Choosing your thoughts

T. Joy · Choosing Your Thoughts

Recently, in a moment of feeling very deeply about a hurtful reminder from my past, I realized that I could either entertain the thoughts around it, or I could choose to think differently about it, which in turn, would help me feel differently about it. 

I’m always reciting the same painful narratives in my head. And I’ve allowed these narratives to set the course of my emotional state, which is why I often feel like I’m going in the same circles emotionally. 

There are some thoughts from past that I haven’t let go, but in order to achieve true emotional peace, I have to learn to overcome them by replacing them. I can’t keep masking my emotions, and expect to have peace if I haven’t learned how to actually conquer the thoughts that cause those emotions to come.

Now, I realize that whenever I’m attacked with thoughts of the past, I still have a choice to think new thoughts. I don’t have to keep entertaining the same unwanted reminders about my past, I just choose to. So why do I continue to recite narratives from the past that do nothing but make my emotional wounds worse? 

What if whenever those thoughts do attack, I take that opportunity to exercise my choice to think a different thought. Instead of capturing the unwanted thought, and analyzing it like I normally do, I can release that thought, and replace it with a new thought that brings me peace instead. 

This is not easy at all. It’s really hard for me not to analyze the past and think what I could’ve done differently to avoid the pain I’m feeling now, but if I want to start feeling better now, then I have to make the choice to think differently now. I can’t keep replaying the same old thoughts, and expect to go any further on this journey. 

Bottom line: my emotions won’t change, if my thoughts don’t change. When I start reciting narratives of hope and peace, my emotions will reflect those thoughts, and exercising that habit will bring me closer and closer to emotional wholeness. 

Until next time. 

Seeking Intimacy

T. Joy · Seeking Intimacy

Recently, I’ve been circling around the idea of what true intimacy is.  What is this “love” that people who seem like they are on a high spiritual level seem to have? How do they get it? How do they feel it? 

I would love to feel this kind of love, but I also feel so blocked from it. 

A lot of my emotional wreckage stemmed from past experiences in my life, and to a certain extent, I thought there was only so much that I could do. I thought that since  I couldn’t physically change my circumstances, there were certain thoughts I just had to live with. But now I don’t think that’s totally true. Yes, my experiences happened, but I don’t have to allow the influences of those experiences to control the way I think about myself.

I realize that there were a lot of things that I subconsciously thought about myself without realizing it, and these were key things that’s probably been holding me back from receiving healing at it’s fullest. 

 I want to bring Nameless up as an example of this, (especially now that I’m in the process of dramatizing this story with him on YouTube), because I’ve come to the realization of what’s been holding me back the most from experiencing this love with God.

Nameless said that he wanted to marry me, but when we broke up, it was like everything he said was revoked, and it all meant nothing to him. On top of that, seeing him some years later acting like a playboy, and treating me like a sex toy…well that stung.

So there’s that. 

And I think this actually has had an affect on me being able to really receive love from God. Not because I looked at God the way I looked at Nameless, but because of how I looked at myself. For so long, I looked at how Nameless took back his promise, and if there was something I could’ve done to change it, if I’m worth making a promise too, or if I’m good enough to love, etc. But being so focused on him, and my failures only held me back from really grasping the love of God.  

However, as painful as it is to live with an experience like that, I still have the power to reframe my thinking. First let’s start with the fact that Nameless is human. Humans get lost. Humans get misguided, and humans lose sight of themselves. As a result of this, sometimes humans make mistakes, and sometimes humans break promises that they genuinely meant to keep. 

Nameless is human. 

But then there’s God…

God is the source of Love. And Love does not give up, Love does not revoke promises, Love is faithful, and Love does not and will not ever turn away from me.

God is Love. And this Love wants me. 

Humans are imperfectly human, but God is a perfect God. If all else fails, I will always have that Love behind me to fall back on, and that’s all that matters. 

Therefore, every time I encounter those thoughts of Nameless, I can remember to replace those thoughts with these truths: 

God does not revoke promises.

God does not give up on the love that he gives. 

God will never turn his back on me.

God will always choose to pursue me.

So, when I find myself going down this usual spiral of pain and regret, and unworthiness, I can use this as a mantra to help guide my thoughts back into the source of true Love. This is definitely going to take some practice to do…and to also fully believe in. But if I keep replacing those hindering thoughts of Nameless, with the truth of God; then I’ll be one step closer to creating a new pathway in my mind to make seeking intimate love with God my first instinct.

Peace is a Choice

Temperance J · Peace is a Choice

This healing journey has been one big fight for peace. It seems as if once I think I have a handle on one thing then life throws me another curveball that makes me question everything all over again. But I think the problem to my wavering peace is that I actually don’t think I really grasped the concept of true peace.  

