By Stephen John Paul
Since I was a young kid I struggled with my own self image. My family moved often due to the demands of my father’s job. He was a right-of-way agent. Short explanation: he convinced farmers to sell off strips of their land so that power companies or cable companies could put down cabling. And those jobs were not all in one spot. There were other reasons that we moved so often, but the bottom line was, I was almost always the new kid at school. Couple that with likely undiagnosed ADHD, and that led to very awkward and difficult social interactions. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have many friends.
But I did have my 66 key Casio keyboard at home that I would plop in my lap and play music on for endless hours. And multiple spiral notebooks filled with story ideas, songs, poems, and secret languages. So basically I spent a lot of time by myself and very little time learning how to make friends. This, of course, led to bullying. I didn’t understand the way other kids interacted. I couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was serious. I was completely gullible to any trick that was perpetrated on me. And over the years, this fed into an unhealthy self-image.
But my family was a good family. I had great parents. I had a younger sister and younger brother. We fought, sure, but mostly we got along pretty well. It was a good life. My feelings of doubt and lack of self worth seemed incongruous to my surroundings. So I buried the feelings.
Over time the feelings that kept getting pushed down and piled upon began to fester. I was prone to snap at people when I would get highly anxious over something innocuous. And that didn’t go well for me. So those feelings got buried too.
By the time I was a teenager I had learned to cope with social interactions. I wasn’t great, but I could survive. I made a few loose friendships and a couple of really tight ones. But those feelings that I had buried were still there. I didn’t like myself. I was always angry or depressed. And eventually I began to feel like people would hate me if they knew the horrible things that constantly spun through my mind.
So I began to imagine what I would look like to people if they saw me the way that I knew me. I would imagine myself 9 or 10 feet tall, all black like the feelings I had buried, sharp spikes protruding from every part of me like all the pieces of me that hurt, claws where finger tips should be that could tear apart the things that made me feel bad, eyes that burned with the fire of anger at the world and my own inadequacy, and a gaping mouth filled with razor sharp teeth that was too wide for my head which served one purpose: Devour anything that hurt.
For years afterward, whenever I was confronted with difficult emotions, hard situations, or even temptations to do things I knew I shouldn't, the monster version of me would unleash within my head and devour all of the feelings and all of the images that I wanted gone.
As you might imagine, this was not a healthy way to deal with things. I won’t get into all of the details of the ways that the monster version of me in my head managed to work its way out into my life. Holes punched in walls, yelling at minor things, poor choices, and on and on. It was unhealthy. But I didn’t understand how to deal with it. I didn’t know there was a way to deal with it that didn’t feed the monster inside of me.
That was until I hit complete rock bottom.
I found myself waking up from a long night of drinking. I was on the couch. My wife at the time was ushering our children out the door. I had scrapes and bruises, and a headache to end all headaches. Apparently the night before I had gotten so drunk that I went on a tour around our area picking up fast food and junk food. By the time I had gotten home (safely, thank God) I had to be pulled up off of the pavement and brought inside the house. That was it. That was the breaking point. Do something or everything was going to implode.
I ended up attending a local church recovery group called Celebrate Recovery. I had some experience with AA since I’ve had a few relatives go through that program. I would like to say it was an instant revelation, but the reality is, it took time. And the thing that made the biggest difference in me was the unabashed honesty that came from the people in that group. I would sit in a circle with 5-7 other guys, and we would all have 5 minutes to share whatever we wanted without any interruptions or having to deal with someone trying to “fix” our problems. I listened to other men share crazy things that I cannot repeat here. Stories that left me wide eyed and stunned. Here were men that looked like they had everything together, and they were sharing the craziest stories I’ve ever heard about the things they had done and the things that they had been through.
Suddenly, my monster didn’t seem so big. So I began to share too. Week after week I’ve shared bits and pieces of what is going on in my head. And many things still need fixing. But with each truth that I share out loud the monster gets a little bit smaller. These days he lurks like a wounded animal, lashing out sometimes in a moment of acute pain, but it doesn’t have any real power anymore.
I learned that, while silence kills, Truth heals.
“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
-John 8:32 NKJV