Well, my last post was one frustrated rant…but back to the usual today.

I’ve started what may be one of the worst anime I’ve seen, but I won’t say what it is yet, I’m going to wait till I finish it to review, but it’s like 30-40 years old, so… (don’t start guessing, you’ll never get it).

Meanwhile, I am still feeling better but not great, and now I have to face going in for my next adjustment, I’m afraid to tell my chiropractor how much worse I felt after the last one, I’m afraid he’ll try the same thing again and make it even worse…

There is always the possibility he is dong something wrong, but nothing he’s doing should be causing any real damage, even if it doesn’t help, so I’m hesitant to come to that conclusion.

And I’ve been thinking that I may actually be more afraid that this is working, that I am getting better, and that the recovery just feels awful. Or ultimately, this problem is more psychological than it is physical, which is the general consensus.

People don’t understand why I am so stressed and anxious, and I have a hard time understanding it myself, especially since often I don’t feel like I am. I’ve been told it’s like I’m carrying something someone else put on me.

It is very much like that, like I’ve just shared my parent’s problems without ever wanting to or choosing to do it myself.

I feel like I believe deep down that this is somehow my fault, and the problem is with me, and I can’t change it. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo, I wish to cut out the part of myself that belongs to this lineage of death and suffering.

Of course, I believe Jesus has already covered that bloodline, Ps 45 says to forget your own people and your father’s house, but it’s easier to say that than it is to really believe it.

I was thinking today that my worldview seems different since my dad moved out, I expected to feel relieved, to see the world as a righter place full of new possibilities. But even in the initial relief, it was much harder to feel that way than I thought it would be.

And then later, I started feeling more grim about the world. Teenage angst started making sense to me, a lot of songs I never liked because of the negativity started to feel like they fit how I felt. In a way it felt like it wasn’t me, but it was me now. I didn’t recognize myself.

I really don’t recognize the person I am now, with so much anxiety, negativity, and temptations to give up and to hate myself, I never used to think I hated myself, but I feel like I do now. I don’t even know myself anymore.

I feel loathing at even having gone through something like this, and slipping, and I feel angry, like it’s just not fair, and why am I the only one who feels like this (though I’m not)

I guess it’s normal for a victim of abuse to feel self loathing. To almost hate yourself for being abused because if you hadn’t been there, this wrong couldn’t have happened, and you were helpless to stop it.

Abuse messes with your head because in a way it doesn’t feel personal, it feels like you triggered a terrible thing in the perpetrator and if you just weren’t there, or were a different sort of person, they wouldn’t have acted in such an ugly way…or at least you wouldn’t have had to see it.

You feel your own existence is the problem…and my dad used to say things like that to my face, and never bothered to retract any of it, claiming it was a joke, I wasn’t laughing.

The wrongness of abuse is like a separate experience from the pain of it to yourself. It’s like looking at an ugly painting, or a twisted, warped, tree. Something just shouldn’t be that way, and to see it makes you feel wrong inside.

Love is a terrible to thing to see twisted in that way, deeply scarring.

It is hard for me to like or accept love, after seeing it made so ugly by my dad and the people around him.

And while that was not something I could have prevented or caused exclusively, the personal connection gives me a disgust with myself.

If you have been bullied or abused, you know this feeling, if you haven’t I don’t think you could really imagine how deep it goes, people rarely talk about it, it’s an aspect of abuse we just don’t understand very well.

In fact, it’s a sneaky side effect I’m not convince ever goes away on its own, I think it has to be confronted directly. People can be loved out of the pain of abuse, but the horror and disgust of it takes another layer of healing altogether. It takes choosing to take up the gauntlet yourself, and face what it did to you.

This ugliness has begun to color my view of life. It didn’t help reading a lot of twisted versions of history, and watching some bad shows, and encountering how sick people really are via the internet.

It’s disgusting what gets justified, the Naruto fandom taught me some bitter lessons about what people will accept in order to like a show, long after it’s become too corrupt to support if you looked at it objectively. (By the time we finished Naruto, we no longer supported it, we just wanted to see the end, we’ve never been stans, and don’t defend or praise it now, but plenty of people do, that’s what I mean by accepting it.)

I realize I’ve gotten more cynical this year, and it has nothing to do with the crisis, the process began before then. My dad leaving has just left a void of optimism in my life.

Partly because I realized he was abusive, but also because I couldn’t fix it or get answers from him about it. It’s not safe to be around him right now, but I also lack closure.

My certainty about some things got shaken.

I always used to think that bad things were somehow preventable, and avoidable if you did enough right. You could preserve yourself. This idea is popular in the church to, “name it and claim it” and so on.

My dad’s exodus from our house was like a huge case-file of proof that not all bad things are avoidable, or fixable by us. I couldn’t make it work with him after all, I don’t regret making that choice.. but I hate it.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about, huh?

