Pilfered Wisdom

Insufficient Funds

2012-02-14T17:36:00.000-05:00

Sex, Money, and In-laws - most surveys say these are the top three topics that couples argue about and I'd say that is true, even if the core issues behind all three usually are more related to pride, selfishness, and self-centeredness. 90% of the time when couples come in arguing about one of these things I can usually help them best not by whipping out slides and spreadsheets on how to do them well but rather to point them back to what is really at the root and needing to be discussed - we're really talking about MY money, MY freedom, MY pleasure, MY body, MY not being controlled, MY family, etc. If both people's hearts are in the right spot and they just need guidance then I can help people with the nuts and bolts of how to relate within extended families but I'm about as qualified to instruct people in financial matters as I am in lovemaking. I can tell you how me and my wife do things (just financially) but I'm no expert.

In fact I'm a financial idiot, not because basic math eludes me but because willpower does, and I can rationalize my way into anything. This lead to a scenario that probably only happened 5-10 times over the course of the 9 years I was responsible for running the family's finances, but each time it was mortifying. It seemed to happen more often to my wife than me, but it was standing in the check-out line of the supermarket with a buggy full of groceries and no way to pay for them. A good hour of life has already been invested in selecting just the right items and then apparently rough approximations of remaining checking balances and maxed out credit cards don't equate to a return on that time investment. So you have to walk out of the store either staring blankly at your wallet hoping it might console you or looking around hoping you don't know anyone in the store before jumping back in the car and driving home empty handed. Then later on you reach in the pantry to get something you purchased before you are once again reminded of your blunder as just because you picked something out doesn't mean it made it home with you. I share this not only so I can be openly mocked by the greater world but because I have a hunch I'm not the only one who has been there or somewhere close. The good news is you don't have to stay there, as my family will never be there again thanks to getting together with a financial counselor.

Our guy sat down with us and walked through what it actually looks like to construct an exhaustive budget and live by it, how to set aside money each month in savings for expenses that aren't monthly, and how to use a cash envelope system so you are going to the store with cash instead of a debit card and hopeful thoughts. What this means for us is no longer living paycheck to paycheck, building savings, eliminating debt, and most of all a freedom that comes from being in charge of our money rather than our money being in charge of us. You may be awesome at all this stuff and if so good for you, read a different blog entry, but if you are like me then stop rationalizing or getting more information and get guidance and accountability. If you are in the Charlotte area contact Kim and Loree Heimbach at http://www.newhopefinancialcs.com/ or 704-604-3485. If you aren't then check out http://www.daveramsey.com/coaching/find-coach/ to find somebody in your area.

It's All Good

2012-02-06T18:44:00.000-05:00

If you asked your average Christian what the single greatest threat to Christianity was you'd likely get answers ranging from Islam to Obama, to a Muslim Obama. We usually think of the worst threats being external and either religious or political, when I believe the greatest threat to the future of Christianity in America really is a cultural issue that has been sneaking within. Just because certain other religions disagree with us doesn't mean they are the real competition, and I believe Satan is happy as can be having major world religions just look at each other squabbling while religion itself is eroded away. I also think vilifying either side of the political spectrum with religious arguments just contributes to the problem by making Christians look small-minded and focused more on agendas than a life changed by their savior.
Keep in mind that I believe enough in the sovereignty of God to think that Christianity itself can be killed off or that it is actually in danger, we aren't that powerful to screw it up. What I'm talking about is on an individual level and especially for our children to pass on an authentic faith that will serve them as adults rather than weak superstition, rigid dogma, or assuming they have it all figured out when they don't have a clue. I'm more interested in how to engage a teenager about faith or how to discuss my faith with someone who just doesn't see it as all that important. What it comes down to is the term "Christian" has really come to lose a lot of its meaning, we can't just assume that when the term is used that people actually know what it means. Its like the word "love," which can be used to mean anything from "I passionately love my wife and children" to "I really love chocolate ice cream." Now people refer to themselves as "Christian" if they sometimes go to church, or kind of believe there might be a god out there somewhere, or if their parents are Christians, or if they just happen to be an American. This makes it kind of hard for me as a counselor because I often have clients state right out of the gate that they are a Christian and for me that has a set of presuppositions that often aren't what they were implying. It also means that talking to teenagers and young adults about faith involves a verbal jujitsu to get them to consider God at all much less allow themselves to be pinned down by any label or categorization.

For me it helps to have a starting point of what it is that someone actually believes rather than me making random assumptions one way or the other, but it seemed like it kept coming back to one coherent set of beliefs that really weren't Christian but couldn't be otherwise categorized. Finally the great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill produced a sociologist named Christian Smith who has written a book that has defined exactly this set of beliefs I keep running into. In Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers he writes about a concept he refers to as moralistic therapeutic deism which to me helps elucidate the belief system that our culture serves up in heaping doses through every form of media until it becomes just the atmosphere we walk around in. Maybe the saddest part of the study revealed that for most teenagers the interviewer was the first adult in their lives to ever ask them questions about or engage them in discussion about matters of belief. Most parents rely on church, youth group, or their own sterling example to be sufficient for helping their teens know everything they need to know about faith. The belief system of Moralistic Theological Deism (MTD) can best be understood by the following five belief statements:

1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."

2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."

4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."

5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Now some of you may read those and think, "well that's pretty much what I believe," or "what is so wrong with that?" It isn't a problem except that it isn't even close to Christianity even though as my religion professor referred to it, "It tastes like chicken" meaning it is close enough to resemble orthodoxy to make its way inside the church and gain widespread acceptance. When most teens, along with most public figures and celebrities talk about Christianity, this is what they are talking about. It would take way too long to break down exactly what the theological differences are but I'll hit some of the high points. MTD sees God as "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process." Some major things are missing or perhaps purposely excluded because they make us as Americans uncomfortable, like the depravity of humanity. If the only people who make it to heaven when they die are "good" people then we are all in trouble, because Jesus will be standing there all alone. We like to use the term good, because then it is up to us and we can just send Jeffrey Dahmer, Bin Laden, and our ex-husband to Hell while we and all our friends and family get to be good as determined by us. If however we think we can really be "good" then it follows that God would want us to be that, except that the cross is a blaring reminder that we are all screw ups in need of mercy and grace rather than rock stars getting cheered on by a god who just wishes he were as awesome as us.
MTD also assumes that everything in this world is all about us as humans, whatever makes us happy, while Christianity says that the entire created world is about God and his glory and honor. We like to rewrite things with us as the central focus, but in Christianity there is no room for that - God isn't focused on our happiness that comes and goes, if anything he cares more about our holiness, but ultimately he is focused on everyone experiencing just how huge he is and being humbled in the process. There are great benefits we receive when we see God accurately but the cost is having to see ourselves accurately as well, because if it is all about God and not us then he gets to decide reality and not us, he gets to judge and not us, and he gets to decide when and how he involves himself in our world. He isn't a genie to be rubbed so we can get bailed out of crises but ignored when we think we are good, he is the King of kings and Lord of lords to be worshiped and obeyed.

Where is the good news in all of this? MTD leaves you feeling self-righteous, important, and good enough but ultimately unfulfilled because it is hollow. We all want something to devote our lives to that is bigger than ourselves because at the core we all know we really aren't that important and even when we define good for ourselves we don't live up to our own standards. All the conflict in our lives stems from seeing ourselves as the most important thing, it is outrage that we aren't being treated the way we feel we deserve because of our greatness. Without a God that forgives us exactly because we can't make it right on our own and are hopeless without his mercy we will never be able to truly forgive another person - unless you know what it is like to be forgiven the best you can do is ignore or try and rationalize the harms against you. Without a God who is greater than us and the collective opinion of others we'll never develop a stable sense of worth and value. And if we don't understand God's unconditional one-sided love that benefits us while we have absolutely nothing to offer him we'll manipulate every relationship we have trying to get what we want and expect from people.

So maybe rather than asking stupid questions of our kids, coworkers, and friends like "Are you a Christian?" we can begin asking what their thoughts and beliefs are on God and what he wants in their life. We need to stop blithely accepting labels thrown out that have no meaning and actually engage in real dialogue or we'll both be nodding and have no idea how far apart we really are. I think one reason we avoid the deeper conversations is we don't feel confident in what we believe because our entire culture presents a different picture. It's OK to talk about a loving God who wants you to be happy that is there for you in a pinch but knows when to scram so you don't ever have to feel bad. But popping someone's bubble and letting them know that they aren't their own God, that the world religions have vastly different and mutually exclusive belief systems, and that trying hard to be good just polishes the facade and you invite criticism and ridicule. Laying out the beliefs of MTD should help us engage our culture in a relevant way, open up dialogue, and provide hope for people who as try as they might can't squeeze fulfillment and purpose out of a false gospel.

Keeping Score

2012-02-01T18:02:00.000-05:00

Lots of couples keep score in marriage, I'd wager to say that most everyone who has ever been married has kept score at some point and probably routinely. By keeping score I mean holding on to some sort of measure of fairness in the marriage based either on number of times the other person has screwed up, number of times they have let you down, or how long it has been since a desired action or behavior has occurred. Men are quick to accuse their wives of this as they are usually pretty good about ignoring the 49 things fully accomplished on the to-do list and focus in on why exactly the toilet didn't end up getting cleaned when they have never been the one to get urine anywhere other than in the bowl. But then I have also found that most every husband on the planet can give you how many days/weeks/years/minutes it has been since the last time their wife had sex with them, data which they are pretty sure is scientifically reliable but almost always errs on the side of exaggeration. Most of this comes from always having a front row seat to observe what we are doing but only occasionally seeing what they do, knowing full well how many times we held our tongue but only having access to the data of when they don't. Whether it is how many times I have done the dishes because you forgot or how many times you have said you are sorry in the last year or the last time I felt like you called me at work and didn't have a complaint from me we all seem to have a running internal scoreboard that is constantly updated. The problem with this scoreboard is that it is rarely even remotely accurate and even if it were it all is a push for fairness in a marriage - and fairness is something that should have been crushed in Kindergarten but seems to survive for most of us.

I touched on this idea here: http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/compromise-key-to-marriage.html in talking about the myth of compromise, but fairness doesn't just infect decision making, but our general stance towards the other person. Either they are doing a sufficient job at pleasing me (Because my happiness IS the supreme ruling force of the universe to be striven after by all, not the worship and glorification of our creator and savior...) and I feel like the scales are balanced, or I am doing the lion's share of the work, responsibility, and sacrifice and therefore I am owed a debt. But if doing things for the person we love and have pledged our life to produces resentment or an invoice then what are we saying about them but that they are really just an object and not a person to be appreciated and loved? Love doesn't expect to be paid back, an exchange does, and if you are part of an unchristian, legal-document, formal contract arrangement then your work and effort needs to be compensated, but if you are loving someone then just shut up and do it. If loving someone who can't love you as well in return makes you foolish then Christ is the biggest fool of all. Maybe you are a part of a relationship with your creator and savior who knowing full well you couldn't begin to pay him back for the lavish love he decided to pour out on you still decided to enter a relationship with you and will never back out. If so and you call yourself a follower of Christ then love deeply and foolishly and pray that your idiocy brings God more glory. If you exist in a world where you are what is most important than by all means squeeze every bit you can out of your spouse, use them up and spit them out, guilt and manipulate them into giving you what you want and throw them to the curb when they stop producing. If loving someone causes resentment because you don't feel paid back then you need to reassess whether you even know what the word "love" means, because apparently you are treating them like a retirement account - you put stuff in and invest so that eventually you can get even more back out.

I've had a relatively easy and trauma free life but I've often thought that Viktor Frankl must have had a hard time biting his lip as a therapist when people came in to complain to him. Probably could have gone like this:
Client: "Yeah, my wife is getting fatter and I'm just really not attracted to her any more. It's just not fair, I make lots of money and she just lays around eating bon-bons all day..."
Frankl: "Hmmm, yeah I had a wife once. Her, my mom, and my dad were all murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp I only survived because I was a doctor so I was useful. They needed my psychiatric skills to calm down the cattle that were being lead to the slaughter. I'm sorry, what were you saying?"
While I am pretty sure this never happened, he did have the ultimate trump card for peoples complaints and in a way the Bible gives similar advice - gratitude and appreciation are pretty important and you only get them with perspective. Are you worried? The Bible says when you stop to appreciate what you have and how God has always provided for you it gives you the perspective to trust him. Are you in an unfair relationship? The Bible says if you are in relationship with Christ it is far more lopsided and unfair than any other relationship you have but you like it that way.

You see, when people tell me they just want fairness they don't really mean it, they want more and better, even more than they deserve. You want fair? The average family income in America is $31,000 a year, so it would only be fair to be given that to work with as a couple. But then internationally you are considered statistically in the "rich" category if you make $8,000 a year so really it's "unfair" you have so much money. One in four women and one in four men will be sexually abused at some point in their life, so fair means you should have to throw that into your marriage and see how that affects things. 22% of wives are abused by their husbands, as high as 42% in other parts of the world so fair would say that you should spend at least a fourth of your marriage cowering in fear of retribution. 30-60% of marriages involve an extramarital affair, etc, etc. The truth is you don't want fair because your wife gaining weight is a burden the vast majority of the world would have a hard time sympathizing with you for as 925 million people do not have enough to eat. Bickering about who has to clean the house you actually own when warlords and corrupt governments make that difficult in some places, who should get to drive the "newer" car when people walk miles to the nearest semi clean water, and how often your husband wants to have sex with you when millions of women and girls around the world are sold into sex slavery and forced to have sex with 40-110 "men:" a day seems like we could all use a bit of perspective. Because it is only with a healthy perspective that we can see the immense blessing that our spouse is and how blessed our lives are, and it is only by deciding to stop manipulating our partners to get what we want that we open ourselves up to truly loving them.

Best line from a sermon I've ever heard was "Fair died on the cross." We don't want fair, we don't want what we deserve, we want some counterfeit myth of the perfect husband or wife we were promised by a deluded society.

Fair died on the Cross

Raising Little Narcissists

2011-12-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

Most experts agree that American children are at a major risk today of developing greater and greater senses of their own importance, not their value but their importance. Narcissism is growing at an incredibly high rate, and a sense of entitlement is seen in kids across the socioeconomic spectrum, and everyone has their opinions as to why. There are those who immediately blame the parents for sweeping in and rescuing their kids from consequences, puffing their children up with nothing but positive reinforcement. There are those who say it is because we took pray out of schools and are becoming a godless nation. There are those who say it is our cultural media through television, the internet, and music that is warping the minds of our children. I think I could easily argue than none of these three in themselves are powerful enough to ruin a child, but it's possible that the combination of the three is becoming a pretty potent recipe for creating little narcissists.

As far as parenting goes I think most parents struggle with falling into one error or the other - a child-focused house or an adult-focused house, and that they both have consequences. In an adult-focused home children are to be seen and not heard, and they are to cater and pander to the parents who should be able to dish out orders and commands like a Roman emperor without so much as an eye-roll. These kids learn well how to avoid upsetting their parents - some decide to do those things as often as possible to stick it to the man, some smile to your face and do whatever they like behind your back, and some make it their life mission to please everyone in their life - a task they never figure out is impossible. Creating a child-focused house, the side I am more prone to err on, says that adults are flexible and adaptable and should sacrifice for their children and so we should cater to their desires and set things up around them. This expresses love, but often also convinces children that they are the most important people in the world, with everyone else here to cater to them. These are the children that yell and berate their parents like insolent employees who just can't seem to follow instructions sufficiently as the parents shuck and jive trying to avoid stirring up negative emotions in their kids. If the rules of hide-and-seek don't suit their child well, then throw the rules out the window and let them do it however makes them happy. If their teacher has some misguided notion that they aren't perfect then you need to march down to the school and berate them for harboring a negative thought, much less correcting your child. The kids end up being treated like little tiki gods, extremely powerful but temperamental - to be catered to for fear of being thrown into a volcano of a temper-tantrum. You can see how this approach could encourage kids towards a narcissistic mindset, consumed with their own importance.

