Cleaning the skeletons out of the closet

Do you have things in your past that you are ashamed of and that you try to keep hidden? This could include a number of different types of things, including things we've done or things that were done to us, or even things about how we grew up that are contrary to the type of identity we're trying to create for ourselves now. We may carry a sense of shame around with us like a weight around our neck because we know, even if no one else does, that there is a reason we don't open the door to that part of our mind. Sometimes we can feel anxiety over how a conversation steers in a certain direction because we feel a line of questioning begging to ask us about something that would reveal the shuttered door that we don't talk about. It's an incredible burden to carry when you are always worrying about people finding out about these things that are in the past. We don't want people to know about our past failures and struggles, or about the dark secrets that we would prefer to keep buried deep inside.

It is my belief that the reason we often prefer to keep these secrets and shameful things hidden away is not necessarily just because they are bad things that happened to us, but rather because they are associated with lie-based thinking that we have come to believe about ourselves at the deepest level, in our identity. The brain is an incredible association engine, as God has designed it in a way to learn from our past in order to better help us to survive in this world. What we have learned in the past, will help us when we encounter something again in the future. The problem is not with how God designed our brains, but with the effect that sin has on everything else, which in turn affects this memory association process.

When we are young and vulnerable, we are taking in all kinds of information from our surroundings and drawings conclusions and forming beliefs about who we are as people. When we are victims of sinful behavior, whether it be things that were intentionally done to us, or if we were simply bystanders hit with shrapnel from someone else's toxic behavior, it can result in us coming to some false conclusions about ourselves, and our brain remembers it all. In many cases as well, we don't even have to be victims of something that is so obviously awful either, we can arrive at a false belief about ourselves from a passing comment that someone made about us, or something we did, and it sticks with us after that. You don't have to have a traumatic childhood to have lie-based thinking that connects to your childhood and ultimately your beliefs about who you are; it can affect everyone.

As adults we often find ourselves in negative behavior patterns, reacting to current situations that feel a lot like those events that happened to us a long time ago. That's because although life has moved on and we've grown older, our brain stored away the lies that we internalized about ourselves, and those lies surface again when a familiar trigger shows up. Something I learned at CrossCounsel International Ministries about this principle, is that "It's not what happened to us that affects us, it's what we believed in that moment that affects us," and that "Your emotions reflect what you believe at a heart level." We often continue in these cycles, reacting in the present to the things that happened to us long ago, until we are able to make the connection from the present to the past, and seek freedom and healing from the Lord in those areas.

"[Transformational Prayer] Principle One:

Our present situation is rarely the true cause of our ongoing emotional pain.

More often than not, the emotional pain we feel in the present tense has been triggered by lie-based thinking, which is rooted in memory. Lie-based thinking is the false belief one holds in memory learned during a specific life event. For example, a man raised by an alcoholic parent might believe the lie that he was somehow the cause for the chaos in his home and responsible to resolve it. This might in turn play out by his being stressed, anxious and overreactive to life situations in which there was perceived lack of order. If we blame the present situation for the emotional pain coming from the earlier memory event, we will be trapped in an irresolvable cycle of emotional pain and defeat. To believe that other people or circumstances are the cause of our emotional upheaval is to empower them to control us emotionally until they change. When we find freedom from the lie-based thinking, we will no longer be triggered by it and can walk in peace, content in whatever circumstance we find ourselves (Phil. 4:11). This is a common scenario in marital conflict. Each partner in the relationship assumes that the pain he or she feels is being caused by the other. When in reality, each one is merely triggering the other's lie-based pain. It is difficult to admit that one's mate is not the source of the pain and that he or she is only exposing what was already there. It is easier to make someone else the cause than it is to choose to hold myself responsible for the emotional pain in my life. This is not to say that what the other person may have done was inappropriate or justified, for it may not be. However, our emotional response often goes much deeper than the current moment. If what I am feeling is rooted in my own lie-based thinking and I blame another, then I am doomed to suffer in this pain until the other person changes."

--Dr. Ed Smith, Healing Life's Hurts

Emotions were created by God for a reason, good and bad emotions serve a purpose. God, in His wisdom, has also given us survival skills to continue living as long as we can in this world, and one of those skills is the ability to sense pain and to avoid it. This principle makes sense especially in the physical realm, when I feel pain, I move that part of my body so it is no longer feeling that before I get hurt even worse. This same principle tends to play out in the emotional realm as well, when we feel something negative in our mind, we automatically try to avoid those feelings in the same way we would if it were physically happening to us. This is problematic with emotions though, because unlike pain in the physical realm, you cannot ultimately escape from the source of the pain when it's emotionally based. This is usually the basis for most addiction cycles: I feel negative emotions, I use substances or other physically stimulating activities to numb out, the brief high triggered by the substance or activity wears off eventually, and I again feel the negative emotion that was never properly dealt with, repeat all over again until madness ensues. We often focus on the wrong thing when dealing with negative emotions, we focus on the negative feeling and think of it as the problem, rather than seeing that it is just smoke from the fire, only a symptom, rather than the cause of the pain we feel. Until we follow the smoke back to the source fire that is burning in the recess of our mind and find the lie-based belief that is keeping the fire going, it will continue to show up and affect our current reality.

