Listen Already

My little brother graduated college last month. That statement in itself makes me feel older than I actually am. 😳

However, this is not a post to talk about yelling at kids on my lawn. This is about something that has been on my heart for a couple of weeks. Now that it's marinated, I figured it time to pop it on the grill and share. 

At the graduation ceremony, the president of the school addressed the crowd and said if he had one thing to advise to the graduates, it would be to learn how to listen. It caused me to tilt my head to one side and go, "hmmm." 

He talked about our polarizing culture. Between ISIS, the upcoming presidential campaigns, Caitlyn Jenner and open carry legislation, you can be barraged by a number of opinions on all these things just by opening Facebook or turning on the news. With the dawn of social media, everyone get to have their say. Isn't that special?

Issue is, I learned in Elementary school that when everyone is special, no one is. We see this phenomena in social media constantly. While we post our opinions on blogs and Instagram, we can't wait to see how many likes or website visits we get. Then when we are underwhelmed by the response, we look to other blogs who say if you really want to be followed, you have to post more frequently, post about more controversial things, give your opinions more. More, more, more. It's the social media equivalent of shouting to be heard in a virtual world that is already on par with the decible of a jet engine. 

The more we post coupled with the less people respond, we become defensive and battle lines are drawn. We post comments on other people's posts with differing opinions, hoping others will back us up. Or, we just filter out differing opinions so that we can have a feel good pow wow in our minds, Anyone who gets more hearts or a differing opinion is instantly an enemy because they are taking all the likes. We pick fights just to win and make ourselves feel better. 

But ultimately, this behavior isn't driven by the desire to be heard, but actually by the desire to control people. Take an example from a heated argument Jared and I had when we first got married. He didn't do something that I wanted him to do. I had asked him to do it before because, after all, our marriage depended on him showing me love, right? When I asked him why he didn't do it if he knew that I had asked him to, he didn't have an answer. As the conversation went on, I just talked, and talked, and my voice got louder and louder until I was yelling at him and threw a pillow for good measure in order to communicate my anger. But what was driving me wasn't my desire for him to love me or understand me. It was my desire to control him and his actions. 

When we engage in social interactions either in person or virtually, many times we are just trying to control what other people think. We want to be a movie star so we can influence people. We want to inflict what we think on others by implementing political policies we like. We want to win the argument on social media so we can win over more followers who will wait with bated breath for our words on what to do or say. We want to curb the actions and attitudes that we don't agree with so we don't have to deal with them. 

This is the source of our polarizing culture: control. Everyone wants to control everyone else. Problem is, I can't even control Jared, much less a community of people. Our argument in our marriage wasn't settled until I actually shut up for a second and allowed Jared to talk without me planning my next retort in my head. Our society's arguments won't be settled until we do the same. 

I can't control what other people do, but I can decide how I am going to respond. Letting someone make a different decision after I have communicated my opinion is the most vulnerable I have ever felt. As I think about it, I feel like it's how God feels whenever we decide not to listen to him. However, He gives us true liberty to have free will and not be controlled by Him. I feel like in our culture, we will not have true liberty either until we decide to give up control. We need to shut our mouths and actually listen to people for what they are actually saying. We need to be ok with them not agreeing with us. And we need to give people the freedom to make their own decision. It can definitely be scary when everyone seems to be making a different decision than you. But I think we would be surprised by the impact we can ACTUALLY have once we finally decide to just listen.

Living with PTSD

Many times on this blog, I've mentioned one of two things: my struggle with my depression and my PTSD. I am not a war vet, so many people don't even know I have it. Plus, I would never compare myself to any of them when it comes to bravery and honor. These people make life altering decisions to protect my freedom. No, my PTSD came from what happened to me at 15. I, along with my family, were victims of a home invasion. And it has fundamentally changed my life.

Initially, I wanted to just forget that it happened. As a teenager, I didn't want to go to a counselor or admit that anything was wrong. I wanted to be normal. I remember I missed that morning at school after being up until 2:00 AM with police as they investigated my house. When I arrived at lunch time, all my friends were asking where I had been. Many reacted with total shock when they heard and treated me weird afterwards. I had flashbacks walking down the stairs from classes, in the halls. I constantly felt paranoid and couldn't calm myself. I didn't understand why it happened or why I couldn't just shake it off. I remember wondering if there was ever going to be a day where I didn't think about it. If these men had stolen my ability to think about anything else. 

