Stop running!

Yesterday I started counseling psychology classes, and even though we just went through the course outline and personal introductions, I found it to be somehow therapeutic for me. I asked a question to which the lecturer replied that we have the conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious parts in our minds. The conscious is what we are aware of right now, the sub-conscious is the memory where we retrieve info, and the unconscious is where we store our repressed feelings, anxieties, painful experiences, needs, loss and grief etc. We then tell ourselves that we’ve dealt with them until something triggers them. 

For example say you lost a loved one years or even months ago, you cried, time passed and you told yourself that you’d mourned enough and were now okay. Then you attend another funeral (even for someone you never knew), and you end up breaking down that it puzzles you. The truth is, you never quite dealt with the loss of your loved one hence the current funeral triggers what you threw in your unconscious. Or say some time back someone hurt you (be it in a professional, family, friendship etc. relationship), and you tell yourself that now that there’s distance between you and that person, or now that you’ve confronted the person, you’ve dealt with it. Then someone in your current relationship does or says something, and you find yourself reacting instead of responding. Or you find yourself shutting doors/running away from that relationship, giving a million different excuses why it would never work out. 

On Wednesday I had two separate meetings, and both brought to my attention how I’ve been shelving issues instead of dealing with them to the end. This has been triggered by events that are currently happening in my life that I’m avoiding dealing with; something I never knew was still in my unconscious (something I’m not at liberty to share with you today). I caught myself running and I had to stop but I didn’t know how. So yesterday after asking the lecturer my query, and it being answered as mentioned above, the lecturer then said that the only way to deal with things stored in the unconscious is to bring them one by one to the conscious, accepting whatever happened, and now allowing yourself to heal from there. Healing/dealing with these issues is a journey, like I mentioned in my blog ‘Jesus the righteous judge’ and ‘Embracing boundless love.’ Plus you can’t deal with issues alone, like I thought (I thought to myself me and God could handle it. but then God works with relationships). You need to speak to someone (which I’m learning to). Trust me, everyone needs therapy.

Now this doesn’t mean you go sharing with everybody! Ask God to give you wisdom on who to speak to; His ordained someone who’ll be willing to listen and help, who you’ll be open with, who’ll keep your issues confidential, who won’t judge you, who’ll speak the truth to you in Love.

In school I am privileged to have 10 free sessions with a counselor, who I will be utilizing very soon. I welcome you to join me in this therapeutic journey where we consciously stop running, as we venture into consciously dealing with the stuff in our unconscious box, with the help of the people God has placed in our lives.

Let’s become aware of our attitudes, (coz they’re more often than not influenced by stuff in our unconscious), and be willing to work on them. Most times the problem is never with the other person, it’s with us. If we don’t deal with these issues stored in our unconscious, as hard as they seem to deal with, then we won’t be able to live out our lives fully as God ordained us to and we’ll end up hurting others trying to shield ourselves.

So, what’s in you unconscious box. What are you running from? Marriage? A promotion? A business idea? Ministry? Expressing your feelings? Letting your guard completely down with your spouse?...... and why?

Is it coz of an experience you went through, something that was done to you, something someone said,…..????? Who was it…..your mother? Father? Boss? Ex-boyfriend/girlfriend?????? 

Corallie Buchanan in her book ‘Watch Out! Godly Women on the Loose’ says:

 “ ...you can’t escape God, and you can’t escape your skeletons in the closet. They will always be there until you take them out from behind those dusty old moth-eaten coats. Your exterior facade of ‘everything is alright’ only works for a little while, and then the cracks begin to show. You can only hide behind yourself for so long. You can’t keep running!” 

Joyce Meyer says:  if you’re always running from everything that’s hard in your life, then you’ll be running all your life.

I am so done running!