The good news is that we can find freedom from this cycle of insanity that keeps showing up in our lives. A lie-based belief that is associated with our identify will not hold any power over us once we receive truth in that area. Because we are created in the image of our creator God, He is the ultimate source of truth-based experience that has the ability to heal and free us from this bondage we may have been carrying for years. If we are willing to stop running from the pain and allow ourselves to feel it and follow it to the source, we can cooperate with God as He helps us to identify the lies we have believed, and submit them to Him as we ask for His truth to be revealed about who we truly are. Identity based lies are almost always learned through experience, so you typically can't remove them simply with logic, you have to replace them with truth learned through another experience. This is why very often as Christians we can start to get to the source of negative behaviors we struggle with and admit them, but after reading in the bible and learning truth about who we truly are, we may actually feel more shame than before because we logically know that the bible is true and we believe it, yet if we are willing to be honest we see that nothing has changed in our hearts, and we continue to struggle with the same thing. This is because although truth received in our left brain is still true in nature, it doesn't cross over to the right brain in the same way that experience does. This results in what the bible refers to as "double-mindedness," which is essentially a conflict of beliefs.

I struggled in my life for many years with substance abuse, and I experienced the madness of this cycle over and over again. I truly believed in my heart what the bible said about who I was and what I was created for, yet I couldn't escape knowing I had those skeletons in my closet. The shame I carried about those things I hated to talk about held me hostage for years, so it took me a long time before I recognized the pattern of avoidance I continually engaged in as I tried to escape opening the door on that closet in my mind. I would find success in one area, only to find new struggles in a different area. I struggled for years with various drugs and alcohol, using pain pills when they were available, to smoking weed, to drinking alcohol, then to an Adderall addiction, then back to weed for quite a few years, before I finally saw the cycle for what it was: a potentially never ending behavior pattern that was being driven by something inside of me that I hadn't put my finger on yet. When a very difficult life event happened to my family, the weakness of my numbing techniques was finally revealed to me in greater clarity and I knew that I had to get to the true source of my struggles, or I was doomed to continue in this process and potentially pass bad habits on to my children. After working with CrossCounsel I began to learn about all of these things I've just shared, and I personally experienced freedom from some core lies I had been carrying all of my life, and experienced healing in some of those areas. Since a core lie of believing I was "unsafe" was exposed in my heart and was replaced when the Lord revealed to me that He was safe, I no longer had the desire to continue smoking weed, which was the last substance I could not break free from at the time. Although in my mind I knew that the Lord was safe (which is ultimately an issue of trust), my heart had never fully believed it because of the life experiences that told me most people could not be trusted. His truth set me free from that lie once I experienced it in my heart.

The Lord loves it when we come to Him seeking truth, because His truth always draws us closer to Him as it frees us from the bondage of lies and sin. Where sin and lies are removed, He is free to work in those areas where "skeletons" once lived, the evidence of our past that we tried so hard to ignore and cover up. The Lord also doesn't waste anything, He doesn't simply want to set us free from those lies, He wants to use them for His good purposes. Ezekiel 37 has a beautiful picture of what this looks like, as we see a vision described to us that the prophet Ezekiel received from God at the time. I have personally experienced this in the areas I have received truth in, as I saw not just personal freedom, but a desire to share and talk about the once painful things of my past, things I swore I would never share with anyone. I know that I still have other lies in my belief system that still need to be exposed and worked out, but now I look at conflict and negative emotions as the first step in the process that can bring them to light. I will continue to look for opportunities to work with the Lord to receive His truth so I can replace those lies and break free from the negative behavior that results from carrying them.

I believe that every one of us has a closet in our mind that we don't want to let others into. The contents of that closet may vary from person to person, some may have more skeletons than others, but I think we all have something in there. Once we recognize where the door to that closet is, we can continue to go back and clean more of the bones of our past out as we are ready and willing. The question for you is, do you trust the Lord enough to open the door of your heart and let Him in?

"This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord," -Ezekiel 37:5-6 NIV.