Here is an interesting concept I read about today. It’s about dealing with and controlling our emotions. I’m going through Outrageous Mastery with Sasha Xarrian. The writing she posted some time ago intrigued me.
If you’re anything like me, whenever you feel a negative emotion, rejection, pain and hurt, fear, anger, revenge, hatred, I just stuff them way down inside somewhere, not react to them nor respond to them. Some people I know react to them instead of respond to them. These are both incorrect ways of dealing with negative emotions. Here are some of the results I personally have observed and perhaps you have too.
My biggest negative emotion is fear of rejection. Because if this fear, most of the time I didn’t express my opinions. I didn’t take risks or try new things because If I Failed, people would not like me nor respect me, nor even want to hear anything about what’s important to me. I think the most important thing we all need is to feel LOVED. Some of this stemmed from my childhood experiences, some from my being shy (though you’d never know that now!), and mostly because of what happened in my first marriage. Uh, Oh; this is getting personal…
The first few years of that marriage, I felt completely loved. I had a husband who worked hard and we had 4 beautiful daughters. The only problem we had was my husband was addicted to alcohol. He wanted to get sober (not just dry). We both worked hard at overcoming this problem. I would stay awake many, many nights praying for him. Eventually, I KNEW he was finished drinking. This was a REAL KNOWING that I can’t explain. One week after my youngest daughter’s 2nd birthday, he did it and as far as I know, still hasn’t picked one up since. I’m very proud of him as it was the most difficult thing he had ever done up to that point. I was sooo happy. Now we could live out our perfect lives, right? WRONG!
Instead of making things better, the opposite began happening. He discovered that after he sobered up, he didn’t know who I was nor his children. He found out that he didn’t love me at all, that he had married the wrong person. He sought out to fill his needs elsewhere. I tried and tried to love him through but he didn’t want my love. He left. This was the most devastating thing I’ve gone through even up to this day. I couldn’t do anything, literally, for years as the pain went so deep. I was an emotional wreck. The only thing I could do was to be the mother of my children. I appeared to be brave in front of them and everyone else…but those negative emotions crippled me inside. Emotions ALWAYS surface in some form or another. For me, I lost a LOT of weight. I was angry at myself for being a failure, which in the back of my mind, was the reason he wanted to leave. I fell into depression. I felt I failed God and that He failed and rejected me. That was worse than just a failed marriage. It took me about 9 years to overcome the emotional state and begin be able to love myself again. I still to this day, carry some of that excess baggage that I’m getting rid of day by day. I have to make a conscious effort to open up to anyone, to even disagree with anyone about anything because I’m trying to avoid that pain again.
Now when I get even an inkling of potential danger of rejection, my defenses go up. When I recognize it happening, I now have a plan of action to correctly deal with them. Instead of just stuffing them, I now allow a specific time I can feel them, so I can protect myself from doing something stupid like harming myself or anyone else…anger can do that even to the meekest of us. This is what happens to people who just react to hurt and pain. When that time is up, I by an act of will, forgive the other person whom I felt hurt me, and I forgive myself. It is now released and no longer mine to deal with. I intentionally start loving myself and re-affirming God’s love for me. I can love myself for who I am because God made me and “God don’t Make No Junk”!
The reason Sasha’s posting intrigued me was she wrote down something I had all ready been practicing. If you think my life was bad, you should read about hers and how she overcame it! A truly inspiring account. Just go to http://www.outrageousmasters.com.