People who are convinced we once were a godly nation who has slipped into ungodliness are pretty misguided from my viewpoint but everyone is entitled to their opinions. Somehow Thomas Jefferson coming home after a rough day of writing up the Constitution to rape the woman he purchased as a slave, creating children who were roughly one-half human and one-half property doesn't strike me as terribly Christ-like. Comparing America to ancient Rome where gory public death was seen as entertainment, any respectable grown man had a young boy to use as a sexual object, and many dining rooms had an adjoining room where you could go vomit up your food so you could go eat more seems like a bit of an overstatement to me. Those who say prayer has been taken out of public schools ultimately are only correct when it comes to organized public prayers aimed at promoting a particular religious persuasion which for me is a better option than forcing my kids to pray to Allah, Krishna, or even touting a non-essential debatable theological stance. All of this aside, however, we exist in a secular society that touts the importance of man far more than God - whether it has always been that way, is getting better, or is getting worse isn't the point. Most kids today are either considered extremely important themselves because of meaningless achievements on tests, in sports, or on stages or are encouraged to consistently compare themselves to celebrities and icons who are at the apex of these achievements. It is rarely taught that having character, having a heart after God is anywhere close to as valuable as being compared to others and considered important.

Research seems to also show that our media seems to regularly promote narcissism as well, but whether it is media warping young people's minds or simply catering to what they already value is hard to tell. An interesting article summarizing a longitudinal study across the past decades comparing the most popular television programs for 9-11 year olds and the corresponding values those shows promote recently came out - http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/popular-tv-shows-teach-children-210119.aspx The chart below summarizes across each decade which of the 16 measured values were most reflected in that decades most popular shows.

The most interesting thing about the study is the sudden shift in the last decade from focus on community feeling or even image and self acceptance to the high priority of fame. General trend is a movement from societal focus to self focus, and then recently slingshotting past being self focused to needing everyone else to understand just how important we are. Fame jumped from 13th or 15th place to number one most important and once again this has to have an impact on future levels of Narcissism. Combine this with Facebook and other social media and we provide not only a drive for fame and the attention of others but an actual platform to act it out. If a teenager has even as low as just a hundred friends on Facebook, they have a stage where they can feel others are looking at them from afar, acknowledging their attractiveness, laughing at their considerable wit, and praising their every accomplishment from Grandma posting "Congratulations on your graduation" to their friend "like"ing their newest hairstyle. Nothing wrong with social media or television, but there is a growing trend of inflating young people's views of their own importance.

So if all three are valid problems then I think as parents we have to take all three seriously in raising our children to be confident but humble, have high self-esteem but a compassion for others, and ultimately to see the fame of God as a much greater goal that their own fame. Maybe we need to start saying "no" to our kids a little more for their own good, not just our selfishness or laziness. Maybe it's OK to pop our kids bubble and let them know that some things they are great at and some things they really just aren't. Maybe we need to teach them that kids aren't the most important and adults aren't the most important, but that God is most important and he has tasked us as parents under his authority to help our children understand what it is like to submit to authority. Probably the number one resistance I get in counseling to seeing people accept Christ is that they have never heard anyone tell them "no" and they are afraid that if they become a Christian then God will say "no" to a lot of things in their life they are unwilling to give up. Maybe we can use TV or social media to create relevant discussions with our kids about their values and greatest aspirations compared to what they are seeing. At the core I believe a big part is helping our children to understand their VALUE, far more than their importance. Your daughter's friend may have 50 more Twitter followers than her, but your daughter is valued and treasured by you for who she is, not how important others see her. Your son may not have been voted class president, but Jesus Christ came and died for him to show him just how valuable his soul really is. When our kids see that we take our role as parent's seriously because of how much we value them as a person we can say "no" to them, and stop pandering to them because later on they'll never overhear us comparing them to others, judging their importance academically, socially, or athletically. A child who grows up feeling important desperately wants to hold on to that importance and narcissism is a convenient lie that helps them feel important even while they doubt their own value. A child who grows up feeling valued for who they are, not what people say about them or what they are able to do are able to see and appreciate that same value in other people and act in humility and compassion. See the core problem is the same with fearful people-pleasers as with tactless narcissists - they both are scared to death of having no value and so work hard to promote their own worth in other people's eyes. Either way what is needed is to see that the creator of the universe loves you so much that he gave that which he most valued, his own son, to reclaim you as infinitely valuable in his eyes. If this is true then fame doesn't matter, pleasing and narcissism are unnecessary, and we can extend the same value we feel to others around us without a fear that if we increase their value then it threatens our own.

Thorn In Your Flesh

2011-11-14T15:17:00.001-05:00

I have found that most people tend to struggle with the same frustrating weaknesses over and over in their lives and no matter how hard they try they can't seem to make them better. I know this sounds like blasphemy coming from a Christian counselor whose career is based on helping people get out of stuck patterns and getting to a state of increased healthiness, but it is often the case. There is definitely a sanctification process where we as believers are transformed by God over the course of our lifetimes being shaped more into His image, and there are insights and tools that counseling can provide that facilitate this process, but often there is a point where no matter how hard I work as a counselor or how hard my client works the weakness doesn't seem to go away. The young man who is afraid he might actually lose his job soon if his business finds out he regularly surfs for porn during work hours, who works extremely hard to institute changes, does everything I tell him to do, and fervently begs God to take the temptation away from him. The woman who has been in counseling for decades and studies scripture daily looking for God to lift her depression that even medication doesn't seem to touch. The spouse that tries and works their tail off trying to transform their marriage and years later continue to get nothing in return. There seems to be cases where people work hard and get better and cases where people work hard and don't get better, but rarely if ever are there times where people are irresponsible and put forth no effort but they are magically transformed by God. So maybe the two necessary components for significant life change are a determination to put forth effort and take responsibility paired with the transforming power of God, where one without the other is ineffective. Don't get me wrong, I believe Non-Christians can improve their marriages and become less anxious, they just have to do all the work on their own and have to fight an uphill battle against their own sin nature to which they are a slave. I also believe that God is sovereign and could choose to transform a person without them doing a thing, I just more often observe in counseling as well as scripture that God seems to like for us to invest in the process rather than sitting back and waiting on the magic.

So this post isn't expressly for those who just don't have a relationship with Christ, or for those who just aren't interested in doing the work of getting better, but rather those who are crying out desperately to God to rescue them from their sinful flesh and are doing everything in their power to take responsibility but consistently see no change. Paul says this, and we can all relate:

2 Corinthians 12:7b-10

New International Version (NIV)

⁷ Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The relationship between man and sin, before and after salvation is a deep and theologically rich topic which can't be fully fleshed out here but the basics I am working from are these: God could have chose to create a world without choice and therefore no sin but it would have also been mindless automatons devoid of the ability to really love. He also could have set it up to where when we accept Christ we are not only forgiven of our past but allowed to move forward without ever sinning again, but that seems to not be the case. And while many believers experience the supernatural deliverance from their sin, weakness, or affliction there are many more that, like Paul, never seem to catch a break.

What this indicates to me about the heart and character of God is that he seems to be more interested in us relying on him in humility and dependence, regardless of what kind of benefit we get from it, far more than he is interested in us becoming more and more perfect and sinless according to the law. It seems that the work of sanctification, where we are rescued from the bondage of sin and able to live more in the image of God, is a work that we are powerless to do in and of ourselves. But it is also a process in which God likes for us to do our part, to struggle and fight, to make responsible choices, and to step out in audacious faith - kind of like my kids cleaning up the playroom on a much grander scale. I know I will be doing the vast majority of the picking up of toys and that by the end I am lucky to get a toy or two a piece cleaned up from my boys but I want them to take ownership and engage in the process even though I could lock them in there for days and they could never get it exactly perfect, but would more likely just create a bigger mess.

I think this is important for people to remember for several reasons, one of which is that it reminds us that if we aren't seeing significant reduction in our sinfulness and we can't easily just acknowledge our own lack of responsibility that maybe God teaches us just as much from allowing us to stay in our sinfulness as he does from rescuing us out of it. It's really just our stubborn humanness that convinces us that the chief goal of life is to stringently stick to a set of laws and work towards becoming more and more perfect. The Bible, however, is chock full of stories and injunctions that suggest us focusing on being more and more sinless is not the correct focus as it ultimately is on us and our elevation instead of God and his glory. God flat out tells Abraham to commit the worst kind of sin, killing his own son, just to make the point that we are to be about listening to his voice and obeying rather than blindly following dogma. In Micah 6:8, God indicates that our acts of sacrifice, trying to become more and more perfect, are worthless compared to a heart of humility and mercy, broken and contrite. It seems keeping us weak and helpless gives God the richest, fertile ground for these things. If you can just get it in your mind to kick a sin and you do it then it becomes hard to stay humble. If you never have to struggle with something far beyond your own power and steely resolve then it is much easier to interact with others based on judgement rather than mercy. And Paul speaks clearly when he says God's power is made perfect in our weakness. I believe God prefers a dependent person over a sinless person any day, someone who knows his frailness and desperate ongoing need for not just a far off savior but a daily strength to get through the day. Someone who knows that they don't have the power to stand toe-to-toe with temptation, that they'd lose 10 times out of 10, and that their only hope is to run full speed away from sin's tempting influence and into the arms of God.

Maybe your weakness is a mouth that can't help but gossip, slander, and judge whenever you are around your friends. Maybe for you it is a nagging sense of never feeling good enough that keeps you working late and disappointing your wife once again. Maybe there are weeks on end where it takes the effort of climbing Mt. Everest to get you out of bed in the morning and reading your Bible just feels like ash in your mouth. Maybe you weep while praying that today when your wife leaves to go to work you won't be haunted by urges to surf for porn or get out your stash of whiskey she doesn't know about. All I know is that over the years I have met many men and women of every age that deeply love Christ and desperately cry out to him to be delivered from their weaknesses only to hear that God's grace is sufficient. These are also the humblest, least judgmental, pious, and Christ-like people I've had the pleasure of knowing. God likes to use weak people, prone to sinfulness, and flawed in every way because when he does great things in and through us the watching world has no other logical recourse than to see the handiwork of an powerful and praiseworthy God. God chose a murdering adulterer to bear the title of a man after his own heart, used a fanatical murderer of Christians to spread the gospel further than any other man, and he uses weak, recurrently sinful, and hopelessly dependent me to counsel broken people because I am and always will be one too.

Listen Up

2011-11-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Most of our parents did a pretty good job of teaching us how to talk but few did as well at helping us learn how to listen, a skill that most of us struggle with. Some of this comes from when our parents tell us to listen to them they really mean obey, they aren't just as happy if we were to say, "Father, I know you worked hard to provide the money for my hard working mother to purchase and prepare these brussel sprouts, and that your desire is that I eat them all. I regret to inform you, however, that I have chosen not to eat them, but to wait for the ice cream later." We sort of grow up believing that listening automatically implies obedience, and often this is poison in our other relationships, because when people feel they are not being heard they tend to either get louder or repeat themselves - or both. It happens all the time in marriage counseling that a spouse says to me something like, "My husband just never listens to me. I've tried talking nicely, yelling, repeating myself, and nothing gets through!" I then ask the other spouse what it is that their partner is trying to get them to hear and they almost always can parrot back exactly what it is - they have heard what was being said. Then a foreign concept is introduced where you have to help a person understand that just because someone hears what you are saying, it doesn't mean they will agree with it or be willing to submit to your demands.

So then, how do we become better listeners, and help others understand that we are listening without just placating and agreeing to get them off of our back? It first starts with reminding ourselves that core truth about marriage that 70% of what we are going to argue about over the course of our marriage are perpetual issues that will never be resolved, but still need to be discussed. He will always be late, she will always have a lower sex drive, they will never be best friends with your dad, and they will never be able to hold onto cash in their pocket for more than a day, and no amount of deeply hearing your brilliant wisdom on life will change these things. So most of our conversations about frustrations, disappointments, and hurts will best be handled by really hearing the other person's perspective, validating and empathizing with them, and reassuring them of your love and commitment, not fixing them so they never do it again.

The second thing we have to do is learn to temporarily shut off our self-centered brain long enough to truly put ourselves in our partner's world and experience long enough to get where they are coming from. This requires two difficult tasks, shutting our mouths, and shutting down our internal conversation where we are fact-checking their statements, determining if we agree with them or not, and figuring out how to counter their obviously flawed viewpoint. This takes metaphorical muscles inside our brains and wills that for most of us are extremely weak and atrophied. We have to get to a point where we care at least as much about hearing the other person as we are about being heard.

Once we get those two things down it gets a lot easier and you can then just make sure you are internally hearing the content, perspective, and emotions behind what is being shared as well as externally reassuring our partner that we get those three things. Mirroring or reflecting content is the first of the three and it is crucial to get before you can really do the other two, or else you will each be having two different independent conversations with each other. Often we assume we know what our partner is saying or what they are REALLY trying to say rather than just working to hear exactly what they are actually saying. Once you have the actual content you are less likely to remember each other having said different things down the road, "Remember last week when you said X? No way, I said Y..." The second part is to make sure you get their perspective by validating them, letting them know that even if you disagree or did not mean for your actions to be interpreted the way they have, that you can see how they view it that way from their point of view. They aren't crazy or irrational, just rationally convinced of a different perspective. Then you finally can make sure you reflect their emotions through empathizing with them, picking up on how the situation makes them feel and letting them know you understand. If you assume it is possible to have a disagreement and don't feel you need to bully the other person into agreeing with your perspective, can shut up and focus wholly on the other person, and let them know you get the content, perspective, and emotion behind what they are saying then you are listening. They will feel heard, be more likely to be OK with you having a different perspective, and actually curious to hear what it is, rather than just having the usual control battle about who will be heard.

Anxiety and Control

2011-11-02T21:29:00.000-04:00

Wow, after a hefty month off from the blog I will finally deliver on the promise from the previous post of a helpful strategy for getting yourself out of an overwhelmed state of worry. Anxiety is a huge topic which I am sure I will hit on more at some point but for this post I will focus more on worry and some practical steps that can help manage and process worry state. The first thing to remember about worry and anxiety are that they are not only unavoidable but necessary and even helpful in the right contexts. When you have a big test next week it is worry that gets you off of the Xbox and your nose in the books. When your child is walking a little too far ahead of you at the county fair it is anxiety that keeps your vision locked onto them. When you get your credit card statement and it makes you want to vomit it is worry that makes you tough it out at an unpleasant job rather than telling your boss to shove it. Worry is helpful when you are faced with a situation where you need to do something that is within your control in order to prepare for or respond to something in the present. Laying in bed late at night worrying about whether the upcoming budget cuts will cost you your job is not useful or beneficial. Lamenting the poor quality of the local high school that your 3 year old is districted to attend some day isn't helpful. Assuming that because you are 23 and have not yet received a marriage proposal that you are destined to a sad and decrepit life ending as an isolated elderly shut in who is eaten by her 95 cats and the world doesn't even notice for weeks is perhaps premature.

