Take Your Life Back Read online

  That momentary slip began a process of internal bleeding and swelling in my finger that would have to be relieved with a hot needle. My fingernail eventually fell off, and I wore cushioned protection on that hand for weeks afterward. But at the moment that it happened, even though the pain was quite intense, my immediate reaction was to hide the truth from Thor about the degree of my suffering.

  Like his namesake in the Avengers, Thor had a kind and compassionate heart, and he immediately asked whether the instant compression of a two-hundred-pound walnut chest on my finger had hurt. What a nice young warrior-prince. I instantly responded as any fine young Christian man would. I denied the truth, lied to his face, and concealed my pain and discomfort. However, when my would-be helper wished me well and walked back into the store, I began a dance quite unlike any classical number you’ve ever seen. Staring in disbelief at my rapidly swelling and bruised finger, I wept uncontrollably, hopped around like a maniac, and uttered words not found in the Old or New Testament. It was not one of my better moments.

  About this time, Misty came out to the truck and asked what was wrong. I made the horrific mistake of saying something about my pain being worse than childbirth—which may still be an issue between the two of us ten years later. But it really did hurt.

  Long after the pain had subsided, it occurred to me that my reaction that day was exactly the same as it had been my entire life. I denied my pain and tried to cover it up, even to the extent of lying about it, all so that I wouldn’t appear weak. It was like second nature to me. Though I was not abandoned as a child or emotionally abused, I felt very isolated and alone while I was growing up. And I had never shared that feeling with anyone. My reaction to the physical pain mirrored my reaction to all the emotional pain I had endured during childhood. But now I know that I’m not alone. Many, many people react to pain in the same way: denying it, hiding it, and doing whatever they can to look as strong as possible.

  Variations on a Theme

  As we talk about reactions to pain in this chapter, we want to avoid putting people into categories. No one likes to be reduced to a label. Are we really so predictable and typical and easily identifiable that everything about us can be summed up in a word or phrase? For a lot of people, labeling can feel more demeaning than helpful. On the other hand, it can be reassuring to know that other people have done what we’ve done and have lived through it. Most important, though, we want to help you see that how you’ve been reacting to pain has allowed something or someone to take control of your life. If you can see that, we know you can change it.

  Our reactions to pain and our adaptations to it are unique to ourselves; we are not all the same. But we have several things in common: In one way or another, we have turned our back on reality, and we have allowed all, or portions, of our lives to be controlled by another person, a destructive pattern, or unrealistic expectations. We live on the edge of almost. We are almost breaking free, or we are almost free. We are almost fed up or almost ready to take our lives back.

  Here are some common signs that our lives are not our own. These are all indications that we need to take action to take our lives back.

  We deny

  Some people would deny that they’re in denial. They know there’s a problem. They see it perfectly. But denial is much more subtle and complex than simply saying that what’s there is not there, or than being unable to see what’s there. We might see the problem, but we deny that we can do anything about it. Or we may compare ourselves to others and refuse to address our own problems until that really sick soul over there makes a move to get better. We refuse to admit that someone else’s huge, enormous, too-big-to-be-missed problem does not eradicate our need to deal with our own issues. Denial is easy because we think we’re in such better shape than that other person. By comparison, it appears that we’re free. In truth, we are anything but free because we’ve allowed that person’s glaring issues to blind us to our need to pursue our own recovery.

  Denial keeps us from addressing the things we can change, causing us to think that our inability to change everything means we can’t change anything. Moreover, we deny that our reactions have become habitual, and we are unwilling to give them up, even though they keep everything the same or make things worse. Because we either don’t or won’t see how far we are from living the life that God intends for us, we stay in our denial and wait for the magic cure that never materializes.

  But when we admit that we’re in denial, and when we are willing to break through it, we can begin to move into recovery. Like the disabled man lying by the pool of Bethesda in John 5, we can pick up our mats and start to walk. We become curious about the things we don’t see or understand. We begin to investigate the terrain of our lives. We might enlist a sponsor in a Life Recovery group to help us. A wise counselor who has helped others get their lives back on track may open the floodgates of hope for us. We might take an inventory of the defects we see in our lives and then review that inventory with someone else to validate what is real, what is exaggerated, and what we’ve been ignoring. Breaking out of our denial may be the first step toward seeing what is actually there in our lives—the aspects of our character and our circumstances that have been so distorted that we’ve become blind to them. None of this work will be easy, but as we move forward with purpose, we will feel an undeniable surge of hope rising in our hearts.

  We minimize

  Often, when we look at our problems, it’s as if we’re looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. We view problems that are huge, that cannot be ignored or overlooked, as normal parts of our lives. We have become so accustomed to the bizarre realities of our lives that we see very little of what is actually there.

