Restoration: Hard

Let's just pretend I've had more blog posts than menstrual cycles in 2016, and jump right in.

I've written about what a transformative experience it was for me to learn how messed up I am, to not shy away from that or downplay it. (In my opinion, it's actually one of my best posts ever, even if I refused to capitalize letters back then).  Learning to identify the events from my childhood that hurt me, and to recognize the pain they caused and still cause has been the most eye-opening experience of my life.  

This isn't one of those, "oh my gosh I need to click through to read about what dramatic event Keight's referring to that messed her up" situations. Because SPOILER ALERT: nothing grabby or terrible happened in my childhood.  No one from the Lifetime Network is calling asking for my story rights. 

But you know what? I was a human kid raised by and around other humans, and that alone GUARANTEES that I experienced painful stuff. Stuff that my kid/tween/teen brain didn't know how to deal with in a healthy way, so I just coped or numbed or distracted or [ir]rationalized my way through it. These instincts that we have for when we're confronted with pain are great because they help us survive, to get through the pain and keep living. 

But as you may know, I am interested in more than surviving (cause, you know, like, it's the tagline to the blog, right? WHATEVER, YALL).

And wouldn't it be great if once we survived long enough to grow into our adult brains we just automatically started doing things in a healthy, rational way? I mean now that we have the vocabulary and reasoning enough to understand things a little better, shouldn't we have our junk together?

EFF TO THE NAW NAW. 

Because, surprise! While my sweet little kid brain was busy coping around a painful moment, it was also setting up habits and thought patterns and making some bizarre kid-conclusions about the world (hang around with Layla for a day if you wanna experience some hilarious and "WTF" 5 year old logic). And as the ever-popular factoid says: 90% of your personality and thought patterns are fully formed by first grade. It's kind of insane when you imagine your five or six year old self being at the wheel of the decisions and relationships that you are dealing with today.

Because 5 year old Keight? Well, she had an imaginary friend named Tennis. And he was a tiny, hairy, adult man who lived in her throat. I'm not sure I want the same brain that birthed Tennis the Throat-Dweller navigating me through the grown up world of emotions and conflict and life (however, I do want to hang out with that brain's owner, because she sounds like a trippy little riot).

Tennis is in there. And those bareback shortalls are the dope freshness.

Here is a basic example from my life. When I was maybe 6 or 7, I was playing with a kitten at my cousins' house. This was the first kitten I remember ever meeting, and it was a pure wonder. As far as I was concerned, it was a stuffed animal come to life, and I treated it with my signature 6 year old gentleness (re: unintentional and clueless brutality). Well, duh, I grabbed it too hard and the cat scratched the mess out of me. I vividly remember the shock as I pulled my arm back and felt those bright red streaks of fire. I didn't even know something so sharp existed in the explored universe, much less did I expect to encounter it on this tiny fuzzball. 

Immediately in my head a switch was made from "cats are all adorable and sweet and exist to delight me" to "they are all scary and mean and will hurt me." Well, neither of those assumptions was actually true, but my kid brain swapped one for the other without skipping a beat.

When Jesse and I were newly married we found two kittens in the woods at a friend's house. We took them home so they wouldn't die, and I started looking for someone to give them to.  They were so cute, but I didn't get attached and kept saying, "we can't keep them because I HATE cats." Even when I would be cuddling them to bits, I would still assert "but I hate cats."  After a few days I was like, "huh, wait a second, what I am believing to be true and what is actually true aren't lining up." It was this strangely dramatic moment at age 24 to have the epiphany, "OMG I THINK I LIKE CATS!" 

It's not always as easy as "X  happened in my childhood and it was painful, and that is why I am still doing Y today."  It may never be so cut and dry, but that type of cause and effect is happening a ton during childhood as we learn the world and make conclusions about it. And the effects are going to keep playing out until our adult selves step in and change the pattern.