Deep down my own idea of true peace was getting my questions answered to things in my life that went unanswered, or getting justice for the situations I felt weren’t resolved, and I believed that only then would my mind rest. Of course, that doesn’t happen with everything, and so  I just became used to not having total peace with certain situations in my life. So I resorted to the temporary feeling of ‘peace.’ The feeling of tranquility or calmness like when I’m doing something fun and relaxing, or when I’m in a quiet space unbothered by the outside world. Because I figured well if I can’t be at peace mentally, then maybe I can feel at peace. So peace became something that I thought of as a feeling. Something that I needed to physically feel, or a place that I needed to physically be at, in order to be okay.

Now, I’m beginning to see that just feeling peace is not enough. Why? Because the feeling is so fleeting. The feeling comes and goes. The feeling is unreliable. And the whole point of having peace is so that you can always have it, right? But the physical peace that you can get from the world is only temporary. Not saying that those things can’t be peaceful, they’re just not enough.

So what is true peace? 

Okay, so I looked into the meaning of biblical peace because this type of peace goes beyond what my definition of peace is. I read that in Hebrew, peace is translated to shalom—which comes with a few definitions—but completeness, wholeness, and soundness are just a few of its meanings. So to be complete or whole would insinuate that there is nothing broken in your life and nothing missing. And this sounds like a beautiful idea of peace, but I can’t say that nothing is broken or missing in my life. In fact, there has been a lot of breaking in my life, and truthfully, what biblical peace is seems to be something that I don’t think I have or can possibly attain at the moment—but I’m actively trying to grasp this concept because I recognize that I need this type of wholeness in my life. 

Biblical peace is also not just a feeling, it’s a knowing. This form of peace doesn’t invite you to ignore your brokenness, it invites you to shift your focus on the knowledge that God is the source of true peace in the midst of your brokenness. When you continue to set your mind on this fact and believe in the power of God to heal you and make you whole, then you will eventually experience restoration. 

But it’s hard to accept or even see this type of peace come to fruit if you’re just focused on the broken areas in your life, and that has been my problem. Whenever I encounter a trigger that reminds me of a broken place, I go into a usual pattern of trying to figure everything out again, focusing on intently on the issue, but I always come up with nothing—which always leaves me in a state of unrest.

As I said in a previous post, now I’m trying to focus on the power of God to carry me through this journey of healing, because I’m in serious need of rest. The more I focus on it, I’m beginning to see things a little differently—peace being one of those things. God’s power includes the power of lasting peace. A peace that’s beyond my definition of what I thought peace was. 

So now I’m learning that true peace is not a feeling, it’s a state of mind. This state of mind is not dependent upon a place, a feeling, or a thing. Having peace means making the decision to continually set my mind on God, the source of peace, in order obtain and keep a state of lasting soundness and wholeness. 

This isn’t something that comes overnight. This type of peace is a choice that I will continually need to make until that state of mind becomes second nature. However, this does bring a fresh perspective to my journey because this whole time I’ve been fighting for a feeling instead of a state of mind. Like I also said in a previous post, God’s power is accessible to me, and this includes the power of divine peace. All I have to do is make the decision to focus on that peace daily, and believe that it will, and is, restoring me to emotional wholeness. 

Until next time.

P.S. I attached a little song I wrote to serve as a reminder of the authority that I have in choosing to bring peace to my mind and heart even when I don’t feel it. 

Waiting to Become

Temperance J · Waiting to Become

    On this journey of healing it can sometimes feel like you’re waiting for a breakthrough that might not ever come. Like me, you’ve probably discovered that you need more than your own strength to get through anything. And also like me, you’ve probably found yourself feeling incapable of ever attaining that kind of strength. Sometimes I wonder where God is. Will God ever come and pick me up through this? Am I not trying hard enough to reach God? Why does having hope in something greater than me sometimes make me feel worse? Especially when I’m not seeing what I’ve been expecting to come from having this hope? 

    But what if waiting in this journey isn’t about actually waiting for that breakthrough to suddenly appear. What if it’s about waiting for myself to become the emotionally whole, mentally stable, spiritually in-tune being, I’m meant to be? The thing is that I won’t ever see myself become the person I want to be if I continue to turn to old mental patterns instead of putting in the discipline necessary to see the change I want to see. 

