Help
With Your Rule
Dealing With Lack of Affirmation
Dear Holly,
I was wondering if you might have any recommendation or resource you could recommend to me. I have been re-reading Dr. Baars books and find myself feeling the need for affirmation. I seem to slip into depression every few months and am wondering if this might be part of the missing puzzle. I have been to counseling for depression, to counseling for child
abuse (I was molested as a very small child), and to see a priest for healing and forgiveness. Just hoping you might have some suggestion.
Labels: 2nd P Person
posted by Holly at 2:03 PM
5 Comments:
If you lived by me, I would have you over for a coffee and a long chat! But my brief response here by email will have to suffice. Please feel free to continue this dialogue if you want to.
First off, I am not a therapist so you must treat this as a sharing. I have been in your spot and I dont' necessarily have further resources to offer, but I do have what eventually helped me, so I will share my thoughts with you and you can do with them what you like.
Spiritual directors always know there can be 3 parts to many issues - the physical, the psychological and the spiritual. And so when there is a problem, they begin with the physical and work their way up to the spiritual. Based on this, I did 3 things.
Physical Causes
There can be a physical reason for your feeling the way you do, or a physical issue which "aggravates" your feeling the way you do. For me, I noticed
miraculous emotional results when I went off wheat and dairy. It was almost like I had an allergy to these things, experienced in the brain and hence the emotions. I suggest you look into this type of thing.
Also then, when I began to eat a balanced meal at every meal, and added enough protein, this all helped. I also added Omega 3 supplementation and B Complex with a multi. This helped. I began to exercise and this helped even more. And sleep - I needed at leat 8 full hours a night. When these things were in place, my feelings of lack of affirmation were diminished.
Psychological Causes
Yes, many of us grow up feeling unloved, and often because of real experiences of neglect or abuse. But I found the key to this in Baar's "Feeling & Healing Your Emotions" where he talks about the role of reason in relation to the heart. The heart is like a little child which flounders until it is directed by reason.
So, I began to realize my heart felt unloved as a result of past experiences or memories of this or just lacking anyone who seemed to care that I was around. I think that my heart was looking for something that it missed as a child.
But I realized that God does not abandon us. Baars had mentioned that it was ONLY through an affirming therapist that we could grow. This is just about the only place that I disagreed with him. I dont' think God puts us in impossible situations.
So, re this psychological level, I began to realize that my reason had to step in and affirm my person and my heart. And often, this took the form of asking my heart why it was feeling this way, and seeing if those things were really true. Was anything that my parents may have said unlovingly true? Did reason really tell me that I was in anyway unworthy of love? I think that here, our reason is meant to step in, fill our hearts with truth and calm our hearts.
You might want to call Dr Greg Popcak for information on which book of his addresses
Cognitive Therapy - ie: how to change our reasoning and thoughts in order to change our emotions. Because it is a Catholic teaching that our emotions are affected by our thoughts. I know Dr Popcak has something about this because I read it in his book about stress.
Also, there can be other issues in the affirmation issue - both the Emotional Deprivation Issue and various repressive disorders compounded on them. Baar's book "Psychic Wholeness and Healing"is very helpful on this. And I know Suzanne Baars has many tapes etc which might be helpful
Spiritual Aspects
And then for me, I realized one day,while reading Born Only Once, that all the references to love were an objective description of love. And that God is love. And that logically then, God must feel this way about me! And I realized that all of the negative un-loving things in that book were NOT how God would treat me, nor how He wanted me to be treated. And so I used that book to begin to ponder the reality of God's actual affirming love for me. I did this in my prayer time.
And I realized I could ask Jesus to directly love me and heal my heart directly. It might help you to do a rosary novena to this end.
And I realized that, even IF I had wounds in my heart from my upbringing or my experiences, and even IF no one in the whole world loved me enough to show me, or were themselves affirmed enough to affirm, that on the bottom line, my self-worth and my sense of being loved had to be coming from my relationship with God anyway! And that, even IF I never had another person ever love me in the way I wanted, that God did.
AND! Then I realized that, even if no one ever loved me the way "I" was looking for, that often people DID love me in THEIR OWN WAY, and that perhaps this was something that me, in my own blind quest for love-as-I-wanted-it, was ignoring.
So I began to look even more to see how others WERE attending to me and affirming me, and I began to see that with my blinders off, there WAS
affirmation.
