trauma

You know, May is mental health awareness month, and I didn't really call it out because even though I was aware of it, and I knew it was, I wasn't really concerned about it because it's kind of like always mental health awareness month for me. But there is something that I do want to talk to you about, which is really about our nervous systems and how they are primed from such a young age and how the things that you trip over today, the things that trigger you, the things that hurt you, the things that scare you, the things that depress you or cause you anxiety or anger are often rooted so much earlier, before you even know that your nervous system encoded them and came up with these amazing strategies for survival.

When we think about going back in time to the pieces that make us up as we are today, of course, there is our spiritual core, and that is, I believe, the part that is God breathed. And then when we get saved, he saves us from our humanness, but that our soul, our spirit are His. They are saved, and they're covered in the blood of Jesus and redeemed. That's what I believe is our true self. However, we also have this human experience that is also reality. It is where we are right now. It is the experience that we are having, and that human experience is also sacred. God made our bodies. God made our minds. God made our personalities. He made our makeup and the way that the body makes us up, so to speak, is through our thoughts and our connections throughout our body, in our nervous system.

We have a lot of different chemicals that fire, give messages, and tell things what to do. We can think about our arm moving or that we need to move our arm, and it can do it. We can naturally focus on things if our eyesight is working well to be able to see far away or up close, or we can alter that through glasses because we're trying to help ourselves. There are often ways to correct for things that we're having difficulty with. When it's something like an arm, a broken leg, or eyesight that we can do something about that's concrete, it's easy to see.

But what we can't see are the things from such a young age that impacted our nervous system. For example, were your cries attended to by a loving caregiver consistently from the time of birth until you were a toddler? Did somebody meet your needs when you didn't have the words to ask for it? Did they come to your cries? Did they console you when you were hurting? Did they bring peace and regulation, or did they ignore you? Because that's still in your nervous system.  Your nervous system will know whether you have been cared for predictably and dependably, even though you probably don't remember back to being a baby. You may not trust other people, and it can go all the way back to the attachment you had with your caregivers in infancy.

Let's say that went well and you now know that my basic needs are met, and then we step it up to the toddler years, and you're starting to learn whether you can really branch out safely, whether you're safe to go on your own, and yet still have help if you need it. Healthy secure toddlers will be able to go explore but keep the parental unit or the caregiver in sight or in mind. They can go away and they can come back and they know that there's this ebb and flow that is healthy, that their back, they still, you know, someone still has their back. Then if that's not there, if they're insecure, that attachment can follow them the rest of their lives, too. It can be something where in romantic relationships later, you feel desperate, like, please don't leave me or I'm going to be abandoned and I'm not safe without you. Or if you've had a trauma where you really were not seen, not cared for, not heard, left alone, frightened, then you learned other lessons that got encoded into your nervous system.

Your nervous system is brilliant. It is here for you to survive. Then you look at the things that happened during the elementary years. How were you perceived by classmates? How were you perceived by the teacher? How were you taken care of at home? How did you feel about different things? The labels you started to get...sometimes those are the years where people start to get messages about themselves, like they're no good or they're always trouble, or they always want something and they're a bother, or they don't read well enough, or they're no good at math or whatever. There may be some truth to some talent type things. There are people who are more language-based learners and people who are more math-based learners, but people seldom have taken the time to really say, but that isn't a deficit in you. This is just your strength area, and we can also enjoy this other area and continue to also cultivate our strengths, and you are great.

However you've been created, whatever your design is, is okay, you are loved, you're acceptable. Every kid is a genius in their own way, but if no one ever comes alongside and says, you don't have to be good at this because you're good at that, everybody is good at something. Then comparisons are in there and that is something that once it starts, unless you nip that root out of there, it can continue to bother you for the rest of your life. You have to some point intentionally say, I am not going to fall to comparisons. I'm not going to be defined by other people. I am defined only by God, and I am enough because He is enough, and He doesn't make mistakes. When you can stand in that and have peace in that, that's a very solid ground to be on.

Our nervous system remembers rejection or ridicule or not feeling good enough, and it wants to compensate for it. Then you bring on the middle school years and oh my goodness, there's so many changes going on hormonally and socially and you're trying to figure out how to make that next leap into the next development period. In some ways you're still wanting to hold on to being a kid or you can't wait to get rid of the kid stuff and really be taken seriously, so there's struggle there.

Then we all know what the high school years can be like and the peer pressure and the coming into our own and trying to find our voice. Before we know it, oftentimes what people do is they end up making decisions about their life, whether they'll marry or not, what education they'll have, what they're going to do for a living, and where they're going to live. Sometimes those choices don't turn out so well, or they do for a time and then they don't or they're great. You know, it is possible to have a lot of great things. 

