that timestamp, what often happens is that if we don't have enough in the way of supportive resources for what we need to be able to process these things, then our systems still hold on to the memory and the energy of it. And we might interpret messages about ourselves like we're not good enough or we should have done this or what will people think? Or maybe God's mad at us or what's wrong with us, we don't deserve anything better, whatever it is, okay? We get messages that lie to us, and we need to challenge those in light of God's truth. But our systems, because of being smacked into are kind of trying to get our balance back and we're trying to figure it out. And then the way we feel sometimes after we've been smacked into makes us think these messages are truer than they are and then makes us feel defeated and then scares us. And then we end up in a cycle that we don't want to be in, but we repeat cycles of fear or anxiety or patterns of defeat and believe the feelings and the lies that we'll never get out of this. We can't break free. Happiness is for other people. We'll never be good enough to please God. We're always going to be anxious or have panic or worry. There's so much that lies to us because it's like the enemy smacks into us. And then when we're wounded, those wounds get even further, kind of infected and messed with. And we're so exhausted from being messed with that we kind of just do the best we can to lick our wounds and try again. But we never get the chance to really heal unless we really heal. What happens is those wounds keep getting triggered or recycled over and over again, and we lose some things.
Aligning with God's Design for You; I Can Help You
Instead of the wonderful story that God designed for us, we end up getting sidelined and licking our wounds and trying to hope for better the next day and things just repeating again and again because we don't have nervous system healing from what happened to us. And so that's why I have the Empowered Freedom Framework in the Empowerment Oasis program that I'm launching in October. Because I want you to have all of the tools possible the spiritual, the mental, the emotional and the physical. Tools to give you peace, to get you off of that hamster wheel and living the life you really want to live, the life you know you can live, the life you just don't know how to get to yet. I want to help you get there. I've gotten there in my own life on a day-to-day basis. I am living my best life, my freest life, my most just, beautiful life with God, because God has done this for me. But He's not just done it by some one-time miracle. He's done it by giving me a healthy marriage and good people in my life. He's done it by teaching me new principles. He's done it by therapy. He's done it by education. He's done it by practicing tools that regulate my nervous system and help me to be calm and more relaxed, less anxious, less fearful. Ways to think that can soothe my nervous system and tell me the truth so that I'm aligned with God's original story being that Masterpiece award winning, unique peach pie, so to speak, rather than a peach pie that's trampled into pieces on the ground and doesn't know how to get back up. And I've been there, but I'm now back on the picnic table. I'm up on the winner's stand where everybody's like, let's see that pie shine, right? I want you to be back up there, too. There's no reason you can't. I want to see you shine for God in the truth of his story about you not constantly beat around in cycles of licking wounds from what the enemy's done to your story. Those are lies. You can close those chapters, and my Empowered Freedom Framework can help you to close those chapters. And I want to work with you and help you if you've been praying for something that can help you get out of the cycles to get really deep in a short amount of time so that you can get back to living and freedom, ultimately saving time and money over the long haul. Because these skills and tools will stay with you for a lifetime. You just have to practice them and use them. It's no fun to struggle, and we certainly don't want to have the enemy holding anything over us. We're daughters of God. We got work to do. All right, so I'm going to tell you when our stories get skewed by what's happened to us, and we get negative messages about ourselves, about how much power we have, about who God is, about how we feel about God, about our abilities to make change or do something about it. There's a lot of struggle that happens and a lot that's stolen and taken away.
10 Ways to Recognize If Your Story Has Been Tainted
I'm going to give you ten ways that you can see if your story has been tainted with and if you're still struggling with things that can be healed and need to be healed.
- Absence of Peace: Do you feel that you have peace on a daily basis? Like really stable peace in your body? Or has your peace been stolen?
- Nervous Tendencies: Do you feel like you're a bundle of nerves in everything you do? Do you feel like it's hard to go out and meet people or go to things, maybe even going to the grocery store? It just gets you all shaky? Do you feel like speaking up in a group is hard, or defending yourself is hard, or having an honest conversation with somebody is too difficult? Do you lack confidence in your capabilities or confidence that God will come through for you?