And lastly.
I began to realize that, even if all of our wounds remain to a certain extent on earth, that I could acknowledge them, offer them, and move on to attempt to affirm others, since I was well aware that affirmation is not easily come by in this world. And in this sense, it was a type of forgetting oneself, to apply oneself to the building up of others. And that in this, there is joy as well.
Please look into Gregory Popcak's tele-counseling. I can't say enough about how much it has helped me to sort through my past so I can get on with living in the present moment. You can find the information on his website exceptionalmarriages.com Words don't do justice to how much Pastoral Solutions has helped me and thus my family. Just know that in my depths of anxiety and depression, I felt I was the most unlovable person and my husband knew we needed help when he looked at me and saw a total stranger. I thank God everyday for Popcak's Pastoral Solutions.
Also, Holly is right on about the physical causes of depression. Depression has several causes but it is always linked to hormonal health. High-vitamin cod liver oil is a must and can be obtained through greenpastures. Cod liver oil contains Vitamin D, EPA and DHA which helps depression. It also contains high amounts of vitamin A which, among many vital roles, plays a part in nourishing the thyroid and adrenal glands. A supressed thyroid and exhausted adrenals play a huge role in depression. The thing to do would be to cut out the things that depress the thyroid and adrenals and nourish the organs with natural, whole foods and supplements. The things that harm the endocrine system include: processed white flour, sugar, high carb foods like corn and potatoes, and the biggy: soy and new-fangled polyunsaturated oils such as canola, soy, corn and cottonseed. Things that nourish the endocrine system are: Celtic sea salt which contains over 80 minerals and is actually good for leveling out blood pressure, cod liver oil, B-complex vitamins, Vitamin C and saturated fats like raw grass-fed butter and extra virgin coconut oil. Since making dietary changes I have noticed I'm not as emotional, tired and irritable as I am when I eat high carbs and sweets. For more information on these dietary principles please look up the Weston A. Price Foundation. Also, there is a website called healingnaturallybybee.com. This website started out for candida sufferers (Another big cause of emotional problems and infertility) but anyone with any kind of health problem can get better following her plan of nourishing the body through food and natural supplements.
I will be praying for you sister. I know the pain all to well. Just know that depression and anxiety is not a cross to be carried through this life. God wants us to have peace so that we can handle the crosses that come our way. I will pray that you will find resources to help you.
Peace In Christ!
Just wanted to leave another thought here for consideration. Have you considered hormonal causes to your depression? I am a Fertility Care Practitioner and I've worked with many women who struggle with depression that is linked to their hormones and irregularities in their cycle. A great deal of the time, progesterone is the cause. For information about this, visit www.popepaulvi.com or www.creightonmodel.com Through those websites you'll be able to read about it and even find out if there is an NFP instructor and/or doctor near you. You can always see Dr. Hilgers at the Institute as well. God Bless You!
A friend of mine noticed that getting enough sunshine (no sunscreen) helped her mood swings. I have read that sunlight helps the body with its serotonin levels. I believe serotonin is a hormone in the brain.
I deal with this issue very much myself and have some of Dr. Baars books and have been fortunate to see a very good Catholic psychiatrist who has been on EWTN. These have both been so helpful.
That said, a wonderful priest in whose presence I immediately feel an overwhelming love coming from God said one thing privately to me once, which I will share, because it certainly would apply to more than me and was one of my first steps in realizing that I needed healing in this regard...he told me that "God loved me far more than I loved myself and that I needed to forgive those who had hurt me in the past"..Such a simple thing, but something so profound-I had not realized my own inability to love myself, and so certainly, how well could I love my neighbor then?
And one of the recommendations he made to us all was that after receiving Holy Eucharist, that our prayer be to Jesus, "Jesus, please love me-and love me more"-in the sense that we are often telling Christ how much we love Him, but truly what is so powerful is His Love pouring into us, and there we can find healing-to only say the word, so to speak-to ask to comprehend how much He loves us-our own dignity because we are His creation (because of course, He loves us fully, but we do not always fully allow His love into us and to transform us).
Anyway, the simplicity and the profound nature of those few words have helped me tremendously and I have been able to feel Him pour into me more since I began to invite more love, love that I did not think I deserved, into my heart. It has helped and I hope that it helps here.
God bless.
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