I had filed away "Cats = Bad" in my kid brain, and the case was closed. I wonder how many very lovely, sweet cats I ignored or ran away from through the years based on my faulty thinking.  And it even took my adult brain a few days of discomfort and full exposure therapy--having those little fluffy puffs clamber around all over me--before I even got the message of "WAIT A TICK! I think I DO like these things!"

I couldn't find a pic of me with a cat (for obvious reasons), but here is me in a cabbage patch kids swimsuit and my chumbo baby brother that HAS to be worth something.

It's a silly example, but it's helped me realize how powerful this stuff is, and how totally unhealthy and unfounded patterns can get passed down for generations if we don't intervene with new thinking.

But, if it was that tricky to realize I was operating on an incorrect assumption about freaking kittens because of one physically painful moment from childhood, how much harder and more painful is it to explore this stuff when the pain/lie/thought is about something closer to home, that played out over years in my heart? 

It's a buttload harder. And it feels like digging around with a red-hot poker in an infected sore. One that you had managed to contain to barely a throb when you had it all wrapped up. The vast majority of the time we choose the quiet and constant throb of lingering infection over the intense and temporarily more painful process of cleaning out the junk and truly healing.

I had no emotional investment in the feline race. The pain that one kitten caused me didn't have any attachment to my worth or identity. And yet it still took me 20 years to reevaluate the information and move forward under more correct thinking.

When I start coming up against and exploring events and patterns that tie in with my identity, my self-worth, body image; when it's issues like acceptance, intimacy, shame, fear, rejection, and abuse, my little kid brain tells me to run kicking and screaming away because it hurts and it's hard. To move past this stuff and process it in a healthy manner means letting myself truly feel the weight of what really happened, to look directly at what was lost and grieve it.

Choosing grief when it isn't absolutely required sounds insane. Grief is something we think of as forced upon us by the most dramatic circumstances of life. Circumstances that none of us wish for.  But if you get to a place like I did and you just feel stuck--in a dysfunctional marriage pattern, in unhealthy parenting, in crumbling or shallow relationships, in feeling like you're just passing through life, in your growth with Jesus; unprocessed pain could very well be why. It definitely was for me.

It's hard for me to look at the little girl in these pictures and know that she was the one that got hurt by the world and by people in it. But I would never tell her to suck it up or get over it. I would want her to be comforted and heard and healed. I have to remind myself that Jesus wants that and more for me: even the grouchy, wrinkly, not-as-cute-or-loveable 33 year old version of me today. I'm still her, and she needs someone to fight for her.

Consider this your once-every-5-years reminder from me: You're messed up and have been hurt, and dealing with it could really change your life for the better. But it will be hard and it will hurt. I'm not telling you what to do, but you should totally talk to someone with training about this stuff.

"Ugh, pain? Do I have to?" Yes, tiny Keight. You have to, for the new generation of tinies. Now eat your apple jack necklace and appreciate how exquisite 1988 is.

re: the other side of the pillow

this moment just fell into my lap (literally) yesterday afternoon. 

i think it's kind of flawless. i have no complaints about my own appearance that might get in the way of fully appreciating the moment: her perfect baby mouth, her pudgy hand holding my necklace, her sweet little mullet upswept into a high pony by my hand, and even the 3rd volume in my teddy roosevelt biography series looking on.

best believe i plastered this baby all over tarnation.

but lest this picture pull an internet/pinterest/social media trickaroo on you (like when i see a beautiful picture of twins on there and think, "oh i wish i had some!" based on one single frame) and you run off looking to get your most fertile egg nice and fertilized by the closest sperm within boinking distance--because, OMG motherhood is such a righteous snugfest!--let me show you just why the above photo is the elusive needle in the proverbial haystack of the moments that dont often get pinned:

4 minutes after the first picture, she woke up.  ponysprout erection, slack-jawed grog face, sweaty bedhead. she's still perfect and amazing but in a less "pin it!" kind of way

and then her personality wakes up:

 and yes. we are back in the wheelhouse.

i think the reason so many "perfect" pictures get internet love is BECAUSE they are the exception. just like the stories on the news are always about the 1-in-a-million thing that happens rather than exclusive interviews with the 6.5 billion people who had a normal day, didnt get murdered, win the lottery, or pull a balloon boy.