    I can be so focused on where I’m not that it can make getting to a better place feel unattainable. As a result, sometimes I want to just give up on myself all together because it can feel like I’ll never see a change. And I start to become discouraged because I don’t see any evidence of progress in myself or even see any help from God. But I don’t think it’s all about waiting for God to come because truth is, God is already here. God is with me in every moment, and through every step of this process. I think it’s about what I choose to think during this process. If I continue to think that I’ll never experience the freedom and clarity that comes from being emotionally whole because I’m discouraged in my journey, then I won’t see it. Waiting for myself to grow into emotional wholeness is all about what I do, and the way I think even when I feel discouraged in the journey. 

    This journey is a process, and change doesn’t happen over night. It takes discipline to reinforce the habits needed to get to that place of emotional wholeness, and continuing in that process without stopping builds endurance. Even though it’d be nice to wake up the next day and automatically be in that place of peace, I know that it takes work and it’s a continual process. It also takes faith to keep believing that I will see the outcome of enduring this process. Even if I feel like I’m not making any progress, it’s not like I have a deadline to make. Progress is still progress when you make the mental decision to keep going; no matter if you feel like didn’t do what you think you should’ve done, or that you could be doing better. When you get back up and try at it again, you’re building endurance and you’re building faith in yourself and in the One who gives you strength. 

    Waiting to become into the person I want to see takes having patience with myself. There are some negative thought patterns that have been deeply embedded in my brain over the years, and it’s going to take some time to undo them all. But while I’m waiting to become, I do have God’s power to help me in this process even if I have to keep telling myself this until I believe it. And so, if in this process I believe I have a strength greater than me to help me when I feel discouraged, then maybe that will give me more faith to believe that I will see the person I want to become. And if I believe I can change, then as a result I will see that change.

Until Next Time. 

More than Me

Temperance J · More Than Me

 In my last post I talked about making the mental decision to conquer the inner battles that I’m facing. It can be hard doing this own my own. I’ve been so lost in the mix of all my worry and anxiety about life, myself, and my future. I can spend so much mental energy thinking about something that I can’t figure out, or beating myself up about not being good enough, or just thinking about the worse possible outcome that could happen to me. I’ve choked myself up with so much doubt and fear, that I’ve blurred my own vision of myself and who I can truly be. 

I’ve made the habit out of thinking like this so often that it’s really hard to break this cycle. Actually, the funny part is that when I rely on myself to rid myself of these emotional stressors, I beat myself up even more when I fall right into the trap of thinking the same old things. 

Like I said in my last post, I really can’t do this on my own. I need more than my own strength to get me through these inner battles. 

So how do I get it? 

Okay, this is where it might get a little deep. 

I also mentioned in my last post how there is a power available to us. This power is what can give us the strength to rewire the way we think about ourselves and our lives. I believe this power only comes from God. The power of God’s love is so divine that I believe it is the key to unwinding these negative mental patterns of doubt, self negativity, and fear, that I’ve engraved in myself over the years. 

The hard part is trying to get past these feelings of doubting myself and even my belief. Sometimes I’m afraid that I might be off in sensing God or that I won’t be capable of fully accessing that type of power, or that it might sound crazy to think any of this is real. 

So this is the direction that I’m going. I want to dig deeper into this idea because at this point I’m desperate. And there is enough evidence out there to show that God is alive and moving. So why not just take the step to believe that there is a divine power available to me that can heal my heart and mind completely. 

My solutions to fighting these inner battles weren’t enough and they keep failing. I need something more than just myself or another human’s comfort. I need something divine to help get me through this. 

Until Next Time. 

Inner Battles

Temperance J · Inner Battles

    I can spend a lot of time in my head. I’m either busy thinking about what the future holds, thoughts about past experiences, my fears, my worries, current life situations, etc. And when I finally get out of my head, it’s like coming up for a breath of fresh air and seeing the present for the first time.

    Being in my head so often has affected the way I view my life, it’s like life has been filtered by all the thoughts I have in my head. And even though it was partly outside factors, like people, that affected my outlook on life, there were also things I thought about myself that had nothing to do with what anyone else did—thoughts about myself that that just popped up out of no where, and that I accepted as truth. 

    It’s those thoughts that I think are the root to some deeply embedded views that I have about myself and about life in general. These views might have been affected by the experiences I faced in life, but it all boils down to the truths I’ve accepted about myself.

    Take Nameless, for example, I allowed myself to become emotionally attached to him, and found emotional security in his words and his views of me...but then he turned his back on me. So, that left me stuck trying to get unattached to his words mentally and emotionally. Since, my emotional security was clearly not anchored in something stable, I completely fell apart. This opened the door to all types of shame and heartache, and deepened the insecurities I already had about myself before Nameless; which effected my outlook on life. To this day, I still haven’t felt like I grasped true emotional wholeness after that, but I’ve been able to manage (for the most part). 

