Each week in the Alive and Free 9 week intensive program, there is a “homework”, typically 3-5 questions surrounding that weeks topic. The homework are meant to dig deep which can bring up a lot of different emotions and memories: painful memories, memories that have been pushed down, memories that seemed so insignificant at the time, but have all played into shaping our belief systems.

Week One is called, “The Story of Pain”. Here is a couple things I have learned about pain:

~ To learn how to navigate pain, you must build a history with pain. For pain to be something that heals us, that launches us forward, and as a “good thing”; you need to look at the experiences with pain. The experiences that you thought would crush or take you out, but didn’t. Pain is not something to be fearful of, rather it is something that needs to be fully felt, embraced, and worked through in order to move through it.

~ We tend to live our daily lives at a pain level of a 3 out of 10, because we don’t want to face the painful experiences, so we shove it away, and try to move past it, forget about it. But that doesn’t work so well, it only pushes the pain down and soon pain is being piled upon more pain. We can end up with a deep ditch of unresolved pain that soon begins affecting our day to day life, at first consciously. Then as time passes and as we get used to that pain just being there, we continue to live our lives not even aware we are not living our lives free. That pain begins to weigh us down, and keep us from freedom. We can then partner with past pain so much that it becomes familiar and feels normal.

Week One: The Story of Pain: Homework: What is the narrative I’ve told myself of my pain and life experiences to help me make sense of my story and why things happen?

“Our true story lies in the gap between the narratives we tell ourselves in order to protect our heart” ~Sammi Robbins

The “story of pain” that I have told myself is that my life has been filled with so many pain/traumas that seem to overlap so it is okay to stay in my sadness. I imagine my pain as a timeline I can fill up with specific experiences. Oftentimes when I tell my whole life story, it’s split up by ages when pain entered my life. My sadness and story will impact and inspire others and this is why God gave me so many trials. I used to go by the quote, “God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers”.

(SIDE RANT: I hate this quote now, it only exacerbated my unhealthy belief of God. I personally don’t believe that God gives us hard battles to strengthen us. He isn’t some mean dad in the sky shooting down pain to see how we react. I believe that He works everything for our good, and there is a purpose or lesson or healing that can come from pain. If you look in the Bible, there are countless examples of trials and most of the time, they didn’t happen to those who were the strongest or the ones qualified. He gives us strength, grace, and peace to get through the trials, okay rant over)

I had to live in trauma and depression in order to feel safe because I am the one keeping myself in that pain and no one else can have that power. This felt safe when everything else was chaotically out of my control. A lot of people like me; not to be too boastful, but I acknowledge that I am pretty easy going, easy to talk to, non-judgmental, accepting, and trustworthy. But I feel connected to few. It seemed like only way people seem to notice me and want to know me better is after I share my life story or are actively going through something. Now don’t get me wrong, I have gained better connection to people through the sharing of my story, and some of those connections have stuck, but when I seemed to be in a good place, I sometimes feel like I lost that connection.

I have locked myself in these “rooms” of anxiety and depression that I have actually closed myself off to the memories of the happy times. The pain of losing my family emotionally has kept me locked away in grief that the happy times actually cause me pain to think back on and remember. I am immediately brought back to the fact of why I won’t have anymore of those memories with them. I had a new family member ask me one night if I had any fun/crazy traditions and times with my family. Thank God it was night and she couldn’t really see my blank expression, I had to stop for a second and try to think; and I think it was a half truth that I told her. I honestly couldn’t even remember what traditions/ fun memories we had. That moment began to open my eyes on how much I was locked away in that “room of grief”.

As I was driving to the mall one day, I was listening to the song, “Mansion”

So I don’t know how to transition to something more pleasant, so let’s all take a deep breath together, okay 4 seconds in through the nose, and 6 seconds out through the mouth. Repeat if needed, shake off the heaviness of this post. I’ll share a quick funny story, two weekends ago, my mom and I went up to family friends house near canadice lake. I decided I was going to explore the woods behind their house before dinner, I went alone. So I decided to climb the ladder to their tree house, it was pretty shaky going up, but I didn’t think much of it. When I tried to get back down, I realized that the one ladder foot that was resting on a wooden plank had come off. This caused the ladder to become unsteady and with a small push, fell to the side. I was only about maybe 8-10 feet up, I think I was more concerned about my phone. I couldn’t leave it on the ledge because I wouldn’t be able to get it back down, so I had to toss it into the pile of leaves and sticks that looked the least likely to crack my phone (which I just got about a week and half before). Now the going down part, do I jump forward and hope I land correctly or do I turn my body and try to lower myself as far down and just jump? I opted for the second option since my jumping skills haven’t been tested for a while 😂

I’ve always loved to climb and jump. My parents had to put a crib tent on the top of my crib when I was 18 months because I was constantly climbing out of my crib.When I was around 3 years old, I learned how to unlock the door to go outside, so my parents had to put a lock at the very top of the door. And do you know what my three year self did? I grabbed my little table and stacked a chair on that table, climbed up, and stood on my my tiptoes trying to unlock that lock. When I was about eight I tried to do a somersault off my little table but ended up flipping the table and landing on my nose. I got a bloody nose and decided to never do that again. I used to climb trees and jump out of them for fun, I jumped off swing sets into blow up pools, I used to rock climb the wall that used to be at Dick’s sporting goods. I was the kid that would swing on her swingset so high and then jump through the air. I walked around my grammas house practicing my “graceful falling”. Knock on wood, I’ve never broken a bone, only twisted, possibly sprained my ankle falling off my bike. I haven’t really had many chances to climb and jump off of things now that I’ve gotten older, but now that I’ve discovered some adventurous spots around town, let the adventure begin!