Overall, all of this goes into a nervous system that remembers. Your nervous system remembers any traffic accidents you had when you first learned to drive. It remembers any time where you had hoped for somebody older and wiser to give you a stamp of approval, and instead you were met with criticism or rejection or somebody who didn't get it. It remembers every time you felt safe or felt threatened. It is trying to predict the future based on all of this input that happened through all of these different relationship stages, developmental stages, and needs that were there and whether they were met or not.

So, it's really common for people to all of a sudden wake up and realize something's wrong here. What affected me so much? Some people's coping skills and ways of dealing with it, decide I'm going to deny it, move on, and not look back as if those that are affected shouldn't let it bother them like they're just wasting time and are wimps or something like that. Maybe they tell themselves, you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Sometimes people get stuck there and wallow and they're like, woe is me and I never had anything good, and I'll never get past this. Sometimes it's a bit of both, right?

The healthiest way when you acknowledge something isn't giving you peace and joy is to figure out what's happening here and do I need help with it, need more education, or need to take personal responsibility to change something or get more skills? What do I need to do to be responsible for me, so that I don't cause damage to other people's nervous systems, nor do I prolong my suffering here with what my nervous system has learned to try to manage and deal with. It can look different than how it looks at first glance, right? It can look like maybe trusting somebody you wouldn't normally trust, or realizing there's a problem when you didn't think there was or realizing that you're not the problem and maybe it was your environment that was the problem, or maybe the people you were around were the ones who were toxic. We have to kind of figure out where the lies got in there about you and where the lies and the not helpful coping skills came from. 

They probably served well at some point.

Your coping skills probably served you well at some point, but when they start to not work in certain situations or they themselves start to hurt, that's often when people need to call for counseling because they don't know what to do anymore. The way they manage things isn't working anymore, and they don't have anything else to rely on oftentimes because they thought they had it. Sometimes people think I am going to find my value in dating, and then they find that they're put down in dating, and that didn't work. So now what? Or I'll find my value in just rising up the corporate ladder, and then they get laid off, or they don't actually like their job, and they're like, well, that didn't work for me. These times where we have to reevaluate are not failure. It's a learning experience. All of life is a learning and growing experience, a refining a journey, and we both get hurt and we heal.

Just like with that arm, that is so easy to fix with a cast, we can see that as a concrete example. But when we move forward, we can do that in other things, in other ways in life, we don't have to constantly be stuck. We can take these certain actions that teach us different outcomes, that tell us the truth, that help us to regulate our nervous systems, that help us to see ourselves more clearly and say no to the things that are hurting us and breaking us down. Instead, we can get something like a cast through support from other people, through our faith, through telling ourselves the truth, through going through trauma therapy, through learning new tools and reading more books, listening to more podcasts, and applying it. Life does not have to cause undue distress forever. It just doesn't. But you have to do something different to get something different.

When people have such horrific things repeatedly, over time, they might have what's called chronic PTSD. So, PTSD would be the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's like replays in your head, feeling like you're back in time, feeling like something present is still connected to something that happened in the past, but you don't know that the past is over. It feels like it's this continuing thing that follows you. If that's happened repeatedly during your development or your growing up years, where you continually had trauma, it can really wreak post-traumatic stress, and then they call that CPTSD because that chronic nature, that ongoing nature, is harmful. We get used to those things, and we don't even realize to challenge them.

So, I want you to take a look at where in your life you're struggling today and see what patterns might have come from way back. What experiences does this remind you of? When did you feel like this previously? Because that is the wound or the hurt that may need to be healed. It's pretty easy if there is a one-time big trauma like a car wreck, and you can put the casts on the arm and the leg to heal those, but if you have a trauma and, in your mind, you can't stop hearing the horn blaring, tires screeching, someone screaming, or anything like that, it is still causing you triggers and pain. That kind of situation is a one-time trauma, but it still has invisible expressions. It needs a cast; it needs support. Even though you can't see it and it's not tangible like an arm or a leg, if untreated, it can cause more mental health issues. It can make anxiety worse; it can make depression worse. It can just bring on a whole host of things in the body and the mind and even mess with your spiritual life.

So, I just want to encourage you that mental health awareness month is not the way I want to focus on it for you because we're not talking mental illness, although it is illness when something is not well in our system, in our nervous system, in our mind, in our relationships, it can cause us to feel sick or to be sick or to act sick. So mental wellness, mental health is to recognize when we're showing symptoms of hurt, pain, or trauma to our nervous systems because of the history of what we've lived through and survived, we get help now to heal the stuff from the past, heal us in the present, and help us to go forward in the future a lot healthier than we are today.