- Untrusting: Do you find yourself not able to trust God or yourself or other people very, very easily? Do you find your decision making is kind of something you struggle with and difficult? Maybe even something you avoid out of fear of making the wrong decisions?
- Anger and Frustration: Do you find that you're harsher than you want to be? That your coping skills are either nonexistent or pretty well shot that you're more critical to yourself. You yell more at your kids or your spouse. You kind of have frustration or anger just spilling over onto others. Lose your temper, get passive aggressive, get resentful, feel like just giving up, being hopeless. Those are other ways that indicate that your story has been tampered with.
- Feeling Hijacked: Do you feel like you have been hijacked, like the ability to control the way that your body and your mind work together seems disconnected. Your self-control to be able to go, no, this is what I think, and my feelings can go along with that. Seem to be at odds. You might realize with your mind, I don't want to be acting this way, but then have some emotional or mental stuff going on that you're just observing, sort of like, what is that about? That seems so out of my control. I just don't feel like I've got a handle on this. Why am I acting this way? Or if you've ever had yourself, say something like, why did I say that? I don't really mean that. What is going on here? If you felt hijacked, as if your body or your emotions or your thoughts don't belong to you, that can be another indicator that your story has been intruded upon.
- Unstable Relationship with God: If you feel like your connection to God isn't solid, feel like you'll never be good enough or feel like you can't trust Him again, that's another indication.
- Physical Response: If you feel like you cannot relax your body. Your muscles are so tense you forget to breathe. You breathe really shallow or rapidly. You feel disconnected from your body. Find yourself zoning out, not quite present when you want to be present. Maybe you're playing with your kids and you're thinking about your to-do lists and everything else, but not actually where you are enjoying it. That's not a guilt, that's just these are often indications that our nervous systems are overwhelmed.
- Wasting Time: Do you find yourself wasting so much time that you want to be using for other stuff, but that your mind races? Or you've spent so much time going over conversations in your head that are long over, that your focus is not where you want it to be? Or you've wasted so long hoping that you'd finally get past this, and now it's months or years later and you're still struggling.
- No Sense of Power: Do you feel like your sense of power has been taken from you and that you don't have any power to get over anything, to even take the next steps? That's a lie. But you might feel that way if you've had your story trampled on.
- Riding the Hamster Wheel: And then the other thing is that you want to make an impact. You have a desire, you even have a calling. But this thing that you keep returning to, like you're on the hamster wheel and can't seem to get rid of keeps pulling you back in, and you need to get out is taking time, power and impact as well away from you.
These are the ways the enemy steals from God's story for your life. And the thing is, Jesus defeated the enemy. Jesus has already given you the victory. Now, what's happening is we need to know how to soothe your nervous system, how to equip your mind, how to strategize as a whole being, body, soul, spirit, mind, feelings, relationships, goal setting with the tools that you need to be able to manage it well. And I would be honored to come on that journey with you. I want you to go from surviving to thriving. Because survival is great and a good gift from God. Thriving is joy and where daily power comes in and it is possible.
Today we're talking about the trauma recovery journey. The trauma recovery journey and how you can actually think more positively even when your thinker is not very clear. So, remember that trauma is a wound. Trauma is a painful past learning experience. It means that something happened that was not optimal, and it impacted you beyond your ability to have the resources that you needed to take care of it. When we are recovering from that, we miss out on knowing that we survived because our system gets so focused on making sure that never happens again.
Are Your Coping Skills Working?
That scary thing that felt like we wouldn't survive, that it puts up amazing scanners under the scenes that say that will never happen again. And then we come up with all kinds of coping skills, whether helpful or not helpful, to prevent the very thing that hurt us. And then those coping skills end up hurting us, so they don't work. They worked for a time, or they worked for a developmental stage or when we were kids, we thought they worked, but then as adults we run into things where they don't work and then we're kind of left wondering what in the world to do next?
You Already Survived!
