Pray For Those Who Are Suffering Persecution

There was a time when Americans didn’t believe persecution for one’s faith even happened any more. In fact we had our eyes opened in a big way in the 1960s when Richard Wurmbrand, a Jewish believer in Christ, had to take off his shirt before a Congressional hearing in Washington to convince people that he had been beaten during the Cold War in Romania. He needed to show us with his own body that his Communist jailers in Romania had tortured him for his faith. (Read Richard Wurmbrand’s “Tortured For Christ” to learn about this amazing man who later started Voice of the Martyrs.)

Well, today believers in the United States no longer doubt that persecution of Christ followers happens worldwide. Globalization has made this very clear to us. Our smart phones tell us each morning of some new persecution. Those being persecuted need our prayers and we are the ones chosen to lift them all up.

The Bible says when members of the body of Christ suffer, all Christians suffer together 1 Corinthians 12:26. Right now violent persecution around the world is rampant. Though we are physically distant from those being persecuted, we can draw near to them spiritually. Jesus told us that when we do good for those hurting, hungry, thirsty and so on…we do it for Him. “Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body” Hebrews 13:3.

What are some ways we can pray for the persecuted church around the world?

Pray they would see God’s grace in their situations, and that they would sense God’s power in the midst of their weakness. The Apostle Paul was dealing with a difficult situation in his life he actually was asking the Lord to remove from his life. Paul says:

“But he (God) said to me ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Paul was actually denied his request by God. I love Paul’s response to being told “No” by God. ‘Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me’ 2 Corinthians 12:9. Some of our persecuted brothers and sisters worldwide are often feeling tremendous weakness in the midst of the brutality they are up against. May we join others in praying for them to feel God’s power and mercy in the midst of whatever they are going through!

We can also pray they would have the strength to treasure Jesus more than life itself. When the Apostle Paul was imprisoned for his faith he said ‘For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21. Paul actually took the time to explain what that meant. He said “If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”

Paul was clear here. He believed it would be better for the people he was helping that he stay alive so he could be with them and help them in this difficult time. But for him he believed dying was honestly better! He believed it to be better because he knew he would get to be with Christ forever. And he knew this was the reality no matter how his jailers chose to kill him. Historians tell us that Paul was tortured and later beheaded by the Emperor Nero. Nero was an evil man who actually made Christian’s into human lanterns to light his evening events by taking a hook through their heads so they could not move as Nero’s men poured boiling material over them to burn their bodies.

Persecution in the days of Christ was horrible to endure and it is horrible today. