ºWHO AM I???

One of the main reasons I hesitated in blogging my story was that others would see me as “the girl who has this traumatic story.” That is not who I am, nor do I plan to live my life with that shadow over me.

I am a CHILD OF GOD, His loved child. There are many stories that make up who I am, stories of great love, wonderful memories with my mother and siblings, beautiful friendships, college experiences that shaped who I am, dating and marriage memories with my husband, experiencing motherhood for the first and second time, and loving relationships with clients and their families.   What’s awesome about my healing journey is that I can clearly see those things now and they overshadow all the other negative, traumatic stories with such brightness that I don’t even see the trauma.  That is why the joy I feel now is so strong. Opening up and truly working through my traumatic experiences has released my ability to feel again.

What happens when you are numbing emotions out of self protection is that you can’t only numb the bad emotions, you have no option but to numb them all. (Brene Brown’s research exposed this truth to me.) The sucky thing about being numb is you don’t realize that you are not present and this makes it hard to recall memories. You are literally missing out in your life. That is another cool thing about healing. I am able to be truly present. No longer lost in the self-sabatoging cyclical thinking that causes the numbing escape.

Worthiness. Such a powerful word and concept.  God through Jesus satisfied the question of our worthiness. I have learned now that basing my worthiness on performance and perfection is like someone giving you a gift that you don’t return but you choose not to use, even when they are present. It looks a lot like wastefulness, or unappreciative self-centered egocentric thinking bordering on narsisism. That might sound like quite the jump, but I don’t think it is.  I now think of it as if God gave me the most amazing gift and my refusal to embrace it not only brings Him sadness, but says something about my pride. Do I really think that I’m capable of perfection, am I saying that my expectation of perfection is achievable? If my measurement of worthiness is perfection then yes on some level I think Christ-like perfection is possible for me.  And even further, if I expect it of myself, but not of others what does that say? That is CRAZY, but it took this journey to figure out how prideful and arrogant that is.

In my position of leadership at work, this has been a HUGE lesson that has tremendously changed my leadership style. I now purposely expose my mistakes, my struggles, and my inadequacies. Not in a ‘let me say negative things about myself so that you will praise me’ kind of way. Just a true transparency that reminds me and others that I’m human-your human and we all need grace.  Modeling grace and love does a lot more for a work environment than modeling this false image of perfection.

It’s like now I think oops, sorry Jesus, I need that mercy or grace card now, ask for forgiveness from all involved parties and then I move on. It’s such a freeing thing. What’s really bizarre is that doing that now brings me joy from knowing that the devil no longer controls my thoughts or worthiness with the lie of perfectionism.

Worthiness and parenting, shew that’s a hard one to swallow when you realize what you have modeled to your children in the from of performance based worthiness. You are either saying be like me and earn your worthiness or no worries honey that performance based worthiness is only for me, you aren’t capable of achieving that.  Ouch!

So needless to say the transparency has carried over on the parenting front as well. The change i saw in my oldest, the perfectionist, was almost immediate.  What’s cool is kids can implement change without much effort because they model our behavior.  So as soon as I changed, she changed. My youngest didn’t get the perfectionist thing to begin with, so she somewhere in her soul knew worthiness was a gift from the beginning.

It’s working so well that my great example of imperfection came up in conversation with my 11 year old, going on 16.  She asked if she could get her driver’s license early, because if she got it at 15 that would be less than 4 years away. Scary thought! I said, “no honey that is called a hardship license and you don’t have a hardship.” She said, “yes I do, Mom. You are my hardship.” (Referring to the many times I am super late to pick her up or just completely forget to get her at all due to losing track of time at work.) That has now become one of my favorite stories to tell. It reminds me that imperfection can also bring us laughter when we aren’t taking ourselves too seriously.

This worthiness lesson was one of my first HUGE breakthroughs and what a difference it has made in every area of my life. Old habits die hard, so the journey to fully internalizing this was long but so worth it!