but the same tricky lies that convince us to fear those freak stories, or to waste our money on the statistically impossible (though i will always buy a $1 ticket when those jackpots get huge just to join in the fun) can mess us up, but in the opposite direction.

let me explain.

i have spent a lot of my adult life praying and wrestling and cowering my way through the crippling wound of fear. like paralyzing, imagination-on-a-rampage-until-i-am-full-on-catatonic fear. i have clung HARD to the the promises of god that i dont need to be afraid because he is with me. the exercise of NOT going there in my mind to the one in a million scenario, of taking captive those thoughts before they steal any more moments of my life has been grueling and so worth it. 

i set a boundary in jesus' name and refused to live my life a slave to the highly unlikely. if any of those things do happen, well that will suck, but jesus will drag me through it and somehow i just trust that glory will come.  but i wont live in that place until i am actually living. in. that. place.

the big scam was that i was mortgaging thousands of my here-and-nows to try to avoid one or two probably-nevers. what an easy payout for satan. i locked myself right up for him.

but in the opposite but equal way, beautiful things can steal our lives too. instead of living for the purpose of avoiding a single event, moment, or image, we can go the other way and mortgage our minds in seeking something that is just as fleeting or unlikely. 

just as much as i really couldnt stop someone from hurting me if they truly wanted to, i also can never be that effortlessly beautiful, perfectly photographed, impeccably styled mom that i see on a blog. because the reality is that A: thats just not who i am and B: it's probably not who she truly is 90% of the time either. 

when all we see is a slice, a picture, a post, a story, clip, we should be careful not to project it onto all of the stuff behind the scenes of that person nor onto ourselves. media (social and otherwise) is tricky because it reports and glorifies the exception. 

if i watch the news nonstop and look at pinterest all day i will see a ton of crime and gobs of really beautiful, relaxed, confident women. my dumb ass will instantly project this out in 2 opposite vectors: one of comparison, "how terrible! that could totally happen to me," and one of contrast--"how beautiful! but i will never be as XYZ as that," until i am some freak hanging by my mental fingernails onto sanity and unhappily convinced that i am just some ugly, frazzled, future murder victim.

WHAAAAA?!?! how did i get here!?

i have read some of the popular rants against certain kinds of pins or blogs. they typically say that these "supermoms"  make we the "normal moms" look and feel bad about ourselves because we dont concoct homemade, organic, pokemon-shaped lunches for our kids everyday and look like meg ryan (in the 90's) doing it.  

while i am all for, dont be so hard on yourself, i feel like we are missing an opportunity for introspection if we make it "their fault." no picture, post, or story can MAKE you feel anything.  but they can bring something across your radar that snags on a piece of your brokenness.

it seems to me that that's what we need to be exploring...not if that certain blogger's picture  is photoshopped or saying things like, "yeah well i bet her husband cant stand her."

this is like 1st grade sociology: the tearing down of others to build ourselves up. spoiler alert:: it doesnt work.

why does a picture of a woman with hot legs and a thick head of hair eating a picnic of carrot charizards and cucumber squirtles in a wooded vale with her 7 adoring children (3 of them adopted!) and disney-prince husband make me feel less? did the pixel-synthesizer (official term) in that camera  require a chunk of my security to create the picture?  um, i doubt it. and is it the woman's fault? hell no! she isnt trying to make a statement about what a mom in 2013 should be, she probably just wanted to look pretty and create and capture a picturesque moment for her family..

so rather than putting up my deflector shield about these things and blaming someone else for my insecurity, or rather than just giving in and drowning in the fear, i have really tried to lean into the pain that arises for me in these situations and to figure out where it is coming from within. to discern where the cracks and wounds and brokenness are in my own life that somehow have me NOT believing jesus and what he says about my life and who i am.

he says i am awesome. he says i am enough. he says my hope is built on him. he says he loves me. 

