Am I broken?  This is a question I used to ask myself quite often.   Do you feel broken? Like there are things inside of you that you don’t understand and don’t know where they are coming from?   You act in ways or feel certain things and don’t know why you do them or think them? Do you feel different from everyone else?

 

You are not alone.   We tend to think we are the only one who’s different.   That we are weird or “broken”. It’s easy to feel that way when you don’t understand yourself, your feelings, your triggers, or your tendencies.  Especially when everyone is wearing a mask of who they are pretending to be to make it look like they have it all together.

 

The thing is, we’re all unique and different and that is amazing!   However, we all try to be the same and follow what everyone else is doing.   We think if we do something differently or don’t fit into the mold that something is wrong with us.

 

The most important and fulfilling thing you can ever do is get to know yourself and stop living to please everyone else.   Stop trying to fit in and be “normal”. Instead focus on getting to know YOU and what is going on inside of you.

 

We ALL have brokenness.   This world is a broken place.   Unfortunately most of us have been trained to bury all our hurts and pains down deep.  To ignore it, to suck it up.

 

I was raised this way.   I wasn’t allowed to show emotion and whatever happened in life I was to suck it up and keep moving forward.   That is how I lived the first 40 years of my life. I buried everything. And I became a hot mess with walls, masks, you name it.  And I hated myself because my emotions were out of my control and I didn’t know how to fix it.

 

This is what causes so much confusion inside of us.  So much despair and torment. We have a lifetime of pain buried down inside of us that we haven’t dealt with.   This is what causes weird behaviors, walls to be put up, masks to be worn, emotional triggers, anger, insecurity, and the list goes on and on.   

 

We do things that we don’t understand.  We don’t know where it’s coming from. It feels out of control and crazed at times and in turn makes us feel like something is wrong with us and like we’re broken.

 

Our fears, our insecurities, our need to fit in, our loneliness, our anger, our sadness…it all comes from something buried inside of us.

 

So how do we get down to the root of it all?

 

Step 1:

 

PRAY:  God wants us to heal and he wants us to reach out to him for help doing it.   You don’t have to pray some fancy elaborate prayer, all God wants is your vulnerable, true heart.   Ask him to show you what you’ve buried inside, to help you understand your reactions and triggers better and to help you get to the root of your pain.   Ask for strength in the process and help in healing.

 

This process will happen over time because if all your past and pain was revealed at once you’d be very overwhelmed!   Be dedicated to the process and PAY ATTENTION. I can’t stress that enough. You have to be aware of what you’re doing and feeling.

 

Step 2:

 

PAY ATTENTION:  When any weird feelings show up…anger, hurt feelings, anxiety, sadness, getting offended, judging or criticizing others, the need to complain or get attention, etc. STOP right there and analyze the feeling and why it’s there.

 

Ask why it’s there.   Why am I feeling like this and where is it coming from?   

 

You may have been teased as a child or emotionally/mentally/physically abused by someone or more than one person.   Those things will set off a defensive behavior or anger.

 

Are you doing things to get attention like gossiping, complaining, or being provocative?   Possibly you weren’t loved as you should have been by one or both of your parents or you received negative talk from them.   Perhaps one of your parents abandoned you or didn’t pay attention to you and now you have a need to feel loved. It doesn’t have to be a parent, it could be anyone at any time in your life.

 

What was the trigger and where in your past did something happen to make you develop this trigger?   Go deep and figure it out.   

 

Do this each time you have a reaction to something and you will start understanding why and you will be able to catch yourself at the onset.

 

Step 3:

 

Let yourself FEEL and PROCESS the pain:  This is the hard part.   A lot of us have very deep and painful things inside of us that we buried for a reason.   It hurt, we didn’t want to feel it so we buried it.

 

The problem with that is buried pain creates a monster.   We have things coming out of us that are ugly. Everyone around us ends up getting our wrath for something they had nothing to do with.   Other people are paying for our buried pain and meanwhile we are miserable and unhappy. We wonder why we are getting what we want in life.

 

Do you want to feel like that for the rest of your life or do you want to deal with it, feel the release, and have better relationships with everyone around you?