So, I lost the illusion of control about anything outside my house. And I’ve begun to see how futile it is to talk about things like that as if we can really control what happens…we can make changes, but we don’t always make the changes we intend to.

I can’t simply choose to be better, can I? We can’t make the problems with the world just go away, to be blindly optimistic seems foolish to me.

I used to be much more of an idealist, and I am sad to have lost that, but I can’t logically go back to it, idealism seems to be only man’s imperfect solutions to me, good as far as it goes, but not the ultimate truth people treat it as.

I’ve learned a lot about God, I think, but I’ve stopped liking people so much. Even the people I like, I don’t see the same way.

I know it’s not fair to them, and that believing the best of people who deserve it is important to do. But it’s much harder now.

Once I tried to believe the best of my dad, and that ended up being a nightmare, so now how can I be sure anyone else is worth it? Or myself.

What if everyone can turn into a manipulator, abuser,or a neglecter? How can I be sure they really care about me… and do I really care about them?

Now that I’m writing it out, I think this is probably only a natural part of the process. This is the part people get stuck on for years though, if they don’t acknowledge it.

First, there was Shock, then Denial that I was really having a problem, then Fear and Anger that I was, then the Frustration of the cycle and trying to break it, and the Guilt of feeling like i just repeat the same mistake, and this is just not happening fast enough.

The phase dangerously close to Despair is the one I dislike the most.

And Disgust, that phase is not fun. It’s kind of an intermittent part of it, disgust accompanies pretty much every phase of abuse recovery, at least for me. It’s just so ugly to think about what happened. How people can be so terrible to each other.

Then I hit this Wall: God, how can I love people if they can be like this? How can You love us? We hurt each other over nothing, and we twist your most valuable gifts into terrible shapes and use them as weapons., how is there grace for that.

Yet, somehow there is, and I don’t want to be the Jonah on the edge of Nineveh, railing at God for being so merciful.

I guess the only way I can understand it even a tiny bit, is if I think of children. Who can do manipulative things, and deliberately be mean and cruel. But I still love them and want to see them become better. That must be how God feels.

Perhaps to Him, the crimes of a 50 year old perp are not really that much more serious than that of a child who shoves someone else on the playground just because they can. We see a difference, but the intent of the heart is the same, whether it’s a child or an adult. In fact, we attribute a lack of conscience more to kids because they don’t realize how damaging their actions are.

Children can be more pure than adults, but in my experience, it varies just as much as with older people. It’s just that the cruelty and kindness of children are both far ore open than adults, they are not more or less common.

But to God, all our sins must seem completely and utterly foolish and immature, as well as evil. While He must punish them, perhaps He can no more take them as serious threats to Himself than we can with kids. As always, the greater concern is how it affects us and each other.

I am getting at an idea here that I really can’t express well without sounding like a fool, even if it has a grain of truth in it, so I should probably move on.

The point is, God is so much bigger than our sins that He can see how to overcome them, and I can’t. Not the idea of it, nor the actions of it, nor the damage left over. But that’s me.

I’m well aware it’s not hard for Him. It’s hard for me to receive that.

I was saying last night to my family that I don’t even know what to ask for, but maybe that’s okay, maybe God knows, and I just need to ask for that. Maybe the ultimate trust is trusting God not just with what we know, but what we don’t know.

Corrie Ten boom wrote of that in “The Hiding Place” when we can’t unerstand cruelty, and suffering, will You carry this too, Lord Jesus?

Perhaps we cannot understand suffering because it is an experience we share with God, and we can’t understand any of those. Love, Joy, Perfect Peace, those are the nice experiences that are beyond our understanding, but Suffering is too. God suffers, and sorrows. We do so because we are like Him, that’s all there is to it.

God cannot give us less than Himself.

It’s an interesting thought too, that He suffers when we do, meaning that whenever He allows a sorrowful experience in our lives, He is allowing it for Himself.

God isn’t afar off watching us, but He feels it with us,

God is like a surgeon who operates on Himself at the same time as the patient, feeling all the pain the patient does, or more, because God is also like the anesthetic.

God does not spare Himself pain, we tend to think He cheats somehow, that He suffers less because He knows when it will end… but I have never found that knowing when something will end makes it less painful, it only enables me to endure it more patiently…sometimes, but even that is a choice. It must be for God too.

I think if anything, God is just Perfectly able to have Joy even in Sorrow, and have all true feelings at the same time. Maybe it’s just us who cannot hold more than a few feelings at once in ourselves…and indeed, the older I get, the more I can feel multiple things at once (like the Inside Out movie showed.)

Anyway, I think that’s all I got for now, until next time, stay honest–Natasha.