we are commanded to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn (rom 12:15). there is some sneaky evil going on in my life that makes my first reaction sniping about or cutting down others and feeling less about myself when i see my peers rejoicing (succeeding, looking good, being happy), and fearing for myself and drawing away ("i wont LET that happen to us...everyone to the bunker!") when i see others mourning. 

i really want to press in to the biblical formula for rejoicing and mourning and ditch this stupid backward one that steals joy and maturity on both sides of the coin. i want to live wholeheartedly, to explode love and joy and encouragement onto others when they are up and to walk with them in the sewers when the shit comes pouring in. 

the capitalist accountant in me says that is a fast way to have nothing left over for myself on the balance sheet, but thankfully i have bought into the upside down, backward, magic awesome economics of jesus which say that giving always leaves you with more of what counts and holding back leaves you with less. (remember his tricks with the 2 fish and the hoarded manna?...yeah, he's for real on this.)

restoring my heart

last night i went to the first meeting of a group i swore i would never set foot in. the first of 17 meetings.

jesus is quite the practical joker. if i ever swear i wont do something, it's pretty much guaranteed that in the next few years, he will take a bulldozer straight through that promise, with me chained to the front scooper gizmo, screaming all the way. and then it will turn out to have been a heaping spoonful of blessing-pants.

2003: "i will NEVER set foot in that campus ministry. they are a cult." a few weeks later, i step in because the athletic association cafeteria is closed and CCF has free chili and i am hungry and lazy. a few months later, i am going every week. a few weeks later i meet my husband inside that building. a few more months and i am baptized by the campus minister. the following year i am working full time and living in the house. as alumni, we now give a large amount of money every month to keep this "cult" running, pray daily that our kids will find a community like it when they get older, and next weekend jesse and i are going to one of their retreats to be the speakers.

good one, emmanuel.

2004: "i am glad he's my friend but i will NEVER date jesse dukes. he's so hairy and i think i saw a neck zit." yall know how that one turned out. homie is the hottest thing inside and out that i have ever set eyes on, and i do bad awesome things to him on the regular.

LOL, jehova.

so i should have known that when i said to my in-laws, "ew, i will NEVER take a restoring your heart group. i'm a hippie jesus chick and dont like binders and programs and i would NEVER spill my guts to a bunch of lady-strangers," that i was essentially saying, "giving me my name tag and my spiral-bound study guide, i'm IN!"

my father in law has worked for over 30 years building his ministry, alongside a few other men, from the ground up. today, they have lots of branches and programs and employees (who raise their own salaries through donations like missionaries) that do a lot of different things (jesse is on staff with them), but their singular goal is building disciples for jesus. hooray, i am all about that. but when he started dropping acronyms and saying "that's a phase 3 principle", he lost me: mental boner deflation.

you should know that i love my father in law (bob) DEARLY, admire most everything about him and respect him more than i can convey. i have probably learned more about jesus from him and my mother in law, linda, than i have from any other 2 people. back when i was doing my failed "top 10 of the oh-oh's countdown," the top ten things/moments of the decade, (here are #10 and #9, the only ones i ever did), the family i married into was slated for #4, behind only jesus, jesse and judah.

because i love him and being around him so much, i was like, "bob, you dont need a binder and boring chapters and abbreviations for how to be more like jesus! just teach people to live like you." and i was all high and mighty because the delivery system wasn't my style that i was willing to miss the entire message. classic keight and totally immature. i'm sure i hurt him by sort of writing off his life's work, but i wasnt against it, i just thought it wasn't right for me.

so a few years back, when they introduced a new program in their ministry, called "restoring your heart," i, of course, heard about it. it was developed using biblical principals, by a licensed counselor, with the aim of discovering where you have been wounded, how those wounds have affected, and still affect you and then grieving those wounds, and beginning to heal from them.

i thought, that sounds great, i'm sure lots of people who had shitty childhoods will really benefit from that. but again, not for me. i dont have any huge, glaring baggage that i felt like i was still carrying around. i have never been abused, havent dealt with addiction, never dealt with death or abandonment...none of the big headliner issues. i figured, nothing that bad ever really happened to me, so any issues i have are of my own doing.