If something is troublesome today, don't beat yourself up for it. There's no point to that. Take a look with compassion and grace to see what you've lived through and how that may have been something you strategized with to try to keep yourself safe and surviving. I'll bet there are more threads there that you'll notice if you look at it through that lens. If that's the case, then you'll know what's still needed, what needs to be healed, or what type of help might be beneficial.

Even as adults, maybe especially as adults, friendships can be tricky to navigate, and I think that's for multiple reasons. But the reason I'm talking about it today is because somebody wrote to me to explain how the friendship relationship or basically having relationships with people who are friends can be tricky and how when we've been hurt, it can lead us to not want to go deep with people. And also when we choose not to go deep with people, then we're also kind of giving up a part of sharing of something important to us which is more of ourselves. And so navigating this is what we're going to talk about today.

There was a time after I was married and had young kids where I realized I didn't have any friends anymore. I had plenty of friends in high school. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't unliked. I mean, some people may not have liked me, but in general I think I was pretty well liked. I had a number of people that were friends or acquaintances and then we grew apart. I went off to college 4 hours away, and they went to different schools. By the time we came back, we didn't have Facebook back then in the early 90s, so it was just like, okay, it's kind of weird to call you up after four years of not talking to you and just life had changed. And so I came back and I had like one friend left from high school and we were growing apart. So pretty much when I got married, I had a couple of people that were my roommates in college. I had a new friend I had met from church and then I had a cousin who was in our wedding as my side of the bridal party. And from there, it just kind of became my husband.

I woke up one day, so to speak, and realized I don't have any friends. I just didn't; it wasn't intentional. It just kind of happened. And I remember thinking at that point because that's when I was starting to really be into some anxiety and some insecurity and just I think all of the painful past learning from trauma had caught up to me at that point. And I didn't have the tools yet. As I've said before, I didn't know how to manage it. I didn't have the tools, I didn't know how to do this. And I was washing dishes one day and was kind of upset that I realized like, well, how did I have friends before and I don't now.

And God just basically told me, if there's someone like you who exists, there's got to be another one like you who exists. Like somebody who also wants to be kind and be a nice friend and not hurt you, is pretty much what I was thinking. Well, I mean, I can't be the only person who wants somebody to be a nice friend to me. There've got to be other people who want to be nice and play nice with their pals, and so maybe there's one. And the thought that I wasn't alone as far as female friendships was really encouraging to me. And also the fact that I didn't have to go befriend the world and have all of these people being in my inner circle. I just had to be open to realize that, of course, there's got to be at least one friend out there I just have yet to meet.

And so that began a process of God allowing me to take steps of faith and finding people that I thought could possibly, maybe not be scary and be safe, that I could go and have one coffee meet up and then go home and never do it again if it didn't work out. Almost like male/female dating relationships, like, I'm going to try you out. I don't know if I can trust you yet. This is scary. What do we do? Because especially if you have anxiety or you've been hurt before or you have anticipatory fear, it can be hard to put yourself out there if you're in that kind of state. And so I just encourage you to do it one at a time and to realize that there are other people out there who are kind and who don't want to hurt anybody. There are other people who've been hurt and wouldn't dream of doing that to somebody intentionally. And so I think it's really truthful and important for me to say that even though it feels like friends will betray you because of past experience or that you might be hurt in some way or that it feels awkward, there's a lot of truth to the fact that there are safe, healthy people out there. And the first step is you being a safe, healthy person.

So the listener who wrote to me was saying that they're guarded in friendships because they've been hurt a lot, because they want someone who values friendship as much as they do. So she thought that this friend valued their friendship as much as she did and then found out through getting hurt that that didn't appear to be the case after all. And so she asked if I could talk about that.

And that has happened to me. My best friend in high school, early high school was and I say that because by the end of high school, she was not my best friend. My best friend was somebody who I have no idea what in the world happened there. We were practically inseparable for years. We really enjoyed each other's company.

And next thing I know, she started getting nasty. And I didn't know why she was getting nasty. And if she had told me that I had done something wrong or that she needed me to talk to her about something, I may not have had all the skills and tools to do it perfectly back then, but I think I would have been willing to have that conversation. But to my recollection, that never was brought up, and I never knew what I did. And I remember this one time she was making fun of me, and she was continuing to just razz me, and I was patient, and I stuffed it down, even though she was hurting my feelings, and I was really trying to kind of respond appropriately. And she kept pushing and pushing until finally, if you've listened to my previous volcano episode a couple of weeks ago, it was like I pushed it down. I pushed it down. I pushed the next insult down.

