Evening everyone, I just wanted to share something I learned over this weekend.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a thing called Exposure therapy. It’s a type of trauma therapy meant to help someone talk about their past traumas so they can heal from them. (Aside from other things it is useful for.) Anyway, along with doing this therapy I have been dealing with a lot of repressed emotions. Depression started to creep back into my life. Needless to say I’ve really been battling with myself and my negative emotions over the past couple of weeks, and it can be very tiring.

Well, this weekend, and a little before, my emotions have been all over the place. I’ve been crying for no reason, crying in front of people (an ugly cry, not a soft cry.), and having so many ups and downs. So on Saturday the 14th, my friend took me to the ER to be evaluated. I was sitting in the hospital room for four hours before I finally was able to speak with someone from Mobil Crisis (a person who specializes in mental health). By this time I was already feeling better and it showed, because the lady said she felt I was safe enough to go back home. (Now, I’m going to jump to a different topic before I come back to this.)

Along with this depression I’ve noticed myself becoming very annoyed with wanting prayer and talking to people in church and other Christians about what I’ve been going through. My thought process was, “Are they going to judge me? Are they going to think I’m possessed? I’m so tired of the church making everything a spiritual issue. Etc.” I felt like no one would understand my specific mental health issues. But, I reached out to people regardless of how I felt. And guess what, I talked about the stuff that was going on! I was brutally honest. (Side note: I also have a little over four months sober and I’ve been told this is when emotions come flooding back.) To my surprise, nobody judged me. Nobody told me I was bad, or wrong, or that I wasn’t doing enough in my walk with God. Most people, including the lady from the hospital, told me I was actually doing really well and that this was just a “pot hole” in my journey.

Going back to being annoyed with everything becoming a spiritual battle: Let me just say that God is so, so good. He helped me piece some things together with what these people had said to me.

The lady at the hospital told me, “No wonder you’re struggling. Your poor brain is so overloaded with processing things that it doesn’t know what to do right now other than what it knew before. You seem to have really good insight though to what is going on and what you need to do.” Now this comment made sense to me in the physical realm.

A pastor told me, “Because you are pushing out the darkness (now I’m just paraphrasing) you are feeling what the darkness feels. Remember you are a child of God and with him you are an overcomer. God isn’t going to condemn you when you fall, instead he will uphold you.” And this… this made sense to me, finally in a spiritual sense, because of what the lady at the hospital told me.

My brain could finally piece together what is happening in the physical AND the spiritual. So when the church talks about the spiritual aspects of things, it’s not JUST spiritual, it coexists with the physical.

I am really glad I was able to learn this over this weekend. Because, for so long it didn’t connect. For so long, I would get frustrated when people would say, “pray!”. I would get upset because I felt like no one was accepting the physical feelings I felt.

So, for anyone reading this that feels like no one is going to understand, especially the church, I want you to know that there ARE people out there that aren’t going to judge you. There’s people out there that, even if they don’t fully understand what you’re going through, they aren’t going to shun you because you don’t understand how they see things either. And, they (along with God) are going to find a way to communicate with you so you reach a point of understanding, as I was able to.

Dear God, I pray for anybody who feels alone, lost, helpless, I pray that you wrap your loving arms around them and give them peace in the storm. I pray you send them a word of love, words of hope from someone, anyone, here in the physical realm. I pray you give them understanding and wisdom to help them through their life. In Jesus name, Amen.

Jesus<3MGP