both of the dukes went through a group and talked about how amazing it was for them. i believed them. they never forced anything on me or tried to talk me into doing a group. but it came up a lot because i would inevitably ask them for advice on marriage or relationships or parenting and how they had learned hings, and they would come back again and again to, "i never realized it about myself until i did the restoring your heart group but...."

a few other couples we know have been through the groups (boys and girls are in separate but parallel groups) and have raved about the results. like: every, single one goes on and on about how much it has changed their lives. how much it sucks at first, but then what freedom and wisdom comes from it.

i started to think more about it. but i always came back to, "no, i really dont have any wounds that i havent already healed from."

all this has been playing out over the past 4 years. we have dealt with marriage issues, becoming parents, having conflict with friends and family and trying to think about how we want to raise our kids. lots of these issues seem to repeat themselves: jesse and i having the same types of fights again and again, me losing my cool at judah over the same stupid triggers, getting into misunderstanding with friends because i feel devalued. these sorts of patterns made me start wondering.

one night last month we called the dukes over for an SOS emergency marriage counseling session. after a few hours of talking through things and them asking questions, it finally hit me that i do a lot of the things that cause me and jesse and my kids pain (and will continue to) because i am wounded. not in any lifetime original movie kind of way, but just in a way that screams, "oh hey, this is a fallen world and sin and lies are everywhere and they are all over you. didnt you know?"

i came to the conclusion that while growing up i interpreted and received what i thought was truth the only ways i knew how. in the process i was told, perceived, believed and reacted to many lies. lies about who i am. lies about who jesus is. lies about how god loves me. lies about shame and worth and safety.

it is really important to note here that there isnt a human bad guy in this story. it's not like my parents or a bully or a teacher ever outright lied to me on purpose to hurt me. and even though, sadly, that can sometimes be the case that people lie to and hurt us intentionally, we have to remember that they are victims of a broken world too. the only person whose entire identity is that of a liar is satan. he is where all of this shit comes from and it gives him amazing amounts of joy when he can convince us to swallow them.

every single one of us is a limping, burned, disfigured product of these lies. in the process we bang around hurting each other, even if we want only the best for and to love one another.

so in the process of growing up, and with the mind of a child, i interpreted false messages that wounded me. that taught me unhealthy patterns and unwise reactions. as kids we are constantly being passively programmed: taking what we see and hear and experience and feel and instantly interpreting it, with no conscious thought--with our tiny minds--into the worldview from which we will operate for the rest of our lives.

so, yes, a 3 year old programmed the brain from which 80% of my thoughts, assumptions and decision originate. awesome! that really explains so much.

satan is a crafty asswipe and he hurts us the most subtly as children, when we are too immature and unlearned to put words to the hurtful things and feelings that we come across. these unnamed things get cemented into our heads as "just the way things are" or "normal," or, "truth," and by the time we are old enough to "know better" (no, my dad didnt love me less because he worked all the time, or no, my mom didnt think i was stupid because she encouraged me to do better in school, or no i am not worthless because some bully kid singled me out), it doesnt matter because the fallout from those unspoken lies has already tangled itself around so much of our operating system that it has become our truth, even if we "know better" in our conscious minds.

i would say the easiest people to hate in this life are those that target and harm children. well, the devil is the king of child predators and he started working on us from infancy. he has planted sneaky and evil lies in the hearts and minds of the smallest souls that never even knew they were in a war or had an enemy. it is disgusting and evil to the core. satan's lies seek to harm us in the only lasting way that we can be hurt: by tearing us away from the truth of how much jesus loves us. it's his only weapon and he wields it with impunity and skill.

it's hard to imagine any damage being worse than what we read about in the papers or see on the news about the horrible and rare things that can happen to children, but i am realizing that every single one of us has been the victim of an even worse abuse: trying to have our hearts and minds stolen away from and twisted against our most perfect heavenly father.

