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Afraid of Love

Real love makes us feel vulnerable. A new relationship is uncharted territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. Our core defenses are challenged. Any habits we’ve long had that allow us to feel self-focused or self-contained start to fall by the wayside. We tend to believe that the more we care, the more we can get hurt. When we enter into a relationship, we are rarely fully aware of how we’ve been impacted by our history. The ways we were hurt in previous relationships, starting from our childhood, have a strong influence on how we perceive the people we get close to as well as how we act in our romantic relationships. Old, negative dynamics may make us wary of opening ourselves up to someone new. We may steer away from intimacy, because it stirs up old feelings of hurt, loss, anger or rejection. As Dr. Pat Love said in an interview with PsychAlive, “when you long for something, like love, it becomes associated with pain,” the pain you felt at not having it in the past.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201401/7-reasons-most-people-are-afraid-love Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at http://www.psychalive.org/author/dr-lisa-firestone/

Love takes off masks
that we fear we
cannot live without
and know we cannot
live within.
James Arthur Baldwin

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Triggers and Healing

Originally posted at – http://joyfulheartfoundation.org/blog/1in6-thursday-triggers-and-healing

1in6 Thursday: Triggers and Healing
By Randy Ellison

 “A trigger is something that sets off a memory tape or flashback, transporting the person back to the event of his/her original trauma. The survivor may begin to avoid situations and stimuli that they think triggered the flashback. They may react to this flashback, trigger with an emotional intensity similar to that at the time of the trauma. A person’s triggers are activated through one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.”1

I have had over five years of therapy, speak publically at least twice a month, write over two dozen articles a year and hear from survivors every day, yet I still find I get emotionally triggered at times. We moved back to Portland recently and I found a street near our apartment that made my stomach get in a knot every time I drove there. There is a retirement center on that street where my abuser took me once. I waited in the car while he went in. I don’t remember what happened before or after that stop, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The memory makes me feel like someone else’s property. A thing.

Since my realization, I have made it a point to go to the coffee shop across the street from that center to change how I feel about being in that place on earth and to take back my power. I don’t want him to own that space or me. 

Two days ago, my wife and I drove to the Oregon Coast. She drove a route that took us through Corvallis where we both attended college. I originally went there six months after my abuse ended. I have discussed this period in my life with my therapist and written about it in my book, but when we drove down that road I went to a place I did not remember. I felt overwhelming despair and oppression. Even my breathing became shallow. I don’t think in all my recovery work I have ever really gotten in touch with just how disconnected I was, with no direction or grounding, and completely out of control. In hindsight understanding that explains a lot.

It turns out that one of my longest standing triggers (and most destructive) has been my aversion to people who I perceive have power over me. I have changed careers six times. Each time I felt like power was being used over me, I literally walked away from everything, including moving my family to a different town. 

I recently found myself in a similar situation and, with the help of some loving friends and family, I changed my response. I sat down with the person in power and told them how it made me feel and then a true miracle happened. I set limits. I told them what I needed going forward. I actually protected myself in a healthy way. 

Remember in the first paragraph how there is a tendency for survivors to avoid activities that trigger their trauma? In my life, I want to identify my triggers so I can learn to change the outcomes. There are places no one should have to go, especially without support. Safety is critical to address these issues. For me it feels like the right time, and I have the need to go back to reclaim my life. I need those pieces to feel whole again. A healing journey leads to hope and grace.  May it be so.

1 PsychCentral. “What is a Trigger?”  http://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-a-trigger/0001414.

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Difficult Emotions – Peace in Anxiety

by applyingmybeliefs

Phil 4:6-7 – Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  ESV

Guiding Commentary – The days of those of us who have been harmed by the actions of another person are often peppered with difficult emotions.  Possibly the most challenging is anxiety.  We can all probably relate to the thought that anxiety seems to pop up in our life when we least expect it.  Our anxiety gets triggered by seemingly innocuous objects, places, smells, sounds or visual stimuli.  Often we are the only person we know who feels anxiety in certain situations.  Anxiety is a giant reality in our lives that sometimes moves us into panic attacks.  Anxiety is a major problem that debilitates and depresses us, and until the anxiety attack passes, we can’t function well, if at all.

Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount singled out anxiety as something He knew was unhealthy for us.  (Mt 6:24-34)  In our focus verses the apostle Paul, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit speaks to this issue again.

There is no chastisement on the part of God for those of us who deal with anxiety, in our verses above there is an offer made.  Through this scripture God acknowledges that we become anxious from time-to-time, He says to go directly to Him with things.  God says to bring our problems, our concerns, our troubles, our burdens and our fears, or anything else that causes us to slip into feelings of anxiety to Him.  He says to go to Him one-on-one in prayer and to thankfully give Him our list of concerns.  His promise is that He will replace our anxious moments with times of peace, the peace of God, which is a unique peace that comes only through the Holy Spirit on the inside of us.

This unique peace does things for us that no human originated peace can.  This scripture tells us that this peace is beyond our human understanding, and it guards our heart and our mind.  This assures us that one of the benefits of our prayer in the face of our anxiety will be that God helps to protect our minds from anxious thoughts and our hearts from those debilitating anxious feelings.

With this in mind, let us choose, because of these promises from a faithful and trustworthy God, to let go of our fears and our anxieties, and rely on Him.

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Terry Crews Details Severity of Porn Addiction in Three-Part Facebook Series: ‘I Felt Like My Wife Owed Me Sex’

As a fan of action movies (and Old Spice Commercials) it’s a blessing to see a man of Terry’s stature come forward to help others by sharing his own struggles with Pornography!

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2016/02/25/terry-crews-reveals-he-went-to-rehab-for-porn-in-3-part-facebook-series/

Getty Images

Getty Images

by Daniel Nussbaum25 Feb 2016

Actor Terry Crews detailed his life-long battle with an addiction to pornography and revealed how it almost derailed his marriage in a three-part video series posted to Facebook.

The 47-year-old former NFL player and Brooklyn Nine-Nine star released his latest “Dirty Little Secret” Facebook video on Tuesday. In the first video posted earlier this month, the actor revealed he went to rehab for his addiction, and said it had “really, really messed up life in a lot of ways.”

“It became a thing where I didn’t tell anybody,” Crews says in the first video. “It was my secret, nobody knew, and that allowed it to grow, and it got bad. If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably got a problem, and that was me. I didn’t tell my wife, didn’t tell my friends, nobody knew.”

The actor added that pornography can change the way human beings view each other, not as people but as “objects” and “body parts.”

“My issue was and is with pornography is it changes the way you think about people. People become objects, people become body parts, they become things to be used rather than people to be loved,” Crews said. “You start to use people, you start to feel like you’re the man and they’re just whatever.”

In the second clip, Crews said it was important not to let a sense of shame interfere in the battle against overcoming addiction.

“Shame doesn’t say you did something bad, shame says you are bad,” he said. “And when you think and believe that you are bad, there’s no way out. You say: ‘You know what, forget it, I might as well use drugs, I might as well overeat, I might as well use porn.’ Because if you believe that are bad, then you act accordingly. What you have to change is that paradigm in your life, you have to believe that you are good.”

In the clip posted Tuesday, the actor revealed his pornography addiction became so bad he “felt like my wife owed me sex.”

“When you have a sense of entitlement, it’s extremely dangerous,” Crews said. “What entitlement does is it gives you self-pity. And self-pity — it feels good. It feels good.”

“Every man out there desires intimacy. Every time you look at pornography, it’s a desire for intimacy,” he said. “You are trying to fight your feelings of being alone by filling it with pornography in an attempt to feel that you are with someone and you know someone. But pornography is an intimacy killer. It kills all intimacy.”

Crews also cautioned both men and women to take more responsibility to combat the problem.

“You cannot accept any pornography in your man’s life. Anything that will make you feel denigrated, make you feel less than, you cannot accept it,” he said.

“I’m calling on men to be more accountable. A true man and a true woman is a person who takes responsibility for everything in his life, good and bad,” he added.

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Clues that a Disloyal Spouse Has Really Changed

http://affaircare.com/2014/05/04/clues-that-a-disloyal-has-really-changed/

by Cindy at Affaircare

“Please don’t cut off all contact with me.  If you do there will be no chance of reconciling, and I want to change. I’m serious. What if I change and you’ve closed the door on our marriage?”