A horse who is working and supposed to only focus on what is in front of them to avoid distraction and wandering off is outfitted with blinders, because it really doesn't matter what is to the left or right, only what is straight ahead. In a similar way I have found a big part of determining whether worry is helpful or destructive is to put on two blinders by asking two questions about the situation. Blinder #1 - What can I do right now in the present about the situation. This means if you are focusing on fixing some mistake or beating yourself up for something from the past and you are NOT in possession of a functioning time machine then you need to forcibly focus yourself on the present and what you can do now. If you are living in the future, mapping out 90 different scenarios of what might possibly happen and preparing contingency plans for each of them, and you are not one of those creepy precogs from the movie, Minority Report, then you are doing what Beth Moore refers to as paying payments on debts that most likely will never come due. What can you do right here and now about your big job interview in the morning when it is midnight? Go through your mental Rolodex of every possible question that has ever been asked from one human to another, or just roll over and get some good sleep for the big day. Rather than once again convincing yourself that you will never dig your way out of the debt you have piled up and that it is just a matter of time before your house is foreclosed on and your kids repossessed, you could step out of the line at Starbucks and decide that starting right here and now I'm going to stop spending money frivolously starting with the couple of bucks you have in your hand. We like to think that if I can be prepared for something bad to happen then it can hurt us less, which is true if you have set up an emergency savings fund in case your job gets outsourced, but getting shot in the leg pretty much hurts the same whether you anticipated it or not.

The second major blinder to keep secured into place is to ask the question "What do I have control over in this situation?" If you are honest with yourself then usually the answer is very little as the vast majority of the control we convince ourselves we possess is just an illusion. We can't really force our kids to make good decisions so worrying that if we were good parents that they would never make mistakes is giving yourself a little too much false control. Being riddled with anxiety about losing your job is helpful if it pushes you out of your comfort zone to start sending your resumes out to better opportunities or to buckle down and start actually doing the job you've been getting paid to perform for years, but just rehashing over and over that somebody in a boardroom somewhere might make a decision that will cost you your current job doesn't actually lead to preparing yourself or responding to the situation. What do you have control of? Your thoughts, feelings, decisions, beliefs, values, and commitments? What do you not have any control over? Basically everything outside of that. I'd say everything outside of your own skin but marathon runners with high cholesterol and health food nuts with cancer would say that's even a myth. I'd say everything outside of your own mind but those suffering with debilitating depression or in the midst of intense grief would say that you often don't even have control over that.

So you find yourself absolutely crippled with anxiety, worried about the million troubles in your life and how you are going to fix them, what do you do? You get out a piece of paper and write out each major issue and list them out, which immediately shrinks your list from a million to like 6. Counting anxieties in your mind is like counting toddlers in a room, you end up getting a much higher number because they keep moving around. Once you have each of the main categories you hit each one individually with the two big questions of what do I have control of in this and what can I do right now about it and it will look something like this:

It's 10 at night and you are getting ready for bed and just feel overwhelmed:
1. Aunt Suzy is having a hip replacement - I can pray for her and ask God to give her a speedy recovery. I can write on my task list to pick up a card tomorrow while I am grocery shopping.
2. We are in a bad economy - Pray.
3. I think my daughter is sexually active - Pray. Stop by her room and just tell her I love her, hope she sleeps well, and that if there is anything at all that she feels like she needs to talk with me about that I am here for her. Put on my to do list for Wednesday while I am having tea with Mary Beth to get the contact info for that hit-man she hired for her rotten husband to see if he does grungy teen boys as well (Just Kidding).
4. My marriage is falling apart and I'm afraid my husband doesn't love me any more - Pray that God will help you forgive his shortcomings and that he would reveal your own and give you the strength to become better. Before going to bed tell him I am committed to him, that I love him, and that he is good enough in my eyes. Write down in task list for Friday night to make him a big steak out of the blue and rub his back before bedtime. Spend my last few minutes before I fall asleep tonight reading a book on being a better wife rather than using the time to watch CSI: Hoboken reruns.

One last great resource on this topic is a recent sermon at my church called "Work, don't worry. Because worry don't work." - If you have an ipod/pad/phone just get the elevation church app as it has all the old sermons and find it under the "Treatment" series - or hopefully this link works - http://www.podcast.tv/video-episodes/treatment-anxiety-worry-don-t-work-part-1-15353536.html

Worry vs Denial

2011-10-04T17:08:00.000-04:00

There are plenty of things I may struggle with over the course of my life but due to my personality and natural temperament I am definitely not an anxious person. I'll struggle with being lazy far before becoming a workaholic, I'm not even sure if wokahol even exists much less where to get a hold of it. I'm not a worrier so there have probably been times in the past where I may have even judged others for worrying, but that is my right as a Christian in America. We like to pick something we are never going to struggle with and then choose that to judge the faith of others like homosexuality, gossip, or depression - it's easy for us to avoid temptation so must be for others. That is why I am thankful to God that he gave me almost a solid year of worrying on a daily basis so that I could never judge again, so I could better empathize with those who do, and so that I could learn the real antidote to worrying - trusting in God's provision.

A little while back I found myself in a position where I was working at a counseling center that just didn't have that many clients, and so my schedule was pretty wide open. Up until that point in my career I always had plenty without really having to work that hard and if I did do a little networking or advertising myself it resulted in immediate results. But then I hit a point where even with advertising and practically calling people begging them to let me counsel them I was still unable to see enough clients to even pay my basic bills, month after month after month. My wife, friends, and family would all reassure me that it had nothing to do with how good of a counselor I was and it was just the bad economy, but I didn't believe it. I'm pretty thick skinned and don't take much personally, especially counseling and the approval of others, but even if I didn't care whether people liked me I cared whether I could provide for my family. It was at this point that I learned point number one about worry, as long as you live in denial you never have to worry. It finally clicked with me that the reason other people worried and I didn't was because I lived life with my eyes closed, fingers in my ears, and humming a tune to myself while they were actually looking at reality. As month after month stretched by my denial was crushed and I was forced to what I really believed about worry, that maybe I was in this spot because I was irresponsible and reaping what I had sown. Maybe I had taken the gift God had given me for granted and not applied myself fully to being a success and the result was my son crying for more milk and I didn't get paid for another week so he had to go without. Like a punch to the stomach I was awakened from my blissful ignorance and forced to stop denying, so naturally I turned to worry as the next valid option.

So I buckled down and did more to drum up new clients, applied for jobs outside of private practice counseling, networked, begged, pleaded, and did everything I could to to become successful. The whole time I had a running number in my head of how many clients I needed each week to pay my bills and each time a client cancelled my heart sank as I tried to make it up. Right on the verge of when I was beginning to see the prospect of new clients in terms of dollar signs rather than human beings in need of God's liberating truth in their lives I even began applying for jobs outside of counseling. That is when I read the book, Sun Stand Still, by Stephen Furtick and I learned the next big lesson about worry that really made a difference, it isn't about me. I began in a spot where I felt like I was invulnerable and worries were unimportant and small because I chose not to look at them. I graduated into a spot where I saw the worries and concerns as huge but that maybe I could be big enough to tackle them. Where God brought me was to a place where I saw how big the worries and concerns were and how small I was to conquer them but how large He is and how capable God is to make the sun to stand still in my life for my provision.

It was at this point that I stopped worrying and began trusting in God for my provision, not in the pseudospiritual way I started out in where I did nothing and expected God to do the work, but in a way where I had active faith. I began doing what the book refers to as digging ditches, I prepared for where God was taking me rather than worrying about where I was. I did advanced training, I read more book, I became a better counselor, I took the time to remind myself why God called me to become a counselor in the first place and it wasn't to collect a paycheck. I nagged, harassed, and begged the partners at my current practice to please feel sorry for me and offer me a storage closet to work out of and when after five years of trying they finally gave me a shot I jumped on it. My prayer was answered and I was blessed with a position at a practice where I am seeing twice as many clients as i was last year, I am completely booked weeks in advance, and I can focus on what I love doing - counseling not accounting. I was given this blessing at the exact moment that I was able to see that denial was making the problem worse, and worry was denying God's power and sovereignty, and so I had to be blessed when I was humble and completely dependent on God because doing it myself just was never going to work.And so the key to worry was revealed to me in that moment and it wasn't the trite, "Just trust God and everything will work out fine" nonsense I was spewing out of my ignorance. It was getting to the point where I realized me trying to take care of my own provision was like the birds worrying about what they would eat and the flowers about what they would wear. It finally clicked that as hard a bird tries it is too stupid and incapable of planting and growing a tree to live in but I thought that since I was an advanced human I was capable of so much more when the truth is we are just as reliant on God despite our many talents, capabilities, and responsibilities. The only way to see things clearly is to see our struggles and issues clearly for what they are - not minimizing and denying them and not making them an idol - and then realizing how truly small and ineffective we are for all of our worrying, but seeing God as big and powerful enough to take our little acts of obedience and turning them into a blessing we don't deserve and could never have earned. Ignoring our responsibilities does not honor God, worrying without taking steps of active faith will always be fruitless, but trusting in God's provision while you do your small part results in miraculous provision of all you could ever need or want.

Next post I'll give some more practical help on what to do when your mind is assaulted by overwhelming worry and anxiety...

Passion vs Intimacy

2011-09-28T22:18:00.000-04:00

Much to the chagrin of my wife there is a type of television show that I can't watching without becoming more and more agitated and angry. Shows like The Bachelor or Bachelorette where dozens of men and women get together and see who can produce the most passion in the least amount of time using the most ridiculous budget. Movies where the heroine finally has the courage to leave her boring old husband and embrace life with a new exciting and romantic man make me want to scream at the TV that relationships that start as a result of an affair have like a 10% chance of success. Now admittedly, part of my irritation comes from being the least romantic man on the planet, I have had many conversations with my wife that boil down to me asking in exasperation, "OK, well if THAT isn't romantic then what the heck is romance?" But even further I get sickened by our culture that promotes sex and romance as the most important goals to be sought out and the way to feel good about yourself. For men it is pornography, and hypersexuality in the culture that says if you as a man can have a very attractive woman, or better many women, who desire you intensely enough to have tons of crazy sex with you then you will be content and life will be perfect. If your wife isn't having sex with you three times a day and you are unhappy and unfulfilled in life then that isn't a coincidence, it's your wife's fault. For women it is romance novels, romantic reality shows, and such that says if you can get a man to read your mind and do for you what you aren't even able to vocalize before you even know you want it then you will be in bliss. The problem is that Hugh Grant and Jenna Jameson both play characters that don't exist in the real world and it is just as dishonoring to compare a husband to outrageously romantic gestures as it is to compare a wife to outrageously misproportioned body parts. They both take something good that men and women have been blessed by God with and make an idol out of them - attractiveness and pursuing - when research shows that marital satisfaction, much less individual mental and emotional health are not based on sex or romance.

Now that my mini-rant is over I'll tackle my real target, the idolization of romantic love in our culture that results in cashing in real relationships looking for something flashier. Most people fall in love, then later come to see a host of flaws in their spouse but feel confident they can fix them, before throwing in the towel and filing for divorce. Others just have an affair because they are either so selfish that they want the stability of home with some passion on the side or are so cowardly they just can't bear to tackle the problems in the marriage so look for something easier on the side. The reason divorce is seen as easy and affairs can feel like a real relationship when they are usually just fragile fantasies that crumble in the light of reality is because of this obsession with passion. Passion is exciting, new found romantic love, or limerence as some researchers refer to it can make everything else in life seem pale in comparison to that person who has swept you off your feet. They are all you can think about, they have nothing but good qualities and not only have they never hurt you but you can't imagine they ever will. They receive instant grace, they go on and on about your positive attributes, they encourage you, they want to sit for hours and hear about your hopes and dreams. This is true of two people falling in love and it is equally true of someone who is married and is building an inappropriate relationship with someone who isn't their spouse, except there is even more of a draw. This relationship has all those warm fuzzy feelings as well as a kick of adrenaline for the wrongness of it, a bond that if things leaked out it would be the two of you against the world, they encourage you to be as selfish and deceptive as they are without a hint of judgement. You take the fantastic feelings of puppy love or forbidden love and they are going to look better seven days a week compared to the day in, day out routine of marriage complete with years of hurt and resentment after the grace tank ran out, a mortgage to pay and kids to raise together. There is only one scale where long-term committed marriage has an edge on romantic love and that is durability, because the dirty little secret about romantic love is that it is a neurological state that can only exist in the human brain for a maximum of two to three years.

So get a divorce, have an affair, you're guaranteed that the next person you date will make you feel all warm and fuzzy, for two to three years. If you are fine jumping from relationship to relationship then you can keep the feeling alive, as long as you are OK with the relational carnage you leave in your wake. There is one exception to the two to three year rule, and that is unrequited love - you get separated and never get to see things played out you can keep the fantasy alive in your head a hundred years later as long as you never actually meet back up with them. Maybe there is a high school sweetheart that you still follow on Facebook and you just know in your heart that if you would have married them instead of the toad you live with you would still be madly, passionately in love. Maybe you had a crush on someone years ago and still compare everyone you date to them unsuccessfully. Research seems to show that the archenemy of romantic love seems to be reality. Give it enough time, reality seeps in and you see the person for who and what they really are, a selfish, sinful, flawed human being with personality quirks and character flaws. I call it the anesthesia of love, and when it wears off it is rarely pleasant. Now that most of you reading have gone to get your antidepressants refilled I'll reveal the truly beautiful part of all this, there is a third option - Intimacy.

There's romantic love, there is brutal disenchantment, and then there is the rarely seen unicorn known as intimacy which is never attained by the vast majority of the population because they don't have the selflessness and perseverance to ever see it come to fruition. Intimacy is what happens when you decide to let romantic love die because you know it can't last anyway, and when disenchantment comes you don't give up. Divorce is the widely publicized route plenty of people take to find a way out, but just as often people settle in to an accompanied solitude, a resignation that marriage will always be there but love died a long time ago. That's why I don't vilify romantic love anymore, because I now know what it is - it's like a down payment, earnest money, a sneak peek for a couple down the road to what they can have if they really work on it. Infatuation comes with no work and no investment and if it didn't exist we'd all just meet each other, see reality and want nothing to do with each other - then the human race would die off in a generation. When we hit the point in marriage where we are tempted to give up we can look back at what was once there and remind ourselves that we can have something that looks a whole lot like it in the future. Hollywood tells us we can get back romantic love with the person where everything is easy and natural and takes no selflessness or sacrifice but that is crap. The reality is if we can allow marriage to humble us, to kill off our selfishness, to orient our mindsets around what is best for us as a couple rather than continuing to think as an individual, and if we can use years and years of conflict and stressors both internal and external to mature and grow us we can achieve intimacy. Strangers in a public bathroom can have passion, any two selfish idiots can remain stuck in stubborn disenchantment, but it takes a selfless, loving, humble man and woman who have been through job losses, the death of family members, late night tearful arguments, or financial devastation to ever achieve true intimacy. If the two of you haven't been through hell together then you haven't earned intimacy yet. You see intimacy takes effort, it takes time, and it takes not giving up when it gets hard. It means you figure out a way to be like Christ and truly love a sinful flawed human being who try as they might will never stop disappointing and hurting you, because you know they are married to you and you aren't much different. I'm not talking about denying they have problems like romantic love, or being obsessed with getting them to fix their flaws like in disenchantment, but seeing them for who they are and choosing to love them anyway. You both do that long enough and lo and behold you'll wake up one day and look around to see that you have achieved true intimacy like I have. And then, like me, you can scoff at hypersexuality and reality shows based on romance because you enjoy something 95% of the population will never achieve and so for them what's on TV is the best they can imagine.

Voice, Relationship, and Power

2011-09-19T14:39:00.001-04:00

Last post, I mentioned the need to redefine what sexual abuse is and how we should view it's effects. Most of my examples focused around childhood sexual abuse and incest, but sexual abuse also covers rape, whether by a stranger, a date, or a husband. Sexual abuse is very different for everyone and there are many various degrees of hurt that are inflicted upon individuals. Many factors come into play that make abuse worse - do you know the offender, are they a close friend or family member, are they in a position of power, were they supposed to be caring for you and protecting you instead of abusing, how far physically did the abuse go, how long did it last, how many times, where at, how did other family members or authorities react, what propaganda was given, were you punished for refusing, were you powerless to stop it, were there injuries, was there sexual stimulation or pleasure, all of these questions and more determine severity.

