Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates

It was a simple task: one that I had done every day for most of my adult life.  But as I emptied the dishwasher that particular day I suddenly had an urge to take the large, heavy duty frying pan that I had clutched by the handle and fling it across the kitchen counter, through the family room, sending it crashing into the sliding glass door, and then sailing across the back yard, leaping over the fence and landing in the cemetery behind our house!

Have you ever felt that way?

Where did that thought come from?  I would have never allowed myself to do such a thing.  After all, I had been raised to be the model citizen: as the oldest of 8 children I was the caretaker and my mother's right hand helper.  I was applauded for being responsible and looking good.  I had always been one of the top students in the classroom while at the same time being the babysitter and cook and nanny for my brothers and sisters while both of my parents worked.

So there I was: married and the mother of a son and a daughter of my own and I had reached a place where I felt as dead as the people who were buried in the graves on the other side of the fence.

It was during that same time that I got one of those bone-chilling phone calls that rocked my world: my mother had been killed in a car accident.  The shock of her death was compounded by the things that I began to learn about the past few years of her life.

My mother had been the oldest of 6 children.  Her father was an alcoholic who spent his paycheck at the bar buying drinks for his buddies while his wife and children often had very little to eat. 

My mother's mother had polio as a child and was overwhelmed by all of the daily stresses she faced as a crippled woman, the wife of an alcoholic, and mother of six children.

My mother soon found a way out of her depressing home: when she was 17 and in the middle of her senior year of high school she left home, quit school and got married. 

As is often the case when two people find each other, passion reigns supreme and logic is suspended.  As one author puts it, "Romance is an anesthesia that keeps us from seeing who we are really falling in love with!"  Well this was certainly true in their case. 

They were barely getting adjusted to marriage when I arrived and then she was pregnant again.  My brother arrived when I was 10 months and 11 days old! 

And when I was 4 she had twins.

And when I was 5 she had number 5!

Family pictures during those years reveal the undeniable signs of her depression.  But instead of going to bed and isolating from the world, she just kept putting one foot in front of another and kept on going.

Unfortunately she was living in a culture that looked down on people who were depressed.  At that time, there was a lot of shame attached to the diagnosis.  There was no avenue for my mother to find treatment for her depression without losing her self respect.  So she did not get help.  She suffered alone.  And she taught me by her example to ignore my feelings and keep so busy I wouldn't notice that I was depressed.

I had been raised according to the rules of the 3 monkeys on the mantel: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.  As a graduate student studying to become a Marriage & Family Therapist I was learning that these guidelines are not healthy.  In fact I say that these rules aren't even good for monkeys, much less human beings! 

After my mother died my father told me that she had been obsessed with thoughts of death.  She had told him how she wanted her funeral and gave him directions about how to take care of her children after she was gone.  It became increasingly evident to me that my mother had been clinically depressed for many years and it had been untreated for so long that it had reached the point that she had a death wish!   

I began to realize that like my mother and my grandmother before her, I had been stuffing emotions inside for years.  It was like trying to keep beach balls under water.  I had been successful for many years, but I had become exhausted, and the feelings and the thoughts attached to them would pop up when I least expected them, like when I was emptying the dishwasher.  Or I would be in the middle of a social setting and would just break out in tears for no apparent reason. 

I began to accept the fact that I was depressed and that I needed to make a choice.  This was very difficult for me because it was going against what I had been taught.  It was a decision that was made at a time of desperation in my life because I needed to do something about my depression.  I decided at that time that I did not want to get to my mother's age and want to die! 

The word ‘DECIDE' is interesting.  Think of the word, SUICIDE: to kill oneself.   Or the word, HOMICIDE: to kill another.  The word, DECIDE means to kill a choice. 

So I decided to make a different choice than my mother did.  I decided to kill the choice of following the old, dysfunctional patterns of thinking that had been passed down through generations in my family and had been systematically trained into me for so many years.  I began to open up and talk about those uncontrollable feelings that were popping up in my life with safe people who would understand, like therapists who recognized my depression, and understood the impact of negative life experiences on my emotional health.  These safe people validated my feelings instead of shaming me for having them. 

