Anxiety
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Deflection: How to Spot and Stop It
Deflection is a go-to defense mechanism that started in the Garden of Eden. Adam deflected onto Eve and Eve onto the snake. I’m not the bad guy here. He or she is the bad guy! In order to avoid unpleasant emotions or realities in our lives, we distract ourselves and others from the source of the difficulty. We change the conversation to something else entirely. For some of us, being thought of as the bad guy is the worst fate possible. Anyone with children sees this in action daily. If Mommy reprimands Jimmy for hitting his brother, Jimmy will use deflection to draw the attention from himself. Mommy, but Billy…
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Your Amygdala and Jesus: Setting Your Brain Free
The amygdala, part of your limbic system, is responsible for the flight or fight impulse. For most of us, we simply think this means that some of us are fighters and others of us freeze like deer in the headlights. This grossly oversimplifies the complexity of our responses to danger. In actuality, we each develop a variety of responses to situations, both internal and external. And since our amygdala is often thought to be the seat of our anxiety, we should get to know that part of our brain. In inner healing circles, we call the amygdala “the guardian”. Andrew Miller, who runs Heart Sync Ministries, really pioneered this way…
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Three Methods that Helped Me Conquer Anxiety
I became aware of my anxiety, ironically, when suddenly I had less to fear. I found myself a single mother of four wonderful daughters and free of a narcissistic and cruel ex-husband. I was so used to feeling numb that when I began to reconnect with my emotions, all the fear I lived with for years came to the surface. My approach to life, similar to my father’s, is to get a few books on a topic and begin to educate myself, but somehow specific methods for curing anxiety proved elusive. The one thing that kept popping up in my research is that the brain is plastic, and we have…