And she kept at it so much that finally I erupted, and the eruption wasn't yelling at her. That almost probably would have been better. But I said something that I knew would hurt her specifically because well, it wasn't that I knew it would hurt her. I don't want to say it that way because I don't think it was to intentionally hurt her. I knew it was an area of sensitivity to her, and it was the area that she was pushing on me. And so I retaliated by pushing back. And that was the end of our friendship.

And I would never have wanted to do that if I hadn't felt like she just wouldn't stop. That still doesn't excuse it. Absolutely doesn't excuse it. In fact, for years, that was one of my deepest regrets, what I said to her. And I knew it hurt her. She did tell me that that hurt her, but she had started this behavior where she was kind of being mean to me way before this as well. So that was kind of like my final straw. And I'm not proud of it, and I've repented of it, and I felt so horrible for it.

And now I've forgiven myself for it because I know God forgives me for it, and I know that it wasn't okay, and I wouldn't do it again, but I was a kid who was struggling and was hurting, and it was the way that I thought I can get her to stop.

But what that meant to me that someone I thought cared about me...why are you hurting me? Repeatedly. And I couldn't figure it out. And it was such confusion. And the only thing that I could come up with was, that's sad. I'm sad that that happened, but I'm not going to stick around for people treating me poorly. I'm sad in both directions. I'm sad for what happened from her, and I'm sad what I did, and I'm just sad the friendship is over.

And when you can recognize that there are times for friendships to be over, that it's okay to set boundaries and walk away from people who are not safe and healthy, but the people who are, they will be there for you. And if you find out, even after a long period of time that someone isn't, I'd like to ask you to look at their character. Is this out of character for them? Is this a one off thing? Are they under particular stress at the moment? Did they go through something really tough? Did something just bubble up to the surface? Even if you don't know if that's the case or not, could there be a reason that their behavior doesn't really have anything to do with you, but something they're going through? So that would be one of the things that I would have you assess. If this is somebody that you were close to and they just hurt you or let you down in some way before pulling away, assuming that they probably have pulled away, or if they haven't, that you've pulled away, which I don't know the dynamics of your specific situation, but if that happens, that you can move towards and try to get resolution, try to figure out how the two of you can work together to understand what happened.

And is it really what you interpreted it as? Sometimes our interpretation is left to our own devices. So if you have texted somebody and they don't return it right away, you can be left to your own imagination. And that imagination might be, oh, they hate me. But your imagination could also go to, oh, they're busy, they got that job. I'm so happy for them. Right? You don't really know why unless you actually talk to the person. So making assumptions that aren't helpful, like they don't like you or they don't want to be around you, or they're not as good a friend as you thought they were may not actually be the truth.

It maybe they hurt your feelings. It maybe they did something thoughtless or rude, but it doesn't necessarily mean they don't want to be your friend. Okay? So that's a time that if you've been friends and their track record is such that it's been good for a while and they've been good for a while, you can talk to them and say, hey, I don't know what went wrong here, but I'd like to at least try to address it so we don't lose our friendship. But I am feeling really hurt and kind of tender and not really sure I can trust, but I thought it was worth it for us to talk about it.

But if they've left or they have told you that it's over or they have done something that you really are not going to be able to risk again. And you need that safe boundary, that's okay too. But first make sure that you are not putting some meaning onto them and their behavior that they haven't had a chance to explain. But if they have left or they have grieved you in some way and they're not sorry or they're not willing to make amends, or they're not somebody who will correct the problem and have a discussion with you, then it's okay to feel sad. Release them to God and move on and find the people who will have your back, and it is a trust walk.

It is a trust walk because there are no guarantees about human behavior. There's only faith, and you putting forth a good effort. You being the person that you want a friend to be to you and trusting God that he will bring good gifts to you in good friendships and pray for that and also just being real with somebody, hey, this hurt me before, so if you think this is going towards a less surface-level relationship and really getting intimate, letting the person know, hey, I'm really enjoying us being friends and going to the movies or shopping together or whatever. And I'd actually like to be more intentional about being in each other's lives more regularly or getting our kids together more often so we can go have a coffee date while they play or something like that, but this is an area where I'm growing and I've been hurt before in friendships. And so I'm afraid to make friendships and really just let them know and ask how they show up in friendships. Are they likely to pull back and tell them what you're likely to do? If you really feel like this could be a solid, safe, good friendship that God has given you, then I think that that's okay to realize that God has good plans and good gifts for you.