Depression comes from many sources:

Chemical imbalances in the brain

Long term negative life experiences

Perspectives we were taught to believe 

Women are 2-3 times more susceptible to becoming depressed than men.  This is not meant to leave the impression that women are weaker than men.  Some of the latest research shows that women's biology is different than men's.  For instance we have different levels of estrogen, melatonin, cortisol and serotonin.  Those differences are beginning to provide clues as to why women are more likely to become depressed.

In my own practice I have found that women are commonly susceptible to depression because we are often more concerned about relationship issues than men are, generally speaking.  Many of the women that come to me for counseling express similar sentiments as this woman:

I am upset by the quality of communication I'm experiencing in my marriage, which causes me to be depressed.  For instance, my husband was asked if he knew what my favorite flower was.   He answered, "I think Pillsbury."

No matter how we become depressed, there are 2 characteristics that are common in depression:

            Anger that is swallowed

            A belief that we ought to be able to control something that is out of our control

I began to realize that there were many subtle but strong messages that shaped my thoughts and actions as I grew up:

            Don't talk.  Don't think.  Don't feel.

            If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

I felt sorry because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.  (So in other words, don't feel bad because someone else has it worse off than you!)

I'd been trained to be a good girl, and to say the acceptable things; things that people expected me to say.  But in the process I had lost contact with what I really thought or felt, and instead had become like a robot that could act polite and nice and sweet, but that was all it was: an act.   

It was like I was created to be like this satin heart.  We enter life delicate, and sweet and tender.

But life brings pain, and it's usually through someone we love hurting us in some way.  Maybe they leave us or abuse us and we lose contact with the person we were created to be.      

It's vulnerable and uncomfortable to walk around in life hurting and in pain.  So we hide our pain by getting angry, which feels a little more powerful than hurt and pain, but it brings us even further away from the person we really are.

We soon realize that we get criticized or ostracized when we let those angry feelings show so we hide them inside of a nice exterior in order to be admired and accepted.

Life can go on for a long time for most of us, as we continue to live life according to others' expectations.  But after awhile we begin to realize that we're just going through the motions and then we begin to have thoughts that seem foreign to us.  These thoughts do not feel like they belong to us.  Or we are afraid of the thoughts that cross our minds.  We become depressed or tearful or angry and we often have no idea why.

I went to church when I was a young girl and I learned that God made me and He loved me.  I heard the Bible stories about how Jesus had lived and loved people no matter who they were or what they had done.  I learned that He had died on a cross to pay the price for the poor choices that we have made and the self-destructive behaviors that we have done.  I loved the beautiful stories and songs about His resurrection from the dead on

Easter Sunday.  And then one day a lady showed me a wordless book that only had colored pages to tell me the simple truth that:

            My heart is black until Jesus comes in

            His precious blood (red) can wash me white as snow

            In the Bible it says I'll walk the streets of gold.

That day I did ask Jesus to come into my heart and to wash me clean as snow.  In simple childlike faith I understood that I needed His forgiveness.   The Bible says that Jesus has gone back to heaven to prepare a place for us so that someday we can go to be with Him.

As I grew up I learned more about faith principles,  but unfortunately in our church and in my home we did not learn some very important things about God, and we were taught some other subtle messages that kept me from really trusting Jesus in certain areas of my life.

Even when we are Christians bad things happen to us.  One of the things that happened to me as a child was that I was sexually abused by a boy babysitter.  He was the son of my mother's friend so I kept it a secret.   I did not want to upset my mother's friendship, nor did I want to be punished.  He had bribed me with gum to let him touch me, so I believed that it was my fault and that I deserved to be punished.  So I hid this secret in my heart for years and tried to be a perfect child in order to make up for this shameful act.