Today what I will focus on is speaking to the predictable ways in which sexual abuse damages people for years and years afterwards, especially if it was childhood incest or molestation. My goal with my blog is never to give trite truisms, to never replace the value of one on one counseling, and to not lump large groups of people into one category and label them. That's why I make a much better counselor than a preacher, I prefer speaking to specifics. But in the same way that all auto accidents are different but have similar injuries, so all sexual abuse is different but has similar injuries. Whether the abuse stunted growth in these three areas from the point of injury or whether it shattered them inside a person, or stolen from them altogether, most everyone who has experienced sexual abuse deals with three main deficits that need addressed and healed - Their Voice, their Relationships, and their Power.

Sexual abuse damages a persons view of their own voice, their right to speak up for themselves in the face of mistreatment, the ability to call attention to wrong and for it to be dealt with. As a child you were given the clear indication either by your abuser, enabling family members, or just your own deduction that speaking up and saying the truth is a really bad idea. This carries over into adult life by allowing people to hurt you, take advantage of you, and abuse you without feeling like you have a right to speak up. Maybe if you told on your uncle for abusing you it would destroy the family, maybe if anyone knew what your dad did you would be sent to one of those homes you saw on the news. Maybe if you told your boyfriend to stop pressuring you for sex he would leave and no one would ever find you good enough to be with. So now you feel like your voice is unimportant, to be ignored, and that your protests as well as you are really unimportant. Maybe your abuser even used shame to convince you this was something you were a part of, that you were enjoying it, and that it was "our little secret" that couldn't get out or you would be in trouble too. So then you get treated poorly as an adult and come to believe you must somehow be at fault because when bad stuff happens to you then you are partially responsible at least. Whatever it looks like it is a loss of belief in your own ability to stand up and proclaim truth, to call evil out for what it is, and let the world see it for what it is so that it can be made better.

The second wound comes in how you view relationships - who and what are you, what do others exist for, and what is your role supposed to be in relationships. You are given tons of data to suggest that you are beneath other people, an object to be used and discarded when the other person in the relationship is through with you. You are an obstinate little girl who deserves what is coming your way because you have been bad, or if you don't do this then your abuser will be cranky and hurt someone else, or you are just a walking vagina with no other worth, value, or purpose. The basic message sent over and over is that you exist solely for the pleasure of those around you, you are responsible for their happiness and if you fail in that purpose you aren't good for much else and so lose what little value you had. Relationships become seen as transactional, and you never want to have to owe somebody or feel behind in the transactions. If you only exist to pleasure someone else then it is important for them to convince you not to look for anything in return. This creates this weird paradigm where you are supposed to make everyone else happy, even at your own expense, because everyone in the world deserves to be taken care of and treated well, everyone except you, you're different. Realizing you are a real person with the same rights as everyone else who deserves equality in relationships and can even have people take care of you is part of the healing process.

The third major injury most people who have been sexually abused suffer is a damaging blow to their sense of their own power. You were put in a position either once or repetitively where bad stuff was happening that your mind may not have even been able to adequately process but you were powerless to do anything to stop it. You couldn't prevent it no matter how diligent you may be, you couldn't stop it because of the size or power differential, and no matter how much you wished or prayed for it to stop it never did and so you were powerless and God probably was too. Either he was powerless or just deemed you as deserving it, but either way it skews how you view God - especially when it is your earthly father doing the abusing. So most people who were abused go one of two routes in response to this powerlessness, you either become a helpless victim or a merciless control freak. Maybe you accept your powerlessness and decide you are just weak and ineffective, so even if you wanted to go back to school you can't, even if you wanted to lose weight you can't, even if you wanted to get out of that bad relationship you can't, you don't have any power. Maybe you go the other route and decide no one will ever take advantage of you again, because you will be hyper-vigilant and totally in control of everything, because being out of control was just too painful for you. You'll mockingly talk of your abuse as if it were petty and if anyone else shows weakness or powerlessness around you it will provoke an irrational anger at them for for not rising above it the way you have. Problem is that either way the abuse has come to define you and when you don't allow anyone close to you because you can't trust them you can pat yourself on the back for being strong and in control or just see that your abuser has once again robbed you of something life-giving and you let them. Either way you go power becomes something different than it is to others, either an elusive thing you wish you were worthy of having or the most valuable commodity on the planet that must be acquired and maintained at all costs.

So whether you want to think of yourself as the survivor of sexual abuse or not, if your injuries look like the above three it doesn't really matter, just get the help you need to become all of who God created you to be initially before the sins of others changed the arc of your life. I've walked with men and women through the process of redefining themselves through God's eyes, healing from past injuries, and counseling has helped them bloom into far more than they ever thought possible, and it can be the same for you. The common excuses of it is too expensive, or I don't have the time for it, or shouldn't I just suck it up and get over it don't apply here. You wouldn't give those excuses if you had a physical injury, no one has time to get their broken leg reset but you make time for it. I see it like a total knee replacement, you could go the rest of your life limping and unable to do all that is within your potential or you can take the time and money required to have the surgery, with all the pain and all the months of rehab, but in the end you can run and jump and get up and down stairs like you've never remembered.

My Amazon widget appears to be malfunctioning but here is my book suggestion on this topic - http://www.amazon.com/Counseling-Survivors-Sexual-Abuse-Library/dp/1591605199/ref=sr_1_1?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1316457871&sr=1-1

A Shot In The Chest

2011-09-14T21:46:00.000-04:00

When I first started counseling everyone suggests you pick a couple of key areas to focus in on and make them your specialties, and so I immediately picked Marriage and Parenting as my top favorites I wanted to get good at doing. The problem was I seemed to have more and more people coming to me dealing with having been sexually abused, and we immediately loved each other. My counseling style has always been very "tell it like it is" with far more truth spoken than tact, so while I am compassionate and encouraging I'll also kick you in the butt when needed. My picture of the perfect counselor for someone healing from sexual abuse was a kindly older woman who would hold their hand and cry with them while sharing encouraging Bible verses, and that wasn't exactly me. So it kind of shocked me that all these women felt so comfortable talking to me about something that for many of them I was the very first person to ever know about their abuse other than them and their abuser. I mean women who have teenagers and husbands of 20 years who have never ever shared that when they were younger someone hurt them in one of the worst ways a human being can be hurt.

Given, to date, I have never had a single client come in who said they were there because they were abused as a kid. They come in for depression, anxiety, trust issues, marital problems, being either obsessed with or repulsed by sex, boundaries problems, same sex attraction, addictions, etc but these were just symptoms of the core injury that needed to be addressed and healed. Their stories broke my heart and made me angry and I found that without exception that anger was exactly what the women needed. Not more sadness, not more shame, and certainly not pity, but something came alive in them when I said I wish I could have ten minutes alone in a room with their worthless piece of crap father. So having a brash counselor tell them it was not only OK but necessary to get good and mad at their abuser turned out to make me a good fit. You can't forgive someone if you haven't gotten angry, otherwise you are just sweeping it under the rug with denial. The many men I have talked to that were sexually abused NEVER would have talked about that with a female counselor and usually expected me to respond like any other neanderthal in the locker room by high-fiving them for getting sex so early. The women that shared it with me not only felt validated and understood, but in a wonderful way I could never had predicted but God ordained I was able to be a healing, healthy, safe relationship with a man. A man that knew all of their secrets and didn't shame them, a man who wanted only health and healing for them rather than their preconceived notion of what all men want from them. For some I was the first man in their lives that gave to them rather than taking, that loved them for who they were rather than what they could do for me, and who saw them how God views them so they could do the same. I'm pretty good with marriages and parenting, but looking back I really believe my greatest impact has been on the men and women I have walked alongside as they heal from sexual abuse.

Still, years later I couldn't figure out why I had such a heart for sexual abuse survivors, why I was so beneficial for them, and why God kept bringing them to me until just within the last two years. I was reading a book on sexual abuse and it was pretty good, but back in the appendix there was a frequently asked questions section that had a little note on men who were sexually abused. It basically says when asking a man if he has sexually abused don't ask "Were you sexually abused," because they'll usually say no. Ask "What were your first experiences with sex" and you'll get a totally different answer. So it pops in my head in that moment that I had access to media with full nudity and sex scenes as a kid, and by adolescence there were a couple of incidents where guys my same age messed around with me and I assumed because I considered most of those things enjoyable at the time that it couldn't be "abuse." That was when I was forced to reconsider what sexual abuse was, as I knew from my many clients that God designed sex to be pleasurable and so therefore just because something feels physically good doesn't make it any less abusive. I also knew that just because you weren't held at gunpoint doesn't mean there aren't power differentials and consent is impossible for a child that doesn't know what sex is anyway. Any time emotional pain is difficult for people to grasp I just transfer it into what it would look like as a physical wound and it seems to make more sense. If a man kicks your front door in and points a gun at your child's chest and pulls the trigger while smiling it is clearly damaging and evil and wrong. If the neighbor kid who is the same age as your kid brings over his dad's handgun and the two kids are playing around with it and it goes off shooting your child in the chest it is still damaging and evil and wrong. The scars are actually the same. Anytime someone is introduced to sex in an inappropriate way, earlier than they are ready and able to process, it damages a person's soul and it will show effects across their lifetime.

I don't intend to compare my extremely minor abuse to anyone else because I know better than any of you reading the depths of depravity human being are capable of and the damage potential therein. What I do want to say is that maybe we have the wrong view of sexual abuse and that it is a huge disservice to victims everywhere. I say sexual abuse and the average person thinks of a disgusting pedophile that drives up in a black van and offers a kid candy to get in the back so he can viciously rape them, which I am sure happens but it is definitely the exception to the rule. Most people in my generation got that stupid idea from the stranger danger campaign that taught us to watch out for creepy guys on the playground looking for a lost puppy. The truth is it is fathers whose number one job is to love, nurture, and care for a beautiful defenseless child but instead use their position of power and authority to terrorize their little girl every time mom goes to the store. It's the cousin, the family friend, the uncle, the grandfather who tries a little more and a little more usually because they were abused and think it is normal. It's the who slaps his 12 year old son on the back with a smile and hands him a stack of Playboys, or the parents who watch graphic nudity and sex scenes or even porn with their kids in the room assuming they are too young to know what is really going on or that it will be over in just a minute. It's the boyfriend in the back seat of the car that pushes past the "no" because she's had a few beers and doesn't really know what she wants. It's the little boy who goes off to Christian summer camp and has another camper or even a counselor do things to him that feel good in the moment but feel dirty and disgusting and confused afterwards.

This post was basically to expand what sexual abuse is so that people can begin to see wounds that may need healing, as well as maybe to better protect your kids from the real dangers out there. Stats are fuzzy as it is something no one talks about and few people admit to, but most estimates say one in four women will be sexually abused at some point in their life and one in five men will be, so next time you are in the mall or at church and you realize there are easily a hundred people you'll pass that have been sexually abused you won't feel so alone. Next post I'll lay out how sexual abuse affects people on into adulthood so that you can know what needs to be done to heal and reclaim what was stolen and damaged.

Rules For Conflict Part III

2011-09-13T16:54:00.000-04:00

Third and final post to wrap up rules for effective conflict resolution:

Everyone Takes Personal Responsibility - easily my single greatest pet peeve in counseling, when people refuse to look at their own responsibility but rather blame their spouse, and justify themselves. God gives us our job descriptions as husbands and wives not our spouses, so when we fail to be what God has called us to be we have no one to blame but ourselves. Too often couples want to go back and forth justifying their poor choices by comparing the other's transgressions, or excusing their own refusal to meet their spouses needs by listing what needs they haven't received. That's like saying, "Yeah I failed Math but another kid in my class didn't do his homework so I decided not to. And you think my grade is bad, my 60 is way better than their 45" - you both failed. Everyone is responsible for their own decisions, good or bad, and justification and blame just assure that one will ever become who they are called to be. We often compare our own excellent job of biting our tongue fifty times to our spouse's five mean statements and don't realize they bit their tongue eighty times. When we compare our internal achievements to our spouse's external failures we always win and we feel justified in treating them like crap, when we compare our hearts to the hearts God has designed us for we allow ourselves to be molded into His image. With this perspective there is no room for defensiveness, as anything our spouse brings to us can be seen as an opportunity to grow rather than an attack that needs to be countered with something they do even worse.

Become aware of the core wounds and accompanying fears of your spouse and avoid them. If they came from a family that always made them feel they were wrong then they may fight a little harder than necessary to make sure they don't always lose in the marriage. If they had an overprotective mother that smothered them they might fight a little harder to have their autonomy and not feel controlled by you. If they had a critical father that always compared them to someone else who they could never live up to you may want to avoid telling them they aren't as good of a wife as friend's wife. If your spouse has an ex-husband who verbally and emotionally abused her it may be that you can never raise your voice at all without signaling to her that you are attacking her. Whatever the wound and wherever it came from you have the opportunity to help heal it or to keep ripping it open and pouring salt in it, and that is a tremendous power. Usually during conflict there is the topic that the fight is about and then there are the real underlying issues that aren't being spoken. You can grumble about how you have to clean up someone else's mess or you can recognize you have your own core fears that get triggered as well and need extra grace in certain areas.

Create a culture of appreciation and acceptance rather than contempt - One of the keys inside and outside of conflict to make sure you are able to resolve conflict well is create a culture of acceptance, appreciation, and love rather than judgement, criticism, and blame. Research shows you need at least five times as many positive interactions for every negative one just to balance things out. Deep at the base of your brain is a part called the amygdala that is the emotional center that basically sees people in black and white, good and bad ways, people are either your allies, on your team and there to make your life better or people are enemies, attacking you and need to be protected from. Its like a giant scale that tips one way or the other and it takes five experiences of acceptance, respect, and positivity to balance out each one incident of anger, frustration, judgement, or negativity. Whichever side the scale is on, that is how everything will be interpreted, neutral comments like "Oh those look like new jeans", get automatically interpreted either as a compliment - "Oh thanks, I'm excited about them" - or a criticism - "They aren't new, I've had them for two weeks, and before you complain about money they were on sale and I had nothing else that fits." If you want your spouse to hear what you say as you intend it rather than with automatic defensiveness you can help by working hard to show tons more appreciation, respect, acknowledgement, and praise, rather than always being critical.

Stay Engaged - the last rule for effective conflict is no matter what, try your best to always stay engaged, or to reconnect as quick as possible afterwards. Often in the middle of conflict one partner will go into an icy cool stance where they respond like a robot without emotions. It's called stonewalling and it is usually a defense mechanism to keep themselves from becoming overwhelmed and flooded with emotions, and often as a way of protecting the relationship. The idea is that if I were to open up and express how I feel I will say something I regret and then lose this important relationship, but what the other person sees is somebody who doesn't care about the relationship or them. Both partners have racing heart rates and blood pressures, but only one looks like they give a crap. This is where it becomes important to learn how to reschedule or just sooth the other person or yourself in the moment, to talk yourself back into being present and engaged. Sometimes this carries over into an overall approach to the relationship where the partner is no longer angry, just numb. The way our emotions work is that we either feel them all or none of them and if someone feels to painful for too long they often have a firewall that comes crashing down that cuts off all emotions. To feel love means to also feel all the pain so they both get thrown out. This is where you need to stop playing around and get in to see a counselor, because your marriage is flat lining. Most couples wait 6-7 years after they notice major problems before they go for help which is like waiting a few weeks to see if you are having a heart attack - tons of damage has already been done.