And if it's to that level where you think that you're going to let down your guard with this person a little bit more, let down that boundary guardrail a little bit more because they seem trustworthy and they seem safe. If they're that trustworthy and safe, you have nothing to lose by actually having the discussion with them. Hey, I've been really hurt in relationships. If there's ever a point where you don't want to be friends anymore, would you please not just leave me or would you please not say nasty things to me? Not that you would, but that's what happened before. Like let them know how much you would appreciate if this friendship could continue if it works for both of you, but also that if it ever did need to come to an end, it would mean a lot towards being able to trust again. If you knew that it would be a kind parting of ways that was just mutually beneficial. And depending on how that person answers that topic that you bring up tells so much about whether they will be that good kind of person for you or not. See, in a healthy relationship, a friend who has the qualities and the ability to be a good friend will be able to say, wow, thanks for sharing that with me; I've been hurting some relationships too. Yeah. I'd like to be a good friend to you. And if that's what you need for us to be able to become friends yeah, I promise I'd never do that to you.

I did this once with my husband because I had been hurt in previous dating relationships. And so here we are, and we're starting to date, and I just flat out asked him because I didn't want to go through the pain again. We were just out one time driving somewhere for our date, and I said, this may be a weird question, but how do you fight? And I was like, do you hold grudges? Do you get silent? Do you walk away? Or do you want to resolve it right away? I don't know if those are the exact answers.

I gave him options, but he said, oh, I like to resolve it right away. I was like, I do too. And he has been true to his word for the last 29 years. Okay. Doesn't mean we don't fight. Doesn't mean that we don't have to both get a hold of ourselves and tempers and make sure that we're intentional with our word choices or repent and apologize if we do something that hurts the other. But it's not an intentional hurt the other. It's a maybe we've been hurt and we need to make allowances for each other to understand each other and where we're coming from better, but that we are committed to always work it out.

It's a leap of faith when you've been hurt to be able to trust that somebody else isn't going to do that to you. But the truth is, the only person you can control is you. And how you show up and how you take steps of faith and how you trust God to bring you good people and how you assess people and let them prove who they are to you. My guess is that whoever this person is that hurts you so much that you now feel you have to be surface with other friends and feel like you're betraying yourself from being fully known that whoever they were, whatever happened in your circumstances, that that was painful because you had a set of expectations, and they didn't live up to it. But if they didn't value you or your friendship, that is on them. If you're making assumptions as to what they should be doing, then that's something that you can even now talk to them about, hey, this is what that felt like. This is what I was thinking. Is that accurate? But if you don't even feel safe to do that, that's okay, they weren't for you.

We're not going to mesh with everybody but these new friends that you're keeping at surface level. If you want to go deeper, pick one. Pick one that seems safest, that seems to treat people the nicest, that seems to be loyal and cultivate that friendship. And then see who their healthy friends are and then maybe they can become your friends too. Look for patterns of who people hang out with. Healthy people hang out with healthy people because healthy people are probably aware when people are toxic or not. And so if you can find somebody who treats other people in ways that appear healthy to you and you feel safe around them, I'll bet they're a person that you can take it one step further to try to be a little bit of vulnerable, a little bit more vulnerable with test them out, see if they can be trusted or not. If not, you're not missing out. You're just, okay, not them. And if they are, you gain a valuable, valuable gift. Doesn't mean they won't ever hurt you or let you down. It means that if and when the hurts come, they will be there to work through it with you and you with them. That's part of being a good friend and being treated with a good friend with good friendship. Okay, so I want you to realize that you can set boundaries and choose how deep to go with somebody. But you don't have to go deep with everybody. You can take it one person at a time and feel your way through it.

Holding on to God, asking for him to bring the right people, and then taking the next step. And notice how your body feels too. That's another tip. Notice how your body feels because your body may feel tense around somebody, or it may feel relaxed around somebody. I mean, if it's feeling relaxed, then maybe allow a little bit of your boundary to go down. See if you can trust a little bit of vulnerability. Not everything. Don't just say, oh, hey, you're my best friend here, come into my house and take everything. They haven't earned that yet, but one step at a time.

The good friendships are of God. Don't let what the enemy's tried to steal keep you from the good things of God. The enemy is a liar and a thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. And he's trying to steal your confidence and your peace and your trust. Don't let him just choose people who are worthy of it. And I'm sorry that your friend wasn't.

Everybody go take on the day. God bless.