When we feel bad about what we have done or what others have done to us, we think that we are bad!  We are filled with shame.  We think that everyone can tell that we are bad, like it is written on our forehead or something. 

Shame is different than guilt.  Guilt is the result when we DO something bad, or fail to DO something good.  Shame is a sense that I AM bad: I am defective as a human being: I am a mistake.

Then we have a choice about how we will deal with that shame. 

We AGREE with the label and do things that prove that we are bad.  We try drugs and alcohol to anesthetize our feelings.  We become addicted to life-destructive habits.  We are promiscuous and are obsessive and compulsive.  Anyone who is close to us can tell that we have an emotional problem.

Or we DISAGREE with that label of being bad.  We try to prove that we aren't bad.  We want to prove it to ourselves, and to others, and to God!   We strive to become successful.  We try to control our environment and the people in it as a way to keep the shame from surfacing.  We become Goody-2-shoes, and perfectionistic, and overly responsible as a means of impression management.  We don't look like we have an emotional problem.  But all of that emotional pain is locked inside of us and our body keeps score.   It comes out as physical problems: headaches, stomach aches, gastrointestinal problems, chronic fatigue, etc.

I chose to put my energy into DISAGREEING with that bad label and spent my whole life trying to prove to God that I was good enough to be a Christian.  I had read in the Bible that God's forgiveness did not have to be earned, but it didn't really impact my heart because I was so caught up in trying to be good enough to please God by my own actions.

So the experience at the dishwasher and my mother's death really rocked my ‘perfect' world that I had tried to create.  I know now that God wanted to get my attention because He wanted me to know the truth that I could trust Him to not only forgive me for the THINGS that I had DONE, but He also wanted to free me from the SHAME that kept me in a prison of hopeless and endless attempts at pleasing everyone by my own strength.

I began to read the Bible with new insights.  I learned that I could not earn God's seal of approval: it is a gift.  I began to embrace the truth that His acceptance of me was not based on my attempts at perfection; because His strength is demonstrated in my life when I let others see me as I am: that I am weak and struggling.     

I do not have to pretend that I am not angry about things that are happening in my life.  Instead I can tell God I am angry and ask Him what to do about it.  As I owned that anger I realized that underneath the anger was a scared person who had been hurt and was in a lot of pain.   

I began to share my shame secrets with safe people who amazingly opened their arms to me and accepted me in spite of my past.  I began to see that God had a perfect plan for me, and that through my pain He was teaching me some life lessons that would help me demonstrate His strength.  And even more amazing, people began to be honest with me about the shame secrets in their own lives.  I didn't feel isolated and lonely anymore.  I began to feel alive and hopeful again.  

When you look at your own life, do you ever feel shame?  Do you identify most with AGREEING that you are bad and acting it out?  Or do you find yourself trying to DISAGREE with the label and trying to prove that you're okay?  As you think back over your life, did you move from one reaction to the other?  Or do you still struggle with both sides: trying to prove you are not bad by going to church every Sunday but then feeling defeated during the rest of the week and doing things that prove you are still struggling with that shame label?

Jesus said, "Come to Me, all who are loaded down with weights that are too heavy to bear and I will give you rest."  Maybe you have never felt depressed, but I am sure that all of us can think of a time in our lives when we have carried a heavy burden by ourselves and felt lonely and that others didn't understand.

Jesus came to give hope.  We have all missed perfection.  Some of you may think as I did that you can achieve sainthood if you just try hard enough.  The bad news is that no one will ever be able to please God by her own attempts.  We all hold grudges, feed jealousy, and hang onto bitterness and fear.  The Bible says that we all fall short of God's standards.  And because we could never be perfect, God sent us someone who was.  God sent His own Son so that you could simply accept His free gift of eternal life by accepting the fact that Jesus is God's Son – that He died on the cross for your sin and when you ask

Him to forgive you, He comes into your life and you become His child.  He has a desire to have a personal relationship with you, but you must decide.

In closing I would like to say to each one of you,

"Bless your sweet heart!"