Rules For Conflict Part II

2011-09-07T21:28:00.001-04:00

Here is part two continued of rules for a fair and productive fight:

Perception is reality - this means that it is possible to validate your spouse's subjective experience and perspective without agreeing with them or saying they are objectively right. Wherever they are coming from is their true view of things and arguing with them will not change this. We have this mistaken notion that if we just tell someone our subjective reality it will trump theirs and they will adopt our way of viewing things, which really doesn't happen. "You know I was really upset about feeling fat because I couldn't fit in my jeans but then when you informed me I was beautiful and didn't need to worry about it, it just all clicked and now I feel totally secure!" "I was really hurt and upset with you but then you told me that was immature so I just decided to get over it and not hurt anymore, you are SO right!" "When your mom said I was a selfish incompetent excuse for a wife I was really upset but then you said that was just how she was and to not take it personal so now I'm fine and considering having lunch with her tomorrow." It really never quite works out that way but we argue as if they are just deluded in seeing things from their obviously wrong perspective. The key is learning to accept influence and being able to put yourself in their shoes so you can see and express the validity of their perspective while still seeing things differently.

Emotional Repair - the key to great conflict resolution is realizing you are both imperfect and need to be forgiven often, and therefore extending grace to the other as well. This means after conflict and eventually even during conflict you can practice emotional repair where you take responsibility for your actions rather than blaming or justifying. Emotional repair is basically restating that we are both on the same team, I did these specific hurtful things, and I really want to be able to have a dialogue without more injury. This should be done as quick as possible and as thorough as possible. It is like moving into a beautiful new house when you get married and each fight you break something or put a hole in the wall, emotional repair patches and fixes rather than just continuing to trash the house until there is nothing to look forward to coming home to.

Stay on Topic - this means to dialogue through one issue until everyone feels heard, validated, and empathized with rather than jumping from gripe to gripe, adding more and more without resolving any. This means no bringing up crap from the past as a way of discrediting the defense's whole case and painting the picture of them as whatever poor character trait - most common complaint is selfishness. No going on and on with endless stories from the past where you are convinced you are Aesop and by the end of your fable your spouse will feel convicted and the reality is you just end up bickering about story details and missing the main point completely. No interrupting the other person, it's a sign you aren't listening and don't care, but on the flip side keep tirades to a minimum so interruption is not necessary. Some people try to filibuster in marriage figuring if they can hold the floor long enough they somehow win, and reality is you end up getting interrupted or at least tuned out.

Avoid Negative Generalities - Never say never or always in the middle of conflict unless your goal is to get your spouse defensive and looking for exceptions, "You claim I NEVER help clean up yet 15 years ago I picked up my socks, therefore you are dead wrong." It is fine to share a complaint, it isn't OK to criticize. We often broadly and generally paint the picture of our spouse as unfeeling, frigid, selfish, lazy, or whatever by lumping together all of their mistakes and making a generalization, yet we don't do that for positive things about them. We make it sound like we view them as a giant horrible loser that every once in a blue moon screws up and gets things right, when we usually really see them as a great loving person who from time to time makes mistakes or drops the ball. Therefor name calling, character assassination, and generic criticism are off limits as completely ineffective.

Next Post - part three and the conclusion to rules for a fair fight!

Rules for Conflict Part I

2011-09-01T22:03:00.000-04:00

War has rules. You can't torture people, you can't execute prisoners of war, you can only play a maximum of three Justin Bieber songs or it is considered cruel and unusual. There seems to be rules everywhere except for within marriage conflict, where it's every man and woman for themselves. We often see conflict as a battlefield and anything is fair in love and war, right? Depends on if abuse is happening or if you want your conflict to be beneficial versus destructive. Three posts will be my complete set of rules for a fair fight - effective conflict resolution skills.

No Abuse - this means physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, financial, sexual, or any other type of abuse where the other person is dehumanized, degraded, and destroyed. I'm not talking about a give and take heated exchange where everyone is on the same level, but an intimidating bullying approach which attempts to cause the other person to cower in fear and shut up and do what you say. If you wouldn't want your son doing it to their wife or your daughter being treated that way some day then stop it now.

Don't ever try to win an argument - nobody wins an argument, either you both feel closer, more heard, and connected because of conflict or you have both lost. Arguing for an invisible jury, dropping emotional artillery, or just trying hard to be heard by using to two common tactics of repeating yourself or getting louder just don't work (Unless they just happen to have hearing loss). The vast majority of what couples argue about is subjective, like whether something should have hurt the others' feelings, rather than objective like the capital of South Dakota. There is no right and wrong, just whether we feel heard and validated and empathized with. 70% of what all couples argue about are considered perpetual issues which will never be resolved. You will have the same 5-10 issues at day one and in fifty years, and no she will never be more adventurous and no he will never be more cleanly. This means only 30% results in some sort of resolution so you do best to focus on hearing and understanding each other rather than fixing each other.

Know your thermostats and reschedule when you are flooded - we are all wired to handle a certain amount of conflict before physiologically we begin shutting down. Like a thermostat that determines when we have sustained too much conflict we get adrenaline dumped in our system and we have the fight or flight response, actually there are two more - freeze and nurture as well. We are all wired to respond in a predictable way and they all can be very hurtful when you are on the receiving end. If your spouse hears the signal that it is time for conflict and immediately go for the jugular they are a fighter, if you instinctively look for the nearest exit and say or do whatever it takes to get out if there you are a flighter. If your spouse goes into screensaver, deer in the headlights mode during conflict he is a freezer, and if you nervously scurry around cleaning, mending, and attending then you are a nurturer. While I have trouble seeing how getting your house cleaned every time conflict happens is a bad thing I hear that all four are devastating to someone trying to be heard and understood. The solution? Know where your cut-off is and before it gets there offer to reschedule for a specific time. Half hour, hour, next morning? Whenever it is, just make sure it is clear we both want to discuss this but right now we are in diffuse physiological arousal and so we will be ineffective at hearing, processing, and storing data. Until we are calmed and soothed we are no good in conflict. This doesn't mean running away when things get tough, or saying what they want to hear, but rather optimizing your conflict by only having it with a brain and body that is able to stay engaged.

No triangulation - keep the conflict between you and your spouse - no bringing anyone else into it. Don't argue in Walmart like rednecks, don't argue in front if your kids, and don't vent to others. I'll likely do a whole post on just this as it is one if my major pet peeves but venting is very unhealthy and produces nothing good. If you have a problem with your spouse talk to them about it not your mom, your sister, your best friend, the guys on the golf course or anyone else who can't actually fix the problem.

Two more posts and you'll have an idea how to make conflict beneficial rather than destructive!

You Tell Me!

2011-08-31T22:21:00.000-04:00

I hate public speaking and would never enjoy giving lectures or sermons, partly because I'm a raging introvert but mostly because I never want to answer questions people aren't asking. That's why I prefer counseling - I have the opportunity to sit with an individual, couple, or family and speak to their real issues and make sure by the end that they have what they need. So I want this blog to be the same, an opportunity for people to get answers to questions relevant to them. My approach up until now has been just to comb through old files and approach common issues and concerns that come up often and I'll continue to do this, but also wanted to add this option. You can leave a comment below, publicly or anonymously, or you can email me at mikeprasse@gmail.com and give your request for a blog topic. Obviously this isn't meant as free or even an effective replacement for counseling but rather an opportunity for topics to be brought up that I may not have thought to address.

So what are your ideas for me to address? One client said she would bring in all of her negative self-views relating to her ADHD for me to give the positive flip side of for a blog entry. I want to do more marriage stuff regarding communication and conflict resolution stuff, more parenting tips, dealing with specific conditions like ADHD or Depression or Anxiety, and more Christian theology and living. It always shocks me which blog posts get the biggest hits, this of course was right after I got over the shock that tons of people are actually regularly reading the blog at all. Biggest topics - Christian theology and living - so maybe more of that? How can an all powerful and all loving God allow for pain and suffering in the world? Is the goal of the Christian life eliminating sin? How does God's sovereignty work? What the heck is supralapserianism? Maybe I'm not the best to answer all of that but I am interested to hear what your questions, concerns, and ideas are for future blog entries!

Just Another Kid To Take Care Of

2011-08-30T16:21:00.000-04:00

Often in marriages where one person has ADHD and the other has a "normal" brain a dynamic gets created that looks a whole lot like a critical parent with a rebellious teenager. The husband or wife with ADHD gets lumped in with any other kids as a liability, a nuisance, or at the very least incapable of responsibility which might be fine but the expectation is usually that they grow up and start thinking differently at some point when they really never will - http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/being-married-to-rainman.html. The other problem I will discuss today is when we, with ADHD, demand to be respected and assert we are normal and really just aren't. I believe the key to success with ADHD is to really look hard and honest at ourselves and see what really is there, rather than what we wish was there, or what we have been lectured by parents, teachers, and spouses to believe should be there. When we realize we are great at some things and inept at others we spend less time making grandiose promises to ourselves and our spouses about how we will never make that mistake again and just learn to compensate so we don't have to.

Two things people with ADHD have in common; we are all convinced we are awesome at multitasking, and we really suck at multitasking. We confuse constantly being distracted and flitting from one task to another out of boredom as effective multitasking when our brains are wired to obsessively focus in on one thing of passion at a time with a hyperfocus. Being fully present wherever we are is very difficult for us, even if we aren't the hyperactive kind that is physically on the move our brain always is. So can we really watch TV while chatting with our wife - nope we will do one or the other effectively but not both so choose one. Can we really check out Facebook real quick while we play with the kids, nope we can do one or the other with no concept of time elapsed either way. This helps if we can accept it because we can stop getting defensive when our spouse asks us to put away the smartphone at the dinner table because we will become engrossed with it and ignore everyone else not because we are crappy parents, but that is just how our brains work. We can stop getting defensive when our spouse reminds us to take the next exit; even if we remembered it this time our spouse remembers the forty times we drove right past it because we were caught up in a conversation. You have to drop your shame and stop interpreting your spouse's suggestions as critical attacks reminiscent of a bad third grade teacher - but rather reminders that your brain don't work like that. Just shut up and do it and you'll be glad later that you were actually able to connect with your spouse, be there for your child, or not have to figure out how to make a U-turn on 485, all for the cost of a little bit of defensive pride.

The second way we can improve ourselves to better accommodate marriage is to be a little less non-compliant and non-conformist. Part of it is just part and parcel with the deficit as we have higher impulsivity which results in creativity, so we dress like Lady Gaga and expect everyone else to think outside of the box like us. Creative is fine, but sometimes our impulsivity can make us embarrassing to our spouses by saying or doing inappropriate things at inappropriate times as we kind of ignore social graces. The part we can work on is the "I'm not going to be told what to do" rugged independence that usually comes from insecurity for having never lived up to your potential as a kid. Whether authority figures busted on you for being spacey, forgetful, or inattentive, other kids picked on you for being different, or you were just always haunted by a feeling that hard as you try you just can't quite accomplish what you feel you are capable of, we don't like being told we are wrong. So accepting that our brains are wired to help us do amazing, wonderful things, but are also pretty inept at other things means we can just be unique individuals getting help with our weak spots rather than the stupid kid who will never do right or the sour grapes kid that says, "That's fine, I'm better than them anyways..." Get an organized secretary, hire someone to do your taxes or housekeeping, and let your "normal" brained spouse help you in your other weak areas - like being fully present, eliminating distractions, establishing work boundaries to get a certain amount done and come home, remembering events and tasks, and following through on promises. Once again, just shut up and do it - you'll find when you comply without resentment you end up accomplishing more, enjoying more, and disappointing yourself and others less. I'd say the same for teens or kids with ADHD but they probably aren't reading my blog.

Previous post on ADHD here - http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/driving-ferrari-with-bicycle-brakes.html

Being Married to Rainman

2011-08-29T12:37:00.000-04:00

Well, since I managed to lose my compiled master list of over fifty blog post ideas I will write today once again about living with ADHD, but as requested from a marriage perspective. I will probably have to break this up into two posts and even then won't be able to fully address the impact the deficit has on marriage. I believe it has the ability to greatly enhance or destroy marriages depending on whether both partners can fully embrace the enhancements ADHD provides while understanding and compensating for the deficits. First post will mainly focus on the "normal" spouse as it can be very irritating living with someone like Rainman who is phenomenal at counting cards but doesn't seem able to dress themselves in the morning.

First off we are absolute slaves to the present, who rarely focus on anything from the past or anything in the future. We have low frustration tolerances so it is easy to get defensive really quick in the moment but the good part is it is really hard for us to hold grudges. Living in the present means we are likely to frustrate our spouses with our lack of preparation for the future, but also make it easier for them when we are able to drop offenses from the past. As with most things within marriage we can focus on the negative or positive, and here is the first opportunity. The ADHD wife could be berated by her husband for not thinking through the steps required to plan a birthday party or for not having sent the invitations out in time, or she could be celebrated for spending an entire afternoon completely absorbed with her children without a care in the world for how they kept her up too late the night before or all the things still to be done on the to do list. The ability to be completely absorbed in the present means the ADHD husband can be absorbed in getting three stars on every level of Angry Birds while the kids he is supposed to be watching light themselves on fire, or he can stare into his wife's eyes on a date night completely in the moment when a normal husband would be worrying about his performance review the next day at work. Living in the present can be great or frustrating, depending on what the hyperfocus is narrowed in on.

Hyperfocus is the blessing/curse where we are able to narrow in on one thing like a laser, completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This can make us have an encyclopedic knowledge of every sports stat ever created, be uncanny at recalling crucial information regarding our jobs, hobbies, or passions, and allow us to work 12 hours straight on a creative project without eating or hardly blinking. But it can also mean we can step right over a mound of laundry on the way out the door, wait until the last possible second to get the kids ready for school, or get caught up at work and not realize it until we are already two hours late. Brain scans show a little dead spot in our brain that in a normal person would stay awake and regulate attention and impulsivity, but is gray and dead in us until something that ignites our passion lights it up from time to time. It would be nice if we could quickly and easily program our brains or our spouse's brain to hyperfocus just on things of great worth and value but that isn't the case - it is determined by things mostly unknown to us currently but involving the release of pleasurable and painful chemicals within the brain. Shaming your spouse about failures, criticizing them for forgetting things, and showing them contempt for not following through like a normal person would are unlikely to produce pleasurable chemicals and train their brain to see you as a worthy target of their hyperfocus. It's about their focus, not your value.

If you look at your spouse with ADHD as in control of their brain and just lazy, selfish, or uncaring then you see them as a horrible person, if you see them as in control of their brains and not horrible then you have to see yourself as just not that important to them, but if you see them as not really in control of their brains you can feel empathy. Most common complaint I hear about ADHD spouses is their lack of follow through and how that breaks their spouse's trust and I often wonder why this really has never been a huge complaint of my wife about me. Is it because I remember important things and follow through, heavens no! I believe my wife realized early on into marriage the key to putting up with someone like me - realistic expectations and tons of grace. Two recent examples show off the awesomeness of my wife: First is the other day she had a list of four items that needed to be done around the house while she was at work and as she began spouting them off I cut her off mid-sentence and said "Do you mind writing those things down and leaving them on the counter for me somewhere I will be forced to see them?" She could have responded with one of many replies I have heard in counseling ranging from "I want a man who is grown up and responsible enough to know these things need to be done, I don't need lists to get things done around here" to "My dad never needed lists and he went to work every day at the 8 am on the dot at the salt mines, because he actually cared about his family" to "You know what? Forget it, I'll just do it myself since you can't be bothered with adult responsibilities, I have three children including you!" Instead she said, "Sure, here it is," because she recognizes that I truly love her and want to get it all done but for either of us to trust my verbal memory would be silly. The second was the other week when she was getting ready to head to work and handed me my new iPhone that came in the mail, still in it's box and said, "I know you are very excited about this and you could easily spend all day hyperfocused on it, but this is your day with the kids so I don't want you missing out on time with them. Do you mind just focusing on them and leaving this til tonight when you can play with it after they are in bed?" That is a woman who knows me, knows ADHD, doesn't vilify either one, and has the ability to tell me what I need to hear when I need to hear it.

