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How Our Relational Style Affects Our Faith
I find that if I have a misconception of love and thus of God, that is, one that does not align fully with scripture, I need look no further than my relational style. Because we are in a genuine relationship with the Lord, we will often have similar hang-ups to those we have in our human relationships. All of us have a relational style, learned from parents and friends that we bring to our marriages and parenting. It should then come as no surprise that those relational styles affect our connection with God. A misconception of love, too, is common. As a naïve seventeen-year-old, I took my first husband’s overwhelming…
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Good Memories and Mental Health: Filling in the Gaps
Trauma is not only the product of bad memories but the absence of good ones as well. Extended abuse or trauma summons up visions of verbal and physical violence, but as damaging are the years barren of good memories. I faced this upon the dissolution of my first marriage, knowing that I needed to rehabilitate Christmas and birthdays. But equally as daunting, I confronted the reality of knowing I needed to create enough sense of safety that the everyday norm could begin to generate good feelings, interactions, and memories. When I married my current and wonderful husband, I did not realize I would need to rehabilitate such everyday interactions as…
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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…
Healing Through Art & Words