Today, I'm going to help teach you how to think as you are recovering from trauma. Maybe you've been in therapy for a while and you're like, but when I hit this pain point again, I thought I had already worked through it. I thought it had already healed. I don't understand why I'm spinning my wheels again. And I want to tell you, you're not. And when you think, why am I not able to get past this? I still have to keep working and trying to get past this, I want to tell you that you are. So, you are getting past it. You are doing the work. Just because something is familiar and because it may be the way it feels, it does not mean that you're not progressing. It does not mean you haven't survived. It does not mean that hope isn't right there with you or that healing isn't completely on the horizon.
Now, I can't promise complete healing in everybody's circumstances all the time. But when you really do the work, you will then have the tools to be able to keep on the path towards healing and it will get smoother as you go. You don't need to still survive. You don't need to try harder to survive. You already have survived. Now you need to basically pick yourself up when you wobble. It's not that you're still surviving, it's that your system doesn't know it already did.
It's Like Riding a Bike
I want to give you the analogy of a bike ride, okay? If you're on a two-wheeler, you're a kid, you've learned how to ride a two-wheeler and you've crashed, and your bike is toast. I mean, you're banged up, your knees are skinned, your bike got all bent, your tires flat, everything's a mess. You don't want that to ever happen again. So, the next time you get on your bike, your new bike, you start to wobble a little bit because you remember, uh-oh, I fell last time, yet you keep going. You may have to stop and go to one side and kind of catch your balance with one leg down while you hold the bike against you. Then maybe you get back up and you try again and keep going. But every pedal, every time you push the pedal around, you are further on in the process of getting back on the bike and getting away from the experience of the accident. You survived your bike accident, and now you're on your way to a wonderful ride. If you keep thinking, I have to survive an accident, I have to survive an accident, you take away the power of the ride that you're already on in your bike. Now, does that mean you'll never wobble? No, of course not. Does that mean you'll never skin your knee again? Of course not. Does it mean though, that you're going to completely crash and lose your bike and never be okay again and break all kinds of bones? It doesn't mean that either. What happened to you in that first bike crash is over. If you have a new bike and you're pedaling, you survived it.
Now it's a matter of maybe carrying some extra tools with you. Maybe you want to wear your helmet when you ride your bike. Maybe you want to have some knee pads. If you wore ten knee pads on each leg, that would be overkill and that would cause more of a problem than it would help you. See, your coping skills can be out of proportion to what you need them to be. So, in what ways are you trying to protect yourself that are actually getting in the way now? But there's nothing wrong with maybe carrying with you some quarters to put in an air machine at a gas station so that you can pump up your tire if it gets a little low and that's what's causing the wobble. Or maybe to put a little basket on the bike that has a bottled water in there because you might get thirsty and that might help keep you hydrated while you pedal. When you have things that are helpful, you just pull out the tool that you need. Maybe carry a Band-Aid in your pocket in case you need to slap one on. If you do fall and skin your knee, it's not buying a whole new bike again and recovering from that huge crash you had. You've already done that. You're already on your new journey. You may need to have some tools in your toolkit that will help you to optimize when you wobble and fall. But it doesn't mean it's a catastrophe. Taking you back to that catastrophe that you had had that big wound trauma that put you on your guard and wanted to make you put every elbow, knee pad, helmets to the extreme on you. No. Just use caution. Be wise, look out for potholes, keep pedaling, enjoy the new journey. You're already on it.
Traumatic Memory Vs. Chronological Time
I wanted to encourage you with that because that's the difference between traumatic memory and actual chronological time you are present, you were hurt, you might still feel like you have a black and blue mark or a few of them, and you don't want them to get bumped. Again. Totally understandable. But if and when they get bumped, you can tend to them with compassion and care, or find others now who can tend to them with compassion and care. And you can process and heal because you survived that initial catastrophe. And the way I know that is because you're here now. You would not be if you were in immediate survival danger. Using your logic, maybe having some sips of coffee while you read. If you were really in fight or flight danger right now, a survival mode, you wouldn't be reading and thinking about how this applies to you. So, you have survived 100% of the things that you've been through. If you're still bruised, it's because you were wounded. And if you're still feeling those spots are tender, then tend to them. Comfort them, get them the support they need, the healing, the processing. But please don't mistake that you are no longer on the journey of the trauma. You are on the journey of recovery from that trauma. When you can acclimate to present time and space, it helps you to realize that you are no longer powerless, that you have power.