So if this is the first half of how to put up with us then tomorrow will be how to succeed in marriage when you have ADHD. The key to both - recognize that this isn't laziness, selfishness, or a lack of value given to the "normal" spouse, but rather a hyperfocus and impulsivity that will never ever change. Each partner must use their strengths most effectively while compensating for weaknesses rather than making grand promises and getting upset when they are not followed through on. Tomorrow's key for people with ADHD? Learning to be humble and accept influence rather than getting defensive, allow the person with the fully functional brain to use it by helping us.

Last Man Standing!

2011-08-26T07:00:00.001-04:00

Parenting is not easy, regardless of who you are. Marriage is tough, but parenting is like trying to hit a moving target - the goals keep shifting, what worked before just makes things worse now, and when we start to feel comfortable we realize we have entered a whole new game. This is especially true of the shift from raising a child to raising a teenager, a shift that happens at different ages for different kids and rarely are they kind enough to send you a memo giving you a heads up. "Dear Mom and Dad, thanks for the great job so far raising me, you have kept me alive in spite of regular decisions on my part that have been working against that. Just thought I would let you know that all those tools and techniques you have developed so far are now worthless, you'll have to develop a brand new approach and you may or may not be good at it."

What is the shift that needs to happen in order to effectively parent a teen - move from overpowering to empowering. What starts off as a reasonable enough way of establishing authority becomes less and less practical - whoever is the biggest, loudest, smartest, strongest person in the house gets to make the rules and tell everyone else what to do. Often we don't even think through the situation we are creating, we just follow suit from our parents who just told us what to do - or else! It would take a whole other blog just to cover why parents no longer have inherent authority like they used to but the who system of our society is different than it once was. So when we have a two year old who is running into traffic we just yank them up by the collar and tell them to do what we say because we are bigger, stronger, and smarter. When they are 16 and they won't do their homework we try the same approach and we find a new challenger in the ring wanting to see if maybe THEY can now be the biggest, strongest, and smartest. We can escalate and try to assert our dominance silverback style, and for the first couple of years of adolescence this just might work, but inevitably it results in one of two responses based on their available assets. If you have a big dumb oaf then their best bet is to bully and intimidate you with their burgeoning size to get their way, if you have more of the bookworm type they will probably just smile to your face and then passive aggressively do whatever they feel like. Either way it really won't work unless you were blessed with one of those people-pleaser teens who will be great now but struggle their whole adult lives because of the pressure to keep making everyone happy.

The solution - recognize the real power you DO have, and then solve your own problems while letting them have theirs, so you end up giving them all the power in the world. You provide them a place to live, nice clothes, food, spending money, rides around town, etc. and those are all privileges not rights. You can't make them talk or not talk, obey, make good decisions, or really much of anything so if your approach is MAKING them do something they'll quickly pull back the curtain on your wizard of oz. What you CAN do is set them up in a world where when they do good they are rewarded and when they do poorly they see the consequences of their actions. This is where it is good to inventory their problems and your problems - hygiene, social preferences, homework completion, and what they spend their own money on are THEIR problems - whether chores are completed, whether you are addressed respectfully, and how your money is spent are all YOUR problems. Let them see the natural consequences of their own problems and then set up effective rewards and punishments to make sure your problems are taken care of. They don't want to mow the yard, that is fine, they are completely in control - it just means the gas and spending money you would have used to take them out that Friday to hang with their friends is now going to hiring the neighbor kid to mow - either way YOUR problem gets solved, their problem gets worse but that is their decision.

Ultimately if you want to go head to head with a teen in a control battle they have a distinct advantage - youth, energy, and far fewer responsibilities - winning can be their full time job. So drop the control battles and give them all the control, you just make sure they see the consequences of their decisions. Often we fight hard to get teens to do what we want, never offering them alternatives other than do what I say, then when they fail to do it we rescue them from the natural consequences like arguing with their teacher for them to get an extension on their project deadline, but then set up an artificial consequence like grounding them. What do they learn, two things - they can do their project whenever they feel like it and their parents are buttholes for grounding them. If in some rare instance you have to fight a control battle - then win it no matter what - step away from 99% of the control battles and if one must be fought, do not lose. Great resource on creative ways to make this happen? Parenting Teens with Love and Logic by Cline and Fay.

GIFT of Anger

2011-08-25T07:00:00.001-04:00

Often when we get angry at others we assume that it is they who made us angry, we have no other way of responding, and that when we express our anger they will reassure us and make us feel better. More often when we get angry at someone they really only have two options, either "Well, good luck with that" as they really don't know what to do with us while we are angry, or "You're angry? What about me, I shouldn't have to put up with this, I didn't do anything to deserve this!" and we end up arguing about who has the right to be angry.

The reality is that anger is always a secondary emotion - we feel some other emotion because of our interpretation of the situation and because of that primary emotion we get angry. When we express these softer underlying emotions then we invite the other person to help us is a more specific way. It's the difference between expressing displeasure as a baby as opposed to as an adult - you can whine and cry and expect someone to magically know what is wrong and fix it or you can say, "Hmmm, I'm not feeling good. I bet it is because I am hungry. maybe I'll ask them for some food." In the same way we can get angry and spew it on the other person or we can figure out what is underlying and express that and they can better respond. Good way to remember the four most common underlying emotions - GIFT.

Guilt - often we feel bad about something we have done and instead of confessing or asking for forgiveness we lash out at the person who is a reminder of our fault. They could be rubbing our nose in it or completely unaware of the transgression but our self anger gets leaked out on them.

Inferiority - sometimes we feel talked down to, less than, unimportant, not valued, or not chosen over other things and it makes us really angry. If we can express this and ask for reassurance we are more likely to get it than the continued approach of spewing anger than just makes us seen as even more inferior.

Fear - many times we get afraid and the fight or flight response kicks in resulting in lashing out around us rather than expressing the fear and being soothed and reassured. Many times people we love step on core fears of ours without even knowing it and get a bigger emotional response than expected when our fears of abandonment, rejection, or being controlled get triggered.

Trauma - this may be the most common, but rather than coming out and saying we are deeply hurt by the other person we lash out in revenge. Saying you were disappointed or hurt may feel like admitting weakness but it's the only way to realistically get an apology and reconciliation.

Express the underlying emotions and the other person can do something with it, just express anger and you can expect either indifference or defensiveness.

Throwing Fuel on the Fire

2011-08-24T15:07:00.000-04:00

My beautiful wife was kind enough not to call my blog boring, but did suggest I make it shorter and not drone on and on - so here is my attempt at a shorter post. I'll discuss deescalating and keeping conflict less intense within the context of marriage, but I really believe these three principles are critical in parenting, dating, friendships, etc. as well. They are Soft Start-ups, Checking, and Accepting Influence and they can make the difference between huge blow-ups and reasonable disagreements.

A Harsh Start-up is anything that initiates a conversation in a way that incites defensiveness in the other person because it starts off as an attack. Research says women tend to make this mistake more than guys in marriage but also that they initiate the vast majority of communication anyway so it really is just they are the ones that start so more often it is harsh. If you get that the first 10 seconds of the conversation really sets the tone for the whole conversation then you realize you can kill the whole talk in your opening sentence. Start off with generic criticism of their character, exasperation, and a harsh tone and they are unlikely to hear anything after it. Start with a reassurance of how you really feel about them, then give a complaint and it can be heard, start harsh and you will only get defensiveness.

Second is Checking, where you simply choose to not overreact until you are sure you heard what they were trying to communicate. It is sort of a time-out where you say "It sounded just then like you were saying I purposefully left my socks in the middle of the floor just to anger you, was that what you were trying to say to me?" Rather than assuming you know what they are really trying to say, give them your interpretation and let them give their real message so that you don't waste emotional energy blowing up at something they didn't actually mean to communicate.

The third is Accepting Influence, where regardless of what is presented to you, being willing to hear it and validate it. Research shows women are naturally good at this but that men struggle much more - leading to the complaint that we are bad listeners - truth is we hear it, we just swat it away quickly before accepting it. Maybe it is the fragile egos that take a contrary opinion as disrespect and a threat to our truth, or a fear that if we accept this and go with it then we become weak, controlled, and subservient, but we tend to do it less. When we throw up a wall it just signals to our spouse that they need to find a way through or around it by jackhammering, sniping, or whatever approach we think will assist in message delivery. When you respond to anything the other person says with acceptance it disarms them and leads to more conversation. Rather than blocking and punching it is more like Aikido where you diffuse the other person's energy with redirection, and you become the strongest person in the room because you are teachable and able to grow. "I can see how you view it that way. That is totally valid. I'll definitely try to be more aware of that in the future as I definitely did not mean to hurt you like I did." Agreeing and validating aren't the same - even if you disagree you can still see it from their perspective and take whatever can be learned to heart so you are better able to communicate how you really feel in the future.

Start with a soft start-up, respond by accepting influence and if it ever threatens to escalate then check it before you wreck it. The majority of conflict can avoid destructiveness with just these three steps.

A House Divided

2011-08-23T12:50:00.001-04:00

Sex, Money, and Families - the three topics couples argue the most about, all have the same thing in common, they are hard to share because we have different viewpoints. It's my body, my money, and my family, but in marriage we have to negotiate to make it all OURS. Fights about families usually revolve around how to handle our insane in-laws or the blog topic for today - how to handle parenting.

The problem is that most us feel like we have no idea what we are doing but we are positive that what our spouse is doing must be screwing up our kids. We'll never say it but we feel like if our spouse would just totally adopt our way of parenting then we could create perfect children - problem is it is a theory we can never prove. When parents come at the same kids with two different approaches often the result is two people undermining what the other parent is doing resulting in a net gain of zero. Chances are if you backed off completely and just went with their approach or they went with yours, either way it would create more productive parenting, but no one will give in and while the parents bicker the child skates off whistling, thankful you created the smokescreen for their getaway. How does this come about? Does anyone go into parenting thinking "I sure hope I can be so hard on my kids that they tremble when I walk in the room, placate me in my presence and then talk junk about me when I leave the room" or "I want my kids to some day see me as just their peer, disrespect me openly, but at least let me be their confidante, but with no authority at all." But that is where couples find themselves due to Parental Polarization.

The same thing happens with finances or other areas where at the beginning of marriage one spouse is a little more frugal and concerned with saving than the other, while the other is a little more impulsive and comfortable enjoying their income. Pretty soon the saver has to compensate for the spender and vice versa and before long they are far more extreme than they started or even they want to be. With parenting we each start a little more towards focused on the rules or focused on the relationship, but before long we overcompensate for the other and become polarized caricatures of parents. The strict one feels like the kids will get away with murder if they don't step in and correct them, because heaven knows their pushover partner will never make the kids listen. The permissive one feels like the poor kids will be crushed under the cruel dictatorship of their partner unless they swoop in to console and reassure, letting them have a little bit of freedom. The result - they both openly or subversively undermine the authority of the other resulting in kids who are at best confused and at worst decide to discount them both. In mid-tirade, vein freshly bulging the strict parent gets lopped off at the knees when the savior parent swoops in to reassure the kids that the cruel ogre in their midst really doesn't have the power to make their lives miserable, they won't let them. As the permissive parent reason's with the kids hoping to convince them to want to do what they want the, the strict parent barges in and in one quick interchange establishes that the other parent never had any credibility, and should continue to be ignored. When we get mad at the other parent totally undermining our parenting it just gets interpreted as them pushing their "I hate rules" or "I hate the kids" agendas and the bickering just continues.

The solution - you have to have a balance of rules and relationship, they have to be independent of each other, and they both must be pursued by both parents simultaneously. This means it is vitally important for kids to be taught right and wrong, cause and effect, have their character shaped with consequences, and be held accountable for their actions so they become respectful, responsible adults. It is equally important that they feel loved, cared for, accepted for who they are, and comfortable sharing their inner world with their parents so they grow up not being a people pleaser, a perfectionist, or full of shame. It's important that each parent balance both of these, using God's example of being the perfect balance of grace with truth, so they get the full message without two messages drowning each other out. So this means if each parent needs to overcompensate it isn't in the direction away from what their partner is doing, but rather towards it. The black and white rules lawyer concerned with what the neighbors think of their parenting job needs to focus on building a strong healthy relationship with their children full of grace. The bleeding heart rescuer wanting to spare their kids from any hurt, disappointment, or consequences needs to focus on establishing real authority with rewards and punishments taking their kid's character seriously. The key to doing this is seeing each role separately and not allowing them to overlap. Just because your kid screws up royally doesn't mean you should pull back on your relationship with them - that's not what God does for us, he maintains his relationship with us through any and all mistakes because he loves us and we are His, not because we are lovable. And just because we want our kids to feel loved and cared for doesn't mean we ignore their poor character and shield them from their own consequences, that's now what God does, and it really isn't loving it's just pleasing.

Apples and Oranges

2011-08-22T07:00:00.208-04:00

When it comes to the Christian faith there is how Christians see themselves and how they are seen by those on the outside, and rarely are those the same. Often we focus on trying to either be or at least portray ourselves as being perfect hoping that others will want some of the good stuff we have, when really all they see is hypocrisy. Sometimes in this pursuit of looking perfect we also present the idea that we know everything, and that saying "I don't know" somehow threatens the truth behind what we do know. If I walked into a McDonalds and said "Hey, those fries are amazing, how do you make them taste so good?" the employee would likely tell me he opens up a bag, puts it in a fryer and when it beeps he puts the salt on, but does he really know? Is it some special kind of salt, or magical potatoes farmed by Grimace himself? We may never know, we just know they are good, and we don't look down on the employee for not having all the answers.

When you ask a Christian questions about science we often feel like we need to answer them with our favorite science textbook - the Bible. What is the origin of the universe? Are homosexuals biologically predisposed towards their sexual attraction? How old is the Earth? What is the most effective medical treatment of anxiety? At what point in gestation does a child develop rights? How far away is the nearest star? What caused dinosaur bones in the ground? We feel like if someone asks us any question in the universe then we should be able to answer it with a Bible and maybe a concordance, when maybe it was never written to serve as a science book, a carpentry manual, surgical guide, or an exhaustive historical account of everything that happened before 100 AD. Maybe it serves exactly the purpose it was inspired to serve rather than purposes ascribed to it over time by people with agendas. If I had intense pain in my side and right before an appendectomy my surgeon walks out with a Bible and says, "Listen, I'm a Christian surgeon, so that means the Bible is my authoritative text for life, not those worldly medical texts presuming they know what is inside of humans" I would run, and fast. If right before takeoff my pilot said, "Let me say a quick prayer before we take off, God directs all of my actions so no need for me to understand how planes work. If we hit turbulence or at any point need to land I'll just consult my Bible and we will be just fine," I would get off the plane as quick as possible. But when we go to a pastor for "counseling" and he tells us everything we need to have a good marriage, be good parents, cure our depression, or get off of drugs is to read your Bible and pray more, we believe it and figure if we fail it was just a lack of faith. When we sit in science class and learn about evolution, or that if the Earth was only 6000 years old then it must have been created with fossils already in it and lights travelling through space that give the illusion of a star being millions of light years from Earth then we freak out. We throw the Bible out as the authoritative text on science and in the process make ourselves feel better but look more silly to those on the outside. We look like the McDonalds employee who answers our above question with, "Well, the employee manual says the fries come from the freezer and the salt from the large sack so we must believe that is where the good taste comes from - the kitchen." What about the truck that brings the ingredients, or that french fries come from potatoes which must grow in the ground? These questions must be ignored to maintain the employee's perfect image and supreme knowledge of the universe.

