Worry vs Denial

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...

A Shot In The Chest

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.

Driving a Ferrari with Bicycle Brakes

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.

Starting my very own blog...

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!