   Currently, there are more pressing matters that have been taking a toll on me mentally, and for now let’s just say that I’m at the point where I’m in major need of some emotional wholeness. 

  Just a few weeks ago, I was faced with the mental decision to either give up on my emotional state completely or to keep pressing forward towards emotional wholeness. Life has just been feeling like one heartbreak after another. And part of me didn’t want to keep going because I didn’t see the point. For the first time in my life I felt like I was facing the edge of a cliff—if life pushed me any further I was going to jump.

This is what happens when life brings you inner battles (not physical pain, mental pain) but you don’t have the necessary equipment to fight them. The reason I was so weary and ready to give up is because I put so much weight on myself to change things. I completely underestimated the power that is accessible to face these battles without losing hope in the process. This is going to sound cliche but, yes, I mean the power of love. There are many names of where the source of this love comes from—the general name in my community is God—but the name that I personally like to use for myself is Immanuel which means “God is with us.” God is love and apparently that love is always with me, even if I don’t realize it. Even though the thought of that is really comforting, to be honest, I really don’t think I have the hang of this realization just yet. Becoming aware of this love and relying on it is still a process for me, and I’m still learning how to accept this. 

This takes work, I know, but here’s why I made the decision to keep going. Even though I wanted to give up, and there is still a voice telling me, “There’s no point to doing anything in this life.” There is also a part of me that feels like I wasn’t put on this earth to just suffer and give up. It’s that part of me that opens up the invitation to see what would happen if I just faced these dark parts in my mind, and overcame them. 

What if I conquered my emotions instead of allowing them to knock me over and bend me to their will. I actually want to see what happens when I overcome the inner battles of insecurity, worthlessness, the pressure for success, regret, blame, and all the other stuff that comes with living life and allowing culture and past experiences to frame me.

We all know how the story ends when you give up, but what happens when you overcome and win? I want to see that other side. I’d rather put in the work to see the outcome of winning the war that’s in my head, than willingly give up and never experience the beauty of true peace and emotional wholeness. The path to emotional wholeness starts with us making the decision to keep going, and we’ll never see the other side of that if we decide to stop. 

Until Next Time.

Residual Emotions

Temperance J · Residual Effects

Just like how a virus can leave residual effects in your body after it has passed, I think painful experiences can leave residual effects in your mind even after time has passed...at least for me I can say it has. Dealing with past memories of traumatic experiences is almost like your mind is fighting off an infection that you thought you were over. 

That's how I can explain what it's like trying to fight off memories involving Nameless. Sometimes I do feel that I've moved past these memories until something triggers them, and I’m going through it all over again, as if this just happened yesterday. Even though I'm not physically in that place anymore, I can still feel what it was like to be in that place and if I’m not careful I tend to relive these memories over and over again. 

Right now, I would consider myself in a mature place about the situation, and my heart is in a better place than it was. However, I am still working through some residual emotions that are still lingering around in my heart (although I don’t pay real attention to them until they get triggered). Sometimes I might see or hear something, and be reminded of a memory, or a memory might pop up out of no where, and that can trigger an emotion that was lying dormant for a while. Either way, the emotions are still there even if I’m not paying attention to them. 

 Remembering these feelings only reminds me that this situation with Nameless is still unresolved, and that is honestly what has made this healing process a challenge. Especially since I had no control in getting the answers I was looking for. 

So how am I fighting through these residual effects? What do I do about them? Do I just have no choice but to let them pass and die on their own like a virus? 

I feel like I've done everything I could do to stay stable emotionally, and to be honest I've come to my wit's end with this. Just when you think you've got a handle on it, then another memory that was hiding in a corner suddenly pops up, and triggers yet another feeling you hid away. This is all apart of the process...I guess. 

Anyway, the answers to those questions is that I'm not doing anything, because there's nothing I can do; at least not by myself. 

 I guess in a way I do have to let these emotions pass and die off like viruses do. I’m not saying that I have no control over how I handle those emotions when they come because I do. When I do experience a moment where I'm feeling those old emotions start to rise, instead of wallowing in them, I can make sure that I'm intentionally remembering that I do not have to allow myself to suffer, because truth is; I am no longer in that same heartbroken place I was in 6 years ago. The emotions may still feel real, but that doesn’t mean that I have to keep giving them life. 

Until Next Time.

P.S. Stay tuned for a new series entitled, “Dear Nameless,” where I go into a little more depth about these feelings towards Nameless and my process of healing. 

P.S.S I will also be posting audio versions of these blogs, (starting with this one) really soon! And some will probably have extended audio. I’m excited to share this blog in a new way so keep an eye out for those!