Why does this debate matter for me - three reasons. First I believe the best method for counseling marriages and families, for treating mental illness, and helping people achieve full healthiness can't be found exclusively within the Bible, but must be supported and reinforced by solid research, quality scientific knowledge, and years and years of clinical understandings of the way people work. Second is I don't want Christianity to be relegated by our culture as irrelevant because Christians define themselves by standing in opposition to science - who said the two were even fighting so we had to pick sides. Maybe it's apples and oranges and the questions asked by religion and science are different and can't well be answered by each other. If so then we won't find ourselves in the all too familiar spot of bundling Christianity with beliefs about the physical world that science goes on to disprove. I have no idea how the church was able to recover after the whole "The Earth is the center of the universe" fiasco, and I don't like to think of the damage it would do if Evolution was ever able to be proven. Do I know whether the Big Bang happened or if we evolved from a lower species, or how old the Earth is? Nope, and I'm OK with that because my faith doesn't rest on it and I'm OK not having all the answers.

The third reason this is important to me is because on a regular basis I have clients that question their faith as their scientific knowledge increases and not getting answers from the Bible makes them question the whole deal. What do I know? The same thing we all really know - what I have personally experienced - A God who has revealed himself to me over and over again in minor and major ways, often through the Bible, often in relationships, and even in nature. So if needing to know all of the answers is necessary for you to accept God's free gift of grace or to continue allowing him to guide and direct your life then it just ain't going to happen - because we just don't have all the answers and we never will. So then they will say - just the answers to the really important questions, then they can believe, and they usually boil down to one of two questions. Theodicy - or the question of how do you reconcile an all-good and all-powerful God with a world that has pain and evil is a question that I'll hit in a later post but even then won't answer. The other is refusing to put on blinders of scientific ignorance and needing to reconcile the creation narrative within the Bible with modern scientific knowledge. For this question there are also others far more qualified to answer this than I, but my simple answer is that maybe they don't contradict. Believe in a literal reading of the creation account and say evolution is a bunch of junk, that's fine, it is just a theory and has yet to be proven. Believe in the Big Bang, evolution, the whole deal, that's fine, it can be reconciled with the creation narrative in a myriad of ways. Why is this? Because the Bible is more concerned with letting us know that the fries are really tasty than how they are made - that there is a great and wonderful God that has been at work in our world from the very beginning and He wants to join with us in our lives to recreate them into something better than what was there before he got involved. Seven literal days, seven periods of time, or maybe that portion of Genesis was written in poetic format much like psalms and proverbs so really wasn't trying to read like a history or science textbook. Was Adam the first human created, or like early Jewish readers would have read it was he the first Jew set aside to found his chosen people, or was he the first ruler over creation meant to bring God's order to a people already in chaos, or was he the first Homo Sapiens evolved from the other neanderthals ready for God to use in mighty ways? Lots of theories are out there but most serious biblical scholars will tell you the more you know the more you realize what you don't know, so humility and grace for the interpretations of others are the way to go.

So the Bible is great for wisdom, a revelation of God's plan for his creation, and contains the greatest gift mankind will ever see, the free gift of a reconciled relationship with their creator, but it is as useful for a science or history book as it is for a cookbook or boat-building schematics. If you have big questions and you think being a Christian just means pretending they don't have answers then you are cheating yourself - get a Bible Commentary, a Systematic Theology, or a scholarly book on whatever your big questions are rather than just burying your head in the sand. You'll expand your own view of a God we'll never fully grasp as well as helping the Body of Christ become more knowledgeable and informed. Good Systematic Theology - Millard Erickson's - nice and balanced and short. Good blog entry on the Adam and Eve debate - Storied Theology - http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/08/10/trajectories-challenges-ethics/.

Wherever you fall in any of the various interpretations just don't get too comfortable - Christianity is about a relationship with a real person not a book or set of beliefs, so when He moves in your heart, reveals a little more of himself, or gives you a different way of viewing things it is just to keep you dependent on him. And when you think you have it all figured out and are judging the ludicrous views of others, all you really know is those fries are fantastic.

Compromise The Key To Marriage?

2011-08-19T08:09:00.001-04:00

Ask anyone what it takes to make a successful marriage and they will likely tell you two important things - good communication skills and lots of compromise. The problem is that both of these nuggets of wisdom are crap, and actually are hallmarks of really bad marriages. Research seems to show that in highly conflictual and low enjoyment marriages that the communication is crystal clear, they are very accurately portraying exactly what they want to communicate to each other, like "I hate you", and "You are the most selfish person I have ever known." Nothing unclear there, just straight to the point and right from the heart. Another hallmark of really bad marriages is where compromise rules supreme and everything is fair, there becomes a tit-for-tat, quid-pro-quo way of interacting that is anything but love.

I kind of cringe when I hear couples talk about compromising or making deals with each other and I think it links back to the previous post http://pilferedwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/08/marriage-horrific-prison-or-best-tool.html that says the focus of marriage should be on growth and sanctification rather than making yourself happy. So maybe I am wrong but compromise to me seems like two people cleverly negotiating their selfishness with each other so no one has to give in, or ever lose. Maybe if we can come up with elaborate schedules requiring graphing calculators to determine the exact exchange rate of a poker night with the guys - three mornings to go running? A week of country music in the family car? A fifteen minute conversation with her mother-in-law without a sarcastic remark? Maybe if I can recreate the final ring ceremony romantic extravaganza from The Batchelorette, then I can trade that in for you taking those pole dancing lessons I heard about? If you have an affair does it makes things better if I just use my free pass to go find someone else? I think the reason this mindset bothers me is that it inevitably leads to the next logical solution, which is to begin doing all this without even talking - to just decide that since he didn't do this, I won't do that. Because she isn't meeting these important desires within me I will withhold what she desires as well. And so we end up in an 80's action movie stare-down waiting for someone to slip up and show weakness.

So what is the alternative to compromise? Submission. Everyone in the marriage just decides to see themselves as steward leaders under authority and in authority. I won't be able to completely flesh out true biblical submission here in this blog entry but for now lets just assume that it is mutual between both partners and that their ultimate authority is God. I think Emerson Eggerichs in Love and Respect lays out one of the best models for mutual submission within marriage where both spouses see their ultimate authority as God and they have been charged to meet the core desires of each other to build each other up. A man was designed to need respect, and women were built with a unique ability to speak life into us, to help us feel good enough, competent enough, accepted enough for who we are to go out and conquer the world. But when a wife criticizes, complains, compares her husband to others, and defines him more by what he is lacking than what he has it cripples him. A woman was designed to need love, and men were designed with an ability to give and sacrifice themselves in a way that puts their wife up on a pedestal and creates a confidence that nothing will be placed above her. But when a husband becomes lazy and selfish, content to count his paycheck as all that should be required of him, and treating his wife with apathy and indifference unless she is naked it pushes her towards anxiety and insecurity. Circular spirals happen both directions, positive and negative, as it is far easier to give respect and love when you are getting yours in return.

The problem comes when you look at your overweight husband piddling on his iPhone while ignoring the kids, after having spent the entire Saturday playing golf following a week of working late every night combined with mandatory happy hour since he needs his "Me Time." Or when you overhear your wife equating your relative worth and value as a human being to Casey Anthony to her mother during her nightly venting session before mocking your attempts at physical intimacy by laying out every mistake you ever committed with detail that makes you question whether she has hidden cameras. Kind of hard to drum up respect for a guy who doesn't deserve it and it seems stupid to lay your heart out out for a woman that looks to devour you unless you develop telepathy and never make a mistake. So if you go with the compromise route then everyone gets what they deserve and no one is really loved. But if you decide to submit and respect the husband who doesn't deserve it and love the unlovable wife, then everyone gets their needs met and we become far more likely to become respectable and lovable - that is speaking life into our spouse.

A warning needs to be thrown out here that often when we start trying to be a better spouse and submitting we are really just caving, building resentment across time, unless we start getting some payback. That's not change, that's exchange - it's quid-pro-quo compromise just on layaway. So either we become the spouse God has called us to be out of submission to him, not our spouse, or we build in frustration looking to get paid back. Basically if we respond to our spouses by what they deserve we give them very little but if we respond to God's love poured out on us by loving our spouses unconditionally we give them our all. It's ultimately what we want for our kids - that they will find someone who will love them like we do, and that even if they screw up their spouse will be everything they need - the same God wants for his children. So when you see God as your heavenly father-in-law it gives you a different perspective on how to treat your spouse. You can tell me you love me all day long but if you treat my kid like crap then I don't really buy it. So maybe the greatest test of your love for God is how you tangibly treat His son or daughter - Ouch.

Driving a Ferrari with Bicycle Brakes

2011-08-18T08:09:00.000-04:00

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may be the most poorly named condition in the DSM-IV - it's neither a deficit of attention nor always accompanied by hyperactivity. It also may be one of the most vilified and least understood learning disabilities in our culture causing just as many people to go undiagnosed as those hyper kids who get drugged up to get off their parents nerves. My goal with this blog entry would be to briefly go through what ADHD is and is not, help people better understand it and in the process better understand me. I have ADHD - Inattentive form, have had it my entire life and will always have it yet didn't manage to figure this out until this last year. How is it that I could make it to 33, be a counselor who can diagnose and treat ADHD, wrote a thirty page paper on ADHD in grad school, and have never figured this out - because even I had a host of misperceptions about the disorder and myself. There are two types and those kids, more common in boys, who have the hyperactive variation they are usually spotted and singled out for being a disturbance, while the inattentive variation is largely undiagnosed, or more accurately misdiagnosed as lazy.

ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting the executive functioning area of the prefrontal cortex responsible for regulating attention and impulsivity. In brain scans the rest of the brain is lit up with activity while one small spot shows gray and dead when completing regular tasks - but it isn't dead, it's just sleeping because when the subject engages in an activity that is exciting, taps into a passion, offers an interesting challenge, or if the fight-or-flight response is engaged it lights up bright. What this results in is a kid who can play Call of Duty for 12 hours straight without blinking but can't stay focused long enough to complete their homework or an adult like me who has a ridiculous ability to photographically recall enough information to fill up libraries but will take two hours to do fifteen minutes of paperwork. This is where our society and especially the Christian subculture will often just say this is a heart problem, we are just lazy and irresponsible. Problem is that when you look at us in an area that is of passion and interest to us we are more responsible and hard working than anyone on the planet. The frustrating part not just for you guys putting up with us but for us as well is that it isn't that we have no focus, we just have a hyperfocus, but only on the things that wake up our brain. If your normal brain is like a shotgun, we have lasers - you can spread your attention between several things at once and can decide which activity deserves your best attention, we are like Cyclops from the X-men without his fancy glasses. So if we are doing monotonous tasks, busy work, or anything that doesn't wake up our brain then anything out there in the background that could be more interesting will forcibly grab our attention - email, a bird flying by, a conversation across the office. If we are engaged in a task that ignites our passion then nothing else exists, our hyperfocus gives us the brain raw horsepower of a Ferrari engine without power steering and bicycle brakes - full throttle intensity with very poor handling.

The other hallmark of ADHD is little to no impulsivity control, if it pops in our head we just run with it. Therefore we are horrible with time management, financial restraint, and we are far more likely to develop addictions. We are prisoners of the now, able to immediately get over being hurt and very unlikely to plan ahead. If something is not directly within our field of vision then it doesn't exist, and even if it is right in front of our eyes but isn't our focus then it doesn't exist. We're the person who says the wacky thing that pops into our head which half the time makes everyone crack up laughing and the other half of the time gets nothing but blank stares and uncomfortable silence. Impulsivity is fantastic when it results in creativity as a brain without caps can create art or music that a normal brain would never come up with. It isn't so great when our emotions don't have the normal cap that other people's have - we feel the same emotions as others but with more intensity. When we are sad or hurt we feel it stronger than others often looking like depression, when we are anxious our mind can race faster than someone with real anxiety, when we are irritated and angry we can snap at people before we even register what happened. A low frustration tolerance, moodiness, and a hard time forcing ourselves to just snap out of how we are feeling are almost always there, even if we have developed a personality that wants to make people happy and so would never express these things on the outside.

In addition to the attention and impulsivity problems that are biological we usually end up developing secondary problems as a result. We feel weird and different so often become loners or even embrace weirdness as our identity. We don't always track with people because our attention wanders so we feel like we are socially awkward when usually others don't even notice. We become procrastinators because if mundane tasks don't wake our brain up then we come to rely on last minute anxiety to give us a shot of adrenaline to get the task done. We often become very driven and self-critical because we end up believing that we really are just lazy and need to try harder, but even when we try our potential never matches our productivity. When we can finally accept that our brain works differently, not better or worse we can do what it takes to succeed - medication can keep that part of your brain woke up increasing attentiveness and impulse-control - counseling or psychoeducation can help us develop skills in things like time management, responsibility follow through, and budgeting - and just becoming more informed means we don't just see it as a curse, but actually quite a gift.

So why did it take so long for me to get diagnosed? Well I believed a lot of the myths floating around that lazy hyperactive kids must just have bad parents, that if this was ADHD then everyone must have it - they don't, and I had figured out all sorts of ways around it. My hyperfocus growing up was always school which really doesn't often get you in trouble, and being naturally intelligent meant I could still get good grades even when I forgot my homework, spaced out for half the lecture, or forgot there was going to be a test. My personality has always been one that wouldn't allow me to have a temper problem, and so my low frustration tolerance never became much of a problem until I had kids. I assumed the meds were just to tranquilize unruly kids into zombies rather than tools that can wake up the brain so that I can better direct my own attention and resist impulsive drives. There is no miracle pill but it definitely helps better than my previous medication - caffeine. I really believe the key to success, however, is mostly within accepting that if you have ADHD then you will be really bad at some things and really good at other things and that whether you like it or not that is OK.

At some point I'd like to throw in some of my adult ways of compensating that may help others as well as how best to parent a child with ADHD, maybe something on how ADHD affects marriages, or how to succeed in your career with it, but those are for another blog.

The Finished Product

2011-08-17T13:44:00.002-04:00

Parenting can be the most rewarding, frustrating, exhausting, overwhelming, fantastic thing in the world but it is a job with a clear start date and a fuzzy end date. Sometimes we choose to be parents, sometimes parenthood chooses us. Sometimes we are excited, sometimes we are terrified, but forever we are changed. Before we have kids we look at and judge the frantic shell of a woman pushing a cart through Walmart with her hair undone, puke on her shoulder, and a screaming tyrant of a child who is blowing snot bubbles on the tile floor until a suitable tribute of M&Ms is offered and smugly think it will never be us. Before we actually live with a real live teenager we assume it is crappy parents that create disrespectful, belligerent, little monsters convinced of their own superiority in all things regarding intelligence, morality, and dating decisions. No matter how prepared for parenting we are, everyone looks at their kids from time to time and wonders if they truly have any clue how to parent based on the unfinished product, and usually this comes when we don't have a clear goal of what we want the finished product to look like.

Let me start with a clear caveat that I do not in any way believe that good parenting creates good kids that become good adults, because that is not something that is within our power. Too many books, sermons, and smug neighbors assert that if you just do the right things in the right way you can create great kids that become great some day. The truth is that it is our job as parents to set the best possible environment and put the best ingredients into the product we are working towards, but that fantastic parents often have worthless kids who reward their hard work with defiance, and just as often horrible parents do everything wrong and end up with fantastic kids. Ultimately what they become is up to them, so stop blaming their friends for corrupting them and stop blaming yourself for every wrong decision they make. God is our heavenly father but he isn't responsible for the bad decisions we make.