We’ve all heard these words like these from our Disloyal Spouse, or if we are the Disloyal Spouse, we’ve said something to this effect to our Loyal Spouse, and with those words the Loyal plunges into a sea of confusion and uncertainty. What if  their spouse DOES change? What if they HAVE ALREADY changed? What if they are in the process of changing? Should I forgive them? How can I tell if they mean it or if they are just saying it to get what they want?

The way to tell if a person has really changed or not is outlined for us in Ephesians 4, specifically starting with verses 22-24:

“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” – Ephesians 4:22-24

In this chapter, Paul itemizes for us the four steps involved in TRUE change (transformation):

  1. Put off your former way of life–your old self –vs. 22.
  2. Be made new in your mind –vs. 23.
  3. Put on a new life that is like God–true righteousness and true holiness –vs. 24.
  4. You’ll a demonstration of the change in the way you live –25-32.

This is also true for the person who was formerly a cheater and has now had a true transformation in their attitude and life.  They will also go through all four of these steps and all four will be observable and obvious.

First, they will “put off their former way of life”, so if they were formerly a flirt or they watched porn or they met others through chat rooms, they will STOP THAT.  If your Disloyal is telling you that they’ve changed will still engaging in their affair or still going to the internet to chat for hours, then they have not really changed.  The very first step is to stop doing what they used to do.

But just stopping the activity is not enough.  Imagine a person who is an alcoholic.  If all they do is stop putting liquor to their lips and swallowing, they haven’t changed inside.  They haven’t changed their minds, their thoughts, their attitudes toward alcohol at all!  So the second step in authentic change is to actually change your MIND–renew it.  We have to change what we think (the words and when, etc.), and this will change our attitude, which is our “set way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior.”  When a Disloyal is sincere in their change, they will not only stop being unfaithful, but will also change the way they think about infidelity and they will change what infidelity means to them.  Whereas they used to see unfaithfulness as “fun” and “exciting” and “enjoyable” they will have renewed their minds and said “STOP” every time they thought of their Affair Partner and instead replaced it with the truth about the AP: they lack character and morals!  And whereas they used to think of their spouse as “a nag” and “a prude” and “controlling” they will have renewed their minds and said “STOP” every time they thought like that and replaced it with the truth about their spouse: they were deeply hurt and still had the courage and grace to hang in there!

Now right about here, a lot of Loyal Spouses are fooled, because often a Disloyal can convince their Loyal Spouse that they have stopped talking to or spending time with their AP, and they can even say the right words that seem to indicate their attitude toward adultery has changed.  But Loyal Spouses–word of warning!  Stopping the behavior and saying words that seem like the thinking has changed IS NOT ENOUGH to indicate true, repentant change.  The third step is a necessary condition.  Verse 24 tells us that true repentance (true change) requires that they also put on a new self.

Finally, if Paul had left it at that, we might have been left to wonder what he meant or had to speculate about what “new self” he was asking us to model, but Paul didn’t do that.  He gave us four practical illustrations of what it means to truly put off, renew, and put on a new self:

  1. The lying person not only stops his/her lying, but s/he begins to speak the truth–vs. 25.
  2. The thief not only stops taking from people, but s/he does something useful with his/her hands and becomes a giver–vs. 28.
  3. The person who swore and tore down with his/her words stops their crudeness and begins to build others up with their tongue–vs. 29.
  4. The harsh, angry, malicious person puts his/her bitterness away, and starts spreading kindness wherever s/he goes–vs. 31.

We can see that the person is doing 180 degrees the opposite of what they used to be doing, and more importantly, the person has taken the time for their life to demonstrate, through their behavior and actions, that they are DIFFERENT!

So we have a guide for telling when a Disloyal Spouse has had a real change.  When you see all four steps, then you know that things are truly different and the repentance is honest.  If you see that they have stopped committing adultery; if they have renewed their mind and how they think about their spouse and marriage; if they have put on a new self and it is 180 degrees the opposite of what they were doing; and if they invest the time to demonstrate in their life the new way of behaving…then it is real.  If you don’t see all four steps, then it’s not real change.