I wanted to check in with all of you because I know how encouraging you have all been on my journey, working through my past, and my divorce, and figuring out what’s next for my life. From the casual reader who checks in now and again, to the avid reader and commenter, I am so appreciative of all of you.

I appreciate you! Thank you so much!

Now, to what happened yesterday during counseling. So the counseling I have currently is all about internal processing. I check in with my feelings and emotionally to see if there are any parts of me that are triggered or agitated or seem to need some attention. I check in with my system to see if it would be okay for the rest of my system to let me “talk with” and give it the attention it is looking for. There is a “gatekeeper” part of me that has been a major player in my counseling where I tend to keep people at an arm’s length out of fear because of past wounds.

I have been working at helping that part to not use fear as its modus operandi where it fears that everyone will hurt it and instead work with boundaries. In this scenario, it sets up boundaries not based on fear, but instead based on levels of trust established with others that allows people in deeper and deeper as they demonstrate trustworthiness. It’s a pretty cool concept but it is also a work in progress.

Counseling has been a rewarding journey on this path. Yesterday though, I had breakthrough. I came back to a time during my childhood that was formative in my elementary school years. Some stuff happened to me that most people would think to be a blip, a minor incident in my life, that really messed up a bunch of ways I saw things and those distorted views put me out of whack ever since.

It’s kind of crazy to think that as an eight-year-old, a formative time in your life, you could get put off-course, and if you don’t work to re-align things, you can be floundering out in left field for years. Counseling yesterday helped re-align things in a major way.

I had an image of dirty laundry, smelly, stained, ugly, nasty old clothes that was in a big heap in my arms. I called out all this garbage I was carrying around for almost three decades and didn’t even realize it. I named each negative piece of “baggage” from that time in my early childhood and then transported back into that moment, I took it and threw it up in the air and left it there. I walked away from it all.

The next step was putting in what I wanted in place of all that garbage. You can’t just throw garbage away, you need to replace it with new, life-sustaining qualities and desires that you want to walk out with in freedom. That’s how it works. I picked up some beautiful things:

Love, joy, responsibility for my actions, self-confidence, a voice, and freedom.

It was really a powerful moment. I believe it will continue to be a catalyst in my life to new growth and deeper levels of overcoming in the various trials I may face going forward.

Be encouraged! If you need counseling, go for it! It’s not scary. It’s just getting to know parts of yourself you didn’t even realize was there. It’s like getting an x-ray of your emotional side to see if anything is broken in there. Then the counselor is your doctor to help get you well. If you don’t deal with your parts that are broken emotionally, there will be an effect that you and those around you will be impacted by, take my advice: Don’t hurt the ones you love by ignoring it and avoiding it, hoping it will fix itself. It doesn’t work that way. Take care of yourself, for you and for those who love you.

Onward and upward!

– Jason