That said, I think it is important to determine an end goal as early into parenting as possible - what end product am I wanting to put out into the world at the end of 18 years of parenting? You have some options here and some pitfalls to avoid. The first is training your kids to avoid annoying or irritating you by snapping at them when they do anything out of line with your constantly shifting whims and desires - make everything a battle from how they chew their food to what grade of gasoline they put in their tank. This creates a finished product that learns to avoid you when you are in a bad mood, placate you in your presence, and do whatever the heck they want when you aren't around and unless they have a boss some day with all the same annoyances and preferences as you then they haven't really been prepared for life. The second option is to immediately do anything and everything you can to make them happy non-stop every day which creates a very frustrated adult that walks into life as a dictator who has lost his only subjects. Another goal might be just trying to make them look good in comparison to other people's kids - are they better dressed, act better at parties, get better grades, score more touchdowns, and have more Facebook friends? This is the parenting message our culture gives us which is to focus exclusively on the achievements of our kids and look at them as a walking report card of our parenting based on what they are able to accomplish. When asked about our kids we will likely spout off their GPA, sports involvement, relative attractiveness and such like we are a promoter describing a boxer or a headhunter raving about someone's resume.

What if our focus and goal was on our kid's character rather than their achievement, what if when asked we described our child as responsible, compassionate, respectful, and hard working? Rather than letting kids do whatever they want or trying to perfectly mold them into a telepathic robot that can read your mind and always do what you want, maybe we should pick our battles and just fight hard on a few things. What are those things? Well, that depends on what values and character traits are most important to you and your spouse. I say pick like 3-5 character traits and enforce them over 18 years with rewards and consequences and you might have a shot at making them stick. The Prasse family is shooting for Respectful, Compassionate, Responsible, Faithful, and having Integrity but your family may include things like being a Servant, being Hard Working, or Generous. Get on the same page between parents or else you will bicker and cut each other off at the knees constantly because you have two different goals in mind and if you sabotage each other then neither set of values stick. Whatever your main values are catch them doing it well, catch them going against them and if anything bugs you but doesn't correlate to one of the values then it is your problem not theirs. Kids are supposed to be annoying at times, we're just supposed to have maturity, grace, and the ability to see our kids as distinct human beings from us.

Marriage - Horrific Prison or Best Tool Ever?

2011-08-16T19:07:00.002-04:00

Have you ever wondered who came up with the concept of marriage anyway? An institution that seems to be entirely contrary to the natural bend of the human heart could only have been introduced by God. No man sat around thinking "Wouldn't it be great to only have sex with one person for the rest of my life, and only when I haven't done anything too wrong that day to stave off a barrage of criticism and comparisons would I be given the opportunity?" And no woman one day decided, "I know, I'll take this guy who is currently wooing me and offer him a deal where he has me for life regardless of whether he continues to deserve me; he can completely quit and turn into a lazy selfish couch potato and I just have to be happy when he grunts in my direction!"

So why did God come up with marriage? Here are some theories. One is that he is just one big fun Nazi in the sky doing the best he can to ruin any sense of enjoyment we may ever get out of life. Another is that he just loves the sheer entertainment value of watching millions of simultaneous reality shows where men and women flounder around trying to make a relationship work. Our culture proposes that the goal of marriage is to make us happy - just find somebody who makes you happy, marry them and keep staying married until they stop making you happy - hence the current divorce rate. In the book, Sacred Marriage by Gary Chapman, an alternate theory is proposed - maybe God designed marriage to make us holy rather than happy?

It really makes more sense if you think about it - I mean if God wanted to create marriage to make us happy it probably would have been designed quite differently. Marriage is very tough work just to survive much less the effort it takes to accomplish a great marriage that you look forward to coming home to. Maybe marriage is an opportunity for two totally different people to be made better for having to kill their selfishness and pride so that they can become one unified entity that reflects the image of God better than anything else possible. In marriage growth and selfishness are inversely proportional - either your selfishness grows and your marriage dies or your marriage grows and your selfishness dies. So we can allow our marriage to shape us more and more into the image of Christ or we can skip off to someone else who will temporarily under the anesthesia of romantic love make us happy, or we can work tirelessly trying to fix our spouse into something that better suits our selfishness. So under this model it really isn't about finding the perfect person to marry but really just picking any old sinful, flawed human being. It isn't about assessing your mate to determine if you really are soul mates or if they are good enough for you. It isn't about trying desperately to please our spouse hoping they will be happy with us. It's about choosing to love our spouse not how they deserve to be loved, but in response to how God has loved us. God's job requirements will always be more stringent than your husband or wife's.

So when we look at marriage we can easily think it was designed by Satan to torment us but really it is a gift to address our greatest needs. the need to get past our own immature selfishness and learn to care about someone else more than ourselves. the need to be confident and secure enough to really be ourselves without fear that we will lose our spouse the second we stop being perfect. The need to constantly be given a challenge to greater and greater possibilities that can never be taken away - our spouse can reject us and leave, they can take us for granted, but the character and confidence that are developed when we die to ourselves and give our all toward a great calling is never wasted. But if there are two of us really doing this we have the ability to really create something amazing that stands out when others look at us, because rather than reflecting our culture we are actually reflecting the image of God.

But what if you have a really horrible spouse, does that give you a free pass? Short of extreme cases like abuse, adultery, addictions, and such then you are really being given a gift when you get a lazy shiftless husband or a nagging queen of the harpies wife. Because the greater the struggle it is to live with a person the more potential character that can be developed - the greater the challenge the greater the payoff. It's true in weightlifting, education, careers, and every other area of life, why wouldn't it be true in marriage. So if your spouse is a colossal pain in your butt then send out a quick prayer of Thanks to God for the opportunity He has given you to be better shaped into his image.

This viewpoint has the ability to totally shift your perspective on marriage so you stop berating a sinful flawed human being for being imperfect and start looking for how they can help you become more patient, loving, kind, forgiving, and accepting. Marriage is no longer a concentration camp where death is inevitable and you can only hope to jump the walls, it can become an incredibly effective tool to chisel away the parts of you that aren't holy so you can be revealed for the potential you have within. Given this tool should probably be investigated by the Geneva Convention as being cruel and unusual, but I am guessing the big lump of rock wasn't too thrilled about the vicious hammering and chiseling that transformed it into the statue work of art.

Three Sources of Worth

2011-08-15T23:16:00.000-04:00

Back in college there were a number of classes that I had to take that met requirements but seemed pretty worthless at the time - I place Anthropology in the list of worthless classes but Film Appreciation was awesome. In my UNC-Chapel Hill class, Introduction to Ethics, we can assume Christianity wouldn't be the accepted cultural worldview, so one goofy question caught me off guard when I was asked to argue it. Why is it that killing and eating animals is all right but killing or especially eating people is not, is it not just species bias that makes us think we are better than animals? If you take belief in a God who created humans in His image out of the picture then it becomes pretty tough to come up with a valid reason why chickens and humans shouldn't have equal rights. You can't even go with the argument that we are stronger and smarter or we have to say aliens should have the right to kill and eat us if they are smarter, or that killing babies, mentally retarded people, or anyone less strong or intelligent must be OK. So why are we as humans better than any other animals in creation? Well, we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, with infinite worth and value because of the spark of the divine within us - period.

If we take this to be true then it keeps us from finding our worth, value, or acceptability in anything other than His image - our race, our possessions, our status, our education, our job, our family, etc. Anything else we could base our worth and value in can be taken from us, as the storms come and destroy the house built on the sand, only the strong foundation of our Imago Dei can withstand the trials and tribulations of life. What happens when we get let go from the job we gave our best to for thirty years, when our last child heads off to college and we are no longer just a Mom, when Alzheimer's threatens to steal what we have stored up in the treasury of our minds - our very identities are threatened unless the foundation was seeing ourselves as God see's us.

Problem is most of us buy this for everyone else in the world, just not us. You would never kill or even intentionally hurt another person because you see others as having worth and value just for being a human being created in the image of God. It's just us, we are somehow inferior to others and don't have the same worth and value. If the above viewpoint is the truth then there are two lies that threaten to steal our worth and value in our own eyes. The first lie is Ascribed Value - we are only as valuable as what other people say about us. Gold has value because people decide that it has value, not because it is particularly useful - it's too malleable to make any decent tool out of but we pay tons of money for it and fearful Americans are pouring their life savings into it. But what if tomorrow we just decided gold wasn't all that great? It would cease to have value. If that is our view of ourselves then we need to do everything we can to sway the opinions of those around us - please as many people as possible, have as little conflict as possible, and work hard to get people to like us. Our view of ourselves will be a roller coaster depending on who we are around - in one group we are valued and deemed worthy but around someone else we are nearly worthless, our value is like the stock market, constantly in flux.

The second lie we could believe is that of Utilitarian Value - that we are only as valuable as what we are able to do. Like a shovel we have value because we can be used to do stuff for people, so the more we accomplish, the more we do for others, the more value we have. But what if we are going through a busy or difficult time and can not do as much for other people, do we feel bad and lose worth? If we are in a car accident and are paralyzed and can never do anything for anyone or even ourselves, do we cease to have value? We become human doers, not human beings, constantly striving to do enough to be deemed worthy in our own eyes, but we can never do enough. Ultimately this was the lie of the Nazi's, that in order to create a better nation you must only kill off any humans who can't make it stronger, anyone considered weak. So maybe you start with the physically and mentally disabled, those considered inferior like Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, and eventually just the Aryan race is left.

We don't have worth and value because other people say so, we don't have it because of what we are able to do, we have worth and value because we are human beings and humans were created unique and special by God to bear his image and accomplish great things in his name. This applies to all humans, even you. The only way our worth can be static and defined is if humans, those around us or ourselves, don't get to decide our value - God does.

Ambition, Culture, and Influence

2011-08-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

For my first real blog I figured I'd give insight into what prompted me to start blogging as well as how it may encourage you. It was staff meeting here at Carolinas Counseling Group and it was Linda McGrew, one of the founding partners', turn to share with the group. I have been here over nine months and have effectively dodged having to present anything to the group as of yet - mostly because I feel like an elementary school student being asked to present to a bunch of Nobel prize scientists my science fair project volcano. She spoke about the most recent conference she went to sponsored by the CS Lewis foundation where she went to Cambridge and Oxford for like 10 days and got to do cool stuff like eat in the big dining hall from Harry Potter, though she claims candles did not float and ghosts did not speak to her. There were numerous speakers like Os Guiness and Chuck Colsen, and the theme was Paradigms of Hope: Transcending Chaos and Transforming Culture. The gist I got from it that was pretty interesting is that we usually think of culture as what the majority of people in a given population think and feel, and that if these beliefs are good and godly we will have a good culture, or not. That a few major important people influence culture and that most of the power to transform culture lies within elected government officials. So as Christians we should just convince as many people as we can to believe like we do, vote good Christian people into office, and sit back and watch our nation's culture transform into a Christian utopia. Problem is that most all of that is complete bunk. In the 60's 98% of the population claimed to believe in God, currently it is still at 88% yet our culture is increasingly secular - so maybe the majority really doesn't rule. The Jewish race has never made up more than 3% of the American population yet Jewish-Americans have had a hugely disproportionate impact on American culture it's entire history - films, art, science, entertainment, education, etc. Homosexuals only constitute about 1.4% of the American population, and while I am no conspiracy theorist about some sort of an agenda, it is clear that our culture is saturated with references to homosexuality. Most of the major political, legal, and cultural victories for homosexuals were gained during the Reagan and Bush administrations, so apparently just electing conservative leaders doesn't create a conservative culture.

The assertion of Os Guiness at the conference is that culture can better be seen as a resource that is produced and used as a source of power much like money. This, of course, reminds me of the video game series Civilization where your options for conquering the world are military, economic, scientific, or cultural victories - where towns produce culture based on great people, wonders, etc and this culture is quantified and seen as a source of power. From this model a college degree doesn't make you any smarter than a person without a degree but it does give you more cultural capital and therefore more ability to impact american culture. A degree from Harvard may not be quantitatively better than a degree from NC State, but it grants a lot more cultural capital. Kirk Cameron may do a much finer job acting in Fireproof than Growing Pains, but the one on nationally syndicated television impacts our culture more. So culture is produced by institutions, is represented by famous people, and is powered by a strong financial base - Billy Graham is a great evangelist but it is the network formed around him and the initial financial backing of William Randolph Hurst that propelled him from backwoods preacher to cultural icon.

What does this mean for me or for you? The ability to really change our world doesn't actually lie in supporting another politician or party or agenda, but to do our individual bests to leverage our cultural capital for God's kingdom. Having the right beliefs and voting for the right people do not equate to changing the world, but rather using the gifts God has given us in the positions he has placed us while accruing as much cultural capital as possible has the ability to impact the world. So why do we as Christians not do this? We avoid power, influence, and notoriety because we see them as bad or worldly - we even openly criticize and mock Christian leaders who attempt to accomplish big things and become a part of culture. We criticize pastors for promoting their church through advertising, or for having a large church budget, or for attempting to invade and infect American culture. We encourage intelligent Christian students to stay close to home or go to small Christian schools rather than encouraging them to apply to Harvard. We applaud people who remove their kid's from society and insulate them in a bubble for as long as possible. We fear that culture and power are evil and will corrupt us when we as Christians possess the hope of the world and the power of the resurrection within us so if we believe God is more powerful that the world why do we work so hard to keep him out of it?

I would argue that the creation of a separate and distinct Christian subculture in America has done far more to secularize America than any evil cultural icon we could blame. By creating our own music, films, clothing, schools, etc we have shot ourselves in the foot for being able to truly impact culture. We become obsolete, isolationist, and an afterthought while secular influences are the only ones left in the only institutions that really matter when it comes to shaping our world. It was years ago, I think at a Catalyst conference, where I first heard the concept that maybe if we really want to help shape America into more of a Christian nation then rather than isolating ourselves in a Christian ghetto we would do better to try and be the next Stephen Spielberg or Dr. Phil or Oprah - because they and the institutions behind them are what is truly shaping America.

So maybe it is false humility for me or you to think we have no platform, nothing to say, and no power. I could easily just be a loving and devoted father and husband and miss out on the opportunities God gives me to impact the world. So thus a blog - I will begin impacting people virtually and who knows where it may lead - I may get my doctorate or write a book or some other way to penetrate our culture. The same can be said for you - how can you be like Esther or Joseph or Moses or the many other Biblical examples of people who leveraged their cultural capital and power to be used by God in big and powerful ways.

Starting my very own blog...

2011-08-11T19:21:00.000-04:00

Over the years I have had several people ask me if I have a blog or suggest I start one, but I have always scoffed at the idea for two main reasons. One is that I have always feared that if I started one I could never keep up with it - I really admire the people who can daily or weekly update their blog and always have something useful, insightful, or challenging to say and in my black and white view I either wanted to do it right or not bother - hence years of not bothering. The second main reason is I feel like I would run out of interesting stuff to say and the only blogs more annoying to me that the ones where people post once a year on average are the ones that post daily but without anything of substance.

So here is my solution - to the best of my ability I will try to keep up with this and be both consistent and follow through across time, but I will also only post if I think I have something relevant, helpful, and purposeful to post. I won't presuppose that my musings on life or what I had for breakfast would constitute something anyone would bother to read so I will use what I have to try to help others - Good or bad I am a walking encyclopedia of information - most useless but some actually helpful, and most all of it pilfered from others more brilliant than I am. Even when I think I have come up with something brilliant and original it usually is just me forgetting where I read it or who I heard it from. Hence the title of my blog - pilfered wisdom - if it seems to have value and the information has the potential to help people that can't actually pay to come see me for counseling then hopefully this can be a platform for lives to be enhanced.

It may be current or former clients reading, friends, family, or just random people who have my blog suggested to them through something like facebook, but whoever checks it out I hope it is helpful. So there you go, I just completed my first blog entry and had nothing of substance within it, but at least I am ready to start posting!