  When we talk about the elephant in the room, we have a way of describing it as a small rodent. Our internal application for minimizing language automatically converts words like pain into irritation; devastating into difficult; abusive into insensitive; and horrific into unpleasant. Our self-talk is unrealistic, so whenever we communicate with someone else, we present our overwhelming problems as manageable situations that we have completely under control. Because we don’t acknowledge the full scope and intensity of our struggles, we don’t act in realistic ways to free ourselves and take our lives back. We minimize in order to give ourselves permission to do little or nothing to change.

  We comply

  After years of minimizing or outright denial, we have learned to fall in line and simply absorb whatever comes our way. If we are abused, we learn to take it. We comply as if it is our God-given duty to soldier on despite the pain. But it’s not our duty; it’s our pattern, our habitually destructive decision to go along with whatever is foisted on us or whatever we’ve fallen into.

  We have made it our destiny to try to please the unpleasable. Our obsessions can’t be analyzed enough, so we keep obsessing. Our compulsions are never satisfied; even though more than enough is never quite enough, we keep on doing and consuming the same things. We comply with the inner urge for more, more, more. We can become so lost that we find our identity in complying with the wishes and demands of others. We start to feel as if our entire purpose is to be used up, run over, stepped on, and put down. Our identity and our calling seem to merge into one demand: Comply, go along, and don’t make waves.

  We adhere

  Some of us have spent so much time feeling abandoned and rejected that we will latch onto anyone who will have us, no matter how we’re treated. We adhere to people who are very bad for us, as if we have no choice but to endure pain, suffering, or torture, because being attached to someone sick feels better than not being attached at all. Like diabetics eating nothing but sugar, we choose to consume the very things that will harm us. We hitch our lives to the very people who rob us of our lives. We become owned and operated by whatever we cling to in our desperate survival mode.

  Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe the phenomenon of hostages or victims of kidnapping who begin to bond with or ide
ntify with their captors. It was coined because of the actions of four hostages taken during a bank robbery in Sweden in 1973. The term came to prominence in the United States in 1974 when newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and soon afterward was seen in bank surveillance videos committing crimes alongside her captors. How could something so strange happen? We see examples of it all the time with abused children who not only stay with their tormentors but also come to defend them or at least rationalize their behavior. Another common example is a woman who clings to an emotionally and physically abusive husband or boyfriend, trying to meet his every need even as he robs her of everything good and wonderful about herself. Rather than run, she willingly cooperates as he cuts her off from her family and friends and cuts her down to a size he can manipulate and control. That is what it’s like to adhere to a sick relationship rather than moving out and moving on to create a life free from control and manipulation.

  We deceive

  Even when the sadness of our lives is on full display, we don’t see it because we are masters of deception. Like magicians, we make the visible invisible by refusing to face reality. We fill our souls with so many lies that eventually we lose the ability to see what is real and true about ourselves. Our self-deception manifests in a running stream of lies we tell ourselves and others: “There are no other options . . . God has abandoned us . . . we deserve this . . . this is the best we can do . . . he will change if I do more . . . she is just going through a phase . . . I am worthless . . . it’s my duty to stay in this . . . no one can help me . . . no one understands me or my situation . . . this is normal . . . it will get better with time . . . I must wait for God to perform a miracle . . .”

  This cycle repeats itself over and over again, becoming a never-ending mantra of lies and deception, because the truth is so painful that we refuse to face it.

  When we deceive others, we are simply exposing what is true inside of us. We are spilling out our soulish lies into the world and expecting that everyone will believe them as much as we do. We maintain our lies even though the truth would be so much easier to manage. But we have lost touch with the truth. Until someone comes along and pulls us back from the brink of total devastation and destruction, we stick with our daily routine of refusing to see what is real and true about our lives.

  We placate

  In our desire to make things right, calm things down, or maintain the status quo, we offer up little pieces of ourselves as sacrifices to a “god of comfort” because we have become comfortable in the most uncomfortable reality we could ever imagine. We can’t even see how awful it is, so we do what we must to maintain it. If someone tells us we drink too much, we appease him or her with a gesture of having only one drink a day or no drinks for a month. If a drinker tells us that we are the reason that his or her drinking has gotten so bad, we offer more effort, a cleaner house, more sex, fewer demands, or anything we can think of to pacify the situation. We placate so that we don’t have to do anything else. We surrender ourselves one bit at a time rather than making a bold move that would transform our souls and our situation.

  We are walking tranquilizers. We have learned every trick in the book to pacify the agitated and mollify the belligerent. We’re willing to take just a little bit of hell so that all hell won’t break loose. We appease the controllers by surrendering more control, trying harder and doing everything we can to reduce the tension and calm the storm so that everything will return to the sick normal to which we have become accustomed. We are the ultimate pacifists: don’t fight, don’t react, don’t be who you are. Instead, back off, run away, close down, tell lies, deny reality, or keep quiet so that the latest crisis will die down and we can get it under control.

