I have always gone through life like a bulldozer for as long as I can remember. However, I was also a procrastinator, but for very specific reasons. I didn’t want to start something if I didn’t have time to do it perfectly and complete it in one sitting. You can see how these guidelines would lead to everything piling up. So it always did. Then once the pressure of the list got to be too much, I would be like a bulldozer and do it all at once leading to many, many all nighters. Then I would crash from exhaustion afterward and start letting things pile up again. I was never able to ration the work and do a little at a time.

Yes, this is somewhat personality driven but it is also common in those who have experienced trauma. I was never good at pacing. My expectations of myself were that I get it all done perfectly or not at all. This can be paralyzing! This is one of the examples of how all or nothing thinking ran my life.

I was also also pretty good at making snap judgements about things, bulldozing my way through relationships.  At the time, putting  people in categories almost immediately kept my world simplistic enough to manage while having the chaos inside of me.  If someone hurt me, made a poor choice, criticized me, or overtly challenged me then they weren’t to be trusted. I didn’t push them out of my life necessarily but I was just really cautious and kept them in the not to be trusted category. Well that’s a problem isn’t it? All people have fallen short and are in need of forgiveness. Not just from God, but from those in their day to day lives. Trust is a fragile thing, but for those with a traumatic history it is almost too fragile to touch.

Because of my past, I despised people who were dishonest, selfish, made poor choices that hurt others, and had no self control; so if I put you in that category for any reason it was next to impossible for me to see anything but the bad. But the truth is that very few people are truly as sick as my father was and I have learned not to so quickly put others in that box, or any box for that matter.  I have had to learn to look at the whole person and determine if the mistake they made was a part of a pattern of behavior or one singular event.  If it was just a mistake and not a pattern, then I have learned to see the whole person, their good qualities but also reminding myself that they are human and will make mistakes. This has opened my world to the true complexities that make up people. In addition to taking my blinders off and truly looking at others, I have also done so looking at myself. It’s amazing the pieces of ourselves that we can’t see when we are avoiding hard feelings, especially shame, and in ‘self protection at any cost’ mode.  Through looking hard at myself in therapy I have uncovered my own complexity as a human-the good, the bad, and the ugly. The difference is that now the imperfection does not illicit SHAME, instead I give myself GRACE and in turn I can more freely give grace to others.

As a part of my healing journey, I pray that God will help me continue to take blinders off when looking at myself and others, leading to a new level of gratefulness for the gift of forgiveness, grace, and mercy and that I will wholeheartedly accept these gifts that were given to me freely through Jesus instead of rejecting them through insisting on carrying my shame.