and the sneakiest part is that these acts committed against us leave no outward signs, and the victims and eyewitnesses to them don't even know they have even occurred. let me say it very clearly: satan is a disgusting, malicious piece of garbage and is the only one who hurts us with full knowledge of what he is doing to us and why he is doing it. he isnt acting out of his own woundedness; he is acting purely out of his identity as a predator who wants to destroy us.

i was always afraid to talk about my "stuff" because mine "isnt that bad." i was afraid of looking like a pampered little complainer next to others who have suffered in more external or obvious ways. but you know what? i am just realizing that that's a lie too. everybody has their own stuff and by saying someone else's is better or worse than mine, i am attempting to judge whats good and what's evil based on some scale that my brain came up with. i seem to remember that doing that exact same thing didnt work out so well for all of us when adam and eve first tried it out in the garden. and you know who was right there telling them to do it? plot twist! it was the devil there too.

i now hate the little saying, "if we all put out troubles in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd want to grab ours right back out again." we are ALL living in a broken world and have been poisoned by it. every single one of us lost. no one wins this contest of "who's got it roughest/easiest?" because they have the "least" or "smallest" mess. it's not an objective scale. we are all walking around with the same score: me-0, satan-1.

just like you cant compare your physical pain to someone else's because you CANT FEEL THEIRS, we can't do that with emotional pain either. what wounded me is what wounded me and that's all i have any control over or firsthand knowledge of. end of story.

so i am done keeping my junk in the darkness. that's what satan wants anyway. for me to feel like i am a freak or that i am alone in feeling this way, or that i am lucky and didnt really get hurt. that's not truth and that's not jesus. there is no shame in christ. he would never turn me away and say, "shut up, that memory of being humiliated in 8th grade was nothing; try having nails through your hands." he is ever-comforting, always gentle, and wants to be with me FOREVER. there is nothing in my heart that he would ever dismiss or write off.

so i will be going through this class for 17 weeks with 6 other women, all strangers, led by another woman who has been trained by the people who wrote the program. i am have committed to a serious covenant of confidentiality about the things i hear during our group about the other women's stories, but i do want to share my own personal walk through this process in a public way a little bit in case any one else has ever thought there stuff was too big, too small, too ugly, too messed up or too anything to not address.

my goals: to stop some of the cycles of unhealthy behavior and recurring wounds that i exhibit, receive and inflict by discovering the lies and hurt that i developed these behaviors in response to. that sounded fancy. here's what i really mean: to figure my junk out before i pass it on to anyone else or make it worse for myself. to walk more like christ.

the thing that finally won me over was hearing my inlaws get emotional saying how much they would give to have gone back and done this before they had kids. they would pay thousands of dollars to have known what their owns wounds were so they could catch themselves in the moment of acting out of those wounds and hurting their kids as they were raising them. their gown children are already benefiting greatly from having more healthy and self aware parents, but stopping the cycle for the next generation BEFORE the many of the wounds and lies are cemented in childhood is an invaluable opportunity that i couldnt spit in the face of.

dear jesus, i already know what it feels like to have wounded my kids due to my own issues. i refuse to do that anymore out of my ignorance. will i still wound them? inevitably and tragically, yes. but i will have this stuff in the light, before my eyes and turned over to jesus, so its insidious power is lost. i might not ever get the cure on this side of heaven, but just knowing my diagnosis and what the symptoms of my wounds are will go a huge way toward breaking the cycle of their power to cause even more hurt.

i am so ready to start the painstaking process of asking the questions that lead me back down the tangled paths of emotional unhealthiness and identify where the stupid, backward messages started. to call out the lie and deny the liar. to claim the freedom that we have all been promised by the one who is truth. to trade in my scorecard of k8-0, devil-1, and redeem the inheritance that i was ransomed to: jesus-a billionty googzillion for ever eternity, satan-jack shit.

bring on my sprial-bound binder of class materials! i dont expect this to be easy. i dont expect it to be fun or solve all of my problems. i do fully expect jesus to show up and hold my hand and start turning the pixels of my heart one by one over to the truth side. it's what he does, when we let go and let him, and he's kind of undefeated at it.

here we go.