 

Go back into your past and start allowing it to reveal itself.   When something bad comes up don’t run from it but think about it, go back to those feelings, process it, cry, scream, throw things…whatever you need to do but allow yourself to feel that pain.  

 

This may be very foreign and scary concept for you.   I understand, I had to learn it as well. The most important thing is that you let yourself go through the feeling process but you don’t keep holding on to that thing and dwelling on it.   

 

You have to accept that it happened to you, that it happened to you for a reason, and that you can help other people and be a better person in spite of your pain.   Use it to make better choices, combat it by doing something good in the world. Be what you needed at that difficult time in your life.

 

But DO NOT LET IT STEAL YOUR LIFE.  

 

Step 4:

 

BE PATIENT AND KIND WITH YOURSELF:  This is a time to be kind and patient with yourself.   We all tend to be hard on ourselves and beat ourselves up.   Try stepping out of yourself and see yourself as a person you love.   Look at you from the outside. Feel kindness, love, support, and patience just as you would someone you really care about.   You would want to help them and you wouldn’t want them to hurt or feel damaged. Doing this REALLY helped me.

 

I suffered abuse from every authority figure in my life and was consistently told I was worthless and stupid.   I was encouraged to drop out of high school because I would never amount to anything (thankfully I did not).  

 

I hated myself for a long time because I believed it.   I abused myself. I thought I was unlovable. After all, every person in my life who was supposed to love me up until I was 20 years old treated me this way.

 

But when I stepped out of myself and looked at myself as I do my son and how I would want him to feel in my shoes, I will tell you that emotions flooded me.   Tears flowed hard. Looking at myself as another person allowed me to completely shift how I treated myself and how I thought about myself. It was quite the groundbreaking moment in my life.

 

The truth was…those people in my life were abused.   They were broken and they had so many buried emotions.   They took out their pain on me. They tore me down but they were really reflecting how they felt about themselves.

 

We have to love ourselves in order to love others.   Don’t hurt yourself and abuse yourself because of what others have done to you.   Their actions don’t define who you are! They define who THEY are.

 

We HAVE to heal ourselves in order to stop this pattern.  It will take time and you will feel pain. But you will get through it.  You will slowly start to see the changes in yourself. You will start to feel better inside.  It’s SO worth it, trust me.

 

Step 5:

 

FORGIVE:  When you read that word you may have a whole ration of feelings hit you.   Forgiving is hard. 10 years ago I sat alone in my room with God and made a list of every person who caused damage in my life.   I went through them one by one and forgave them in my heart and let what they did to me go.

 

The result?   I was free and I was able to start new relationships with these people.   The change in me and my forgiveness towards them helped them to change and become better.   They no longer treated me in an abusive manner but instead started seeing that I did have worth and that I was a good person who made something of myself.  They saw they were wrong. It was incredible.  

 

That’s not to say their negative patterns don’t continue at times, but I set my boundaries to where I don’t allow it in my life anymore. 

 

Forgiving someone is not saying what they did was ok and you don’t even have to tell them to their face that you forgive them, but to forgive them in your heart is releasing yourself from what they did to you.

 

The biggest thing for me that helped me to forgive was understanding that the reason they hurt me was because they were broken.   Broken people hurt other people. They are reacting off their buried damage. It’s not even about you…but you had to pay for their pain even though it wasn’t your fault.

 

Do you see how this comes full circle?   Do you want someone else to have to pay for your buried pain?   Or do you want to reverse the pattern into something positive?   

 

Most importantly do you want to be truly happy and balanced?    

 

If so, you have to heal, forgive, and release.   

 

If you don’t you will continue to feel lost, confused by your reactions, and broken.  You will hurt other people and you will not find joy.    

 

That is NOT what you were created for.   Combat the bad things with good things. I have found that is the key to finding peace.

 

My sincere hope for you is to find your peace and your path.   You are NOT broken. You have a special anointed gift that only YOU have.  There is no one that you are less than. Please don’t deprive the world of your unique awesomeness! 

 

Much Love to YOU!

Denise

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