Tairngir tellings

This year has left me contemplating the damage that a secret kept can wreck. As a counsellor I hear many things that distress a person and many that also distress me. In this dynamic there is a release valve in the form of supervision which I attend once a month. Also a client is not a person that is close to you and though you esteem them, their life circumstances do not infringe on yours. But what if a family member tells you a secret and swears you to secrecy? A secret that has played an injurious part for many years in a variety of ways. A secret that unbalances the picture you've held  about someone close, about yourself, about the past, and the present. A darkness that for the one dear to you has held onto alone through the tears and its seditious tentacles have subtly shaped so much of the experience of life and relationships with others. I felt over the months that the secret now known and held by me latched onto latent anxieties and fears and created yet more darkness in the fertile fields of my own mind. Through attending my own counselling and talking to trusted friends I have been able to untangle the mess that was created in my mind. Just being able to say the message of the anxieties out loud gives space to healing, and the other person listening accepting you and reminding you of the truth ushers in peace.

I have been reading that anxiety and panic can produce intrusive; disturbing thoughts and feelings that are hard or seemingly impossible to resist. I have struggled with anxiety and stress this year in particular and intrusive and disturbing thoughts have clouded my days on too many occasions to count. I have times seriously wondered if there is something really wrong with me and that I'm not safe or trustworthy. This link: http://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/signs/intrusive-thoughts is a good introduction and has some good information on anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Now that I am a counsellor these intrusive thoughts can be the images or feelings conjured by my mind in response to another's trauma, along with older ones that are results of my own historic events and fears. Thankfully now that I am a counsellor I attend one-to-one supervision and have been able to discuss this issue with another counsellor and learn helpful techniques but more vital to my heart that I am not the only one, that it isn't the end of the world and it doesn't make me a bad person.  If any of this resonates with you then I urge you to seek help and speak to someone you can trust. The clouded heavens have cleared only when I recognise these thoughts as malfunctions of a stressed and anxious mind and not secret, oppressed desires or memories that I am helpless before. I need not add to them weight that will only further embed the track-ways they create through my beautiful but complicated and imperfect mind. Our TV culture can also be unhelpful. I have tried to limit how much news I watch as the negative can flood an already stretched mind. News of murders, rapes, assaults, children being harmed can leave my beleaguered brain ravaged like a sea cliff face during a tempest. I am learning (all too slowly it can feel) to give over these unhelpful thoughts to someone who can be trusted to remind this world wrecked heart of the truth of me.
And I pray for myself and others from Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Listening intentionally; intently to another's burdens can leave me feeling burdened and numb. I am now a counsellor and have chosen to tread very deliberately onto this winding path of another's journey past. Sometimes it is my own past that comes back to my mind like a lightening flash when the person across from me shares, but sometimes the flash is the flash of a camera that captures a raw negative of an event/situation that leaves my heart aching and my head out to sea. Often the burden settles into a recess in my mind after the person sharing their story has left and I am reflecting back on all they have told me (thankfully). I always pray for the people who share themselves in my work and that has helped often, but sometimes something seems to stick and I can't just carry merrily on with my life. I need a process, a deep place within another that I trust to place this precious pain and terrible picture; captured. I know it will be in the Father that I find this place, but the process will include others around me who will listen to my weighty words and tell me it's ok.

Rocks are heavy to carry in your rucksack over any distance. I recently found this when i went hunting for gravel to use as drainage in the bottom of plant pots. I laboured home questioning the ill treatment I am subjecting my body to knowing that I will be home in a bit and my back is stronger than it has been for years. This happened a couple of days after I said to myself that I will not carry around the pebbles of unmet expectation in my head anymore. I will lay down rocks of disappointment, and boulders of shame whenever I sense their burdensome presence. I have been and am going to counselling (also I'm studying it), and am also in conversation with myself, and my creator. A rucksack, it turns out, is for carrying heavy objects only a short distance, and even then you wake up with sore shoulders and that old pain to the left of the spine back for a few days. From a young age I have walked around with stooped shoulders, not knowing that I suffered from a continuously tired heart, not any form of physical malady. I would interpret all the bad moods, haunted looks, angry outbursts done in my presence by those around me as meaning that I had done something wrong, or at least not all the right that I could have been doing. I grew up with a frustrated and often rageful father, as you can imagine my interpretations became problematic. I would carry around these leaden weights of impossible and often fictitious expectation in a rucksack and wouldn't lay them down, not knowing that there was a place to. God finding me; me finding him, started a process of finding that place to lay those memories and feelings down. And allowing my metaphorical back to recover, strengthen and grow straight. Today I found myself weighted to an extent again. I was carrying those damned expectation pebbles and was not placing them in the plant pots He provides where they will do some good. I think this might be real prayer. Placing the boulders of burden of others, and your own at a safe place where you know they will not lose their weight, but you learn it's not for you to hike them around with you. What can you do whilst barely being able to walk and talk? How much more life can you offer if you can skip, and jump, and dance, and sing