  We cover

  We are the world’s most accomplished makeup artists. We have learned to cover the worst wounds with the most effective superficial treatment that will hide our pain and bury anything that needs to be changed. In honor of Adam and Eve, we’ve gone into the “fig leaf” business. If something pops up to the surface, we cover it immediately so that no one feels the need to intervene and help us. If we are ignored, we cover our pain with busy preoccupation. If we are insulted, we cover our pain with sick humor. If we are blamed, we cover our shame with distraction or deflection. We come up with countless excuses to cover the real reasons why we can’t function or why the person we love can’t show up to a gathering.

  Whenever we need to conceal where we have been emotionally battered and bruised, we put a leaf over it, hoping that no one can see under it or around the edges. But of course people do see, and we’ve learned to add another fig leaf, or a fig leaf extender. Our motto has become “Cover at all costs,” but the biggest cost is the loss of our freedom, identity, self-respect, and even our very souls.

  We never stop adding fig leaves. Eventually, we place them over our eyes as well, so we can’t see beyond our pain and suffering. We don’t see the truth about our situation, and we don’t see what’s happening with other people. Our obsession with covering up the truth extinguishes any interest we might have in others and makes it impossible for us to connect with their pain. We have enough pain of our own. As Helen Keller reportedly once said, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” Covering up has the effect of shrouding our lives in total darkness.

  We enable

  Enabling is such a classic symptom of dependency that to mention it seems trite, but it is no less true and every bit as powerful. Enabling can be described as doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. At first, we allow things to happen because we don’t know what else to do. We’re confused and we want to be accepted, so we learn how to go along with others. We might join everyone in a drink, or watch porn, or become what someone else wants us to be, or do what someone else wants us to do to meet an unrealistic or unhealthy expectation.

  When we look the other way, we enable really horrible things to happen. We allow the worst to happen when we try to rationalize why a bad situation might be fine in some way or another. We believe that our motives are pure, and we become experts at manufacturing excuses.

  “The person has to want help before he or she will get help.”

  “There is nothing I can do.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to submit to my husband?”

  “I’ve tried everything.”

  We don’t get help for ourselves. We don’t go online to see that others have called an interventionist in impossible situations. We refuse to acknowledge that there are groups of people all over the world who have the same problem or are married to someone with the same problem. We don’t look for those groups because we are committed to doing everything just as we’ve always done it, even though the same old patterns have done nothing but intensify our frustration at all levels. We’ve simply learned to live with it. We say that we would do anything to make our lives better, but in the end we do nothing.

  We control

  Why be a lowly doormat, getting stepped on all the time, when we can become highly respected controllers of all things? Some of us have learned to excel in this coping strategy. We didn’t necessarily set out to become controllers, and we may not have seen it was happening; but as the problem got worse, we transformed our approach. At first, we were disappointed by what our loved one did or didn’t do. We were speechless, powerless, and hopeless. But then we turned our disappointment into a destiny. The other person’s problem gave us a reason for being.

  The worse the other person became, the better we looked. The more we had to sacrifice, the more we were praised by others for all we had to endure. The worse the problem became, the more respect we received. We began to thrive on the sympathy of others. We tuned our ears to hear how great we were in the midst of such failure and disappointment. We took charge of everything—planning our work and working our plan. We used every ounce of power and strength we had, but we felt secure because we were in control.

  Sadly, many of us developed our own addiction
s, compulsions, habits, and dependencies because it isn’t easy coping alone and trying to run another person’s life while also trying to run our own. We learned to boost our efficiency with stimulants or stimulating relationships, and we comforted ourselves with alcohol, medication, or fantasy—anything that would take us away from the drudgery of reality for a while. We were able to control everything except the intensifying pain and increasingly damaging consequences of our actions. We reached a point where we were in far over our heads, taking everything onto ourselves, trusting nothing to God, and feeling an enormously lonely desperation and hopelessness. We think that control works until we lose control and have no choice but to surrender to God, who has been there all along waiting for us to ask him for assistance.

  We attack

  With the face we show to the world, most people think we’re quite nice. But back at home, there is a price to be paid for our dreams not coming true. And we make sure that whoever is causing us all this grief understands, in great detail, the extent of his or her defective way of life. At every opportunity we attack, criticizing everything that does not please us perfectly. We keep score, and every way in which the other person has ever let us down, every unmet expectation, is available as ammunition for our next attack. We destroy the other person with our words and our disappointment, and then we withdraw before he or she can respond. Like hit-and-run felons, we reverse gear and roll back over the person we hold responsible for our pain, just to make sure he or she feels it as intensely as we do. We are nice to the world, but at home our cruelty knows no bounds. Not everyone is like this, but many are headed in this direction.