Thankfully high school kept me stressed out enough I could focus all my energy on that rather than why I couldn't get past my brush with death. Unfortunately, that caused my college years to be chaotic. Emotions always ran high. I frequently had insomnia or just always wanted to sleep. I would shut down if something became too overwhelming and many times, I barely had the motivation to continue with my studies. Living with my best friends helped immensely. Meeting Jared got me through many of my rough patches, especially when I went to live on my own at the end of my schooling. But I couldn't deny my bouts of depression, frequent nightmares and outbursts of anger any longer. I struggled with God, wondering why I couldn't overcome my issues. I experienced his deep love at the bottom of my pit my junior year of college. But it wasn't until graduation and getting married that I realized my issues were much deeper and I really needed help. 

Thankfully, when I moved to Dallas I was referred to a really great counselor. At the beginning, I was really frustrated because I was diagnosed with PTSD. I resented feeling labeled. Yet, as I met with her and she explained some of the symptoms and ways to manage them, I realized it wasn't a label, it was a method of getting better. My nightmares were normal. My insomnia, flashbacks, anger, paranoia, all were explained and methods to deal with them were then introduced to me. I had an unrealistic expectation that I could "cure myself" where I never had to deal with it again. But God actually used my work with trafficking survivors to help me see that I was going to have good and bad days. That the symptoms would diminish, but not necessarily always go away forever. I would ask God why he wouldn't just take it away. But I realize he has taken something terrible that has happened to me and made it a way to remind me to always trust in God. Paul mentioned he had a thorn in his side that God never took away. Mine seems to be PTSD. 

So what does it look like to live with PTSD? For starters, you have to realize that your brain has been structurally transformed due to the prolonged stress. Fight or flight responses are great for survival. However, if constantly turned on, they actually form additional channels of neurons to help deal with the stress. Post-trauma, if any of these neurons fire due to just a little amount of stress, it can trigger the same emotions that you felt when the trauma was occurring. Some of these things can be big. A kid pointed a stick at me while I was jogging in the park the other day. He was playing pretend and was an army dude "protecting the bridge." The kid didn't know doing that was going to cause me to have a flash back. But I did. Thankfully, I knew how to deal with it using a grounding technique my counselor taught me. A mile down the trail. I was feeling shaken, but relatively confident no one was pointing a gun at me.

Yet, small things can do it too. Just the other day, Jared and I were geocaching. We couldn't find the darn thing. We were bushwacking and getting frustrated and I got so overwhelmed I began to cry. Obvious to any other person, a geocache isn't worth crying for. But the constant weaving in and out of bushes and getting poked by thorns set me off where I just broke. But, thankfully, I knew it was normal for someone with my brain to get upset by that. I reassured myself that we weren't in any real danger. Then two minutes later, I was fine. Plus we found the geocache haha. So, it's just a good thing for others to know, I might get overwhelmed for a couple of minutes, and I just need to cry it out sometimes. My brain is bringing all the emotions of my past and crashing them into my present. It takes me a bit to regain control, but I'm learning how to do it better and better these days.

Secondly, for me, I need to feel accepted by those that I love. It's hard to let your guard down and be vulnerable to a person when you have been assaulted. I tell Jared all the time to show me he loves me. I desire recent evidence to allow me to feel safe in our marriage, that I am accepted with my crazy brain and all. I know he's not perfect and thankfully, forgiveness runs rampant in our household, because we both need it. But when he does show me how much he loves me, it helps me immensely to be able to feel secure. Husbands and wives...show your spouse you love them. They often feel like weirdos and outcasts even without PTSD. Showing them they are VALUED helps the healing go a long way. 

And thirdly, know that because of what has happened to me, God has implanted a deep empathy in my heart for those that go through traumatic experiences. Dr. Tomi Grover said it best that God uses the gloriously ruined to rescue those whom God wants to gloriously rescue. I understand on a deep level the shame and insecurities that come with constantly battling the past and trying to not let it affect your future. He has given me a deep love for people. That love has since transcended into my calling. 

While everyone is different in how they deal with it, I hope me being raw and real helps you, the reader, understand a little bit more about how complex stress and emotions can become when living with PTSD. Sometimes, I don't know how to explain myself and my crazy habits sometimes. Lord bless Jared when he married me! Yet, honestly, if I could go back and do it all over again, I wouldn't change anything. While I know I might not ever be "cured," I also know that living with PTSD causes me to rely on God more than ever and to reach out to people who need him all the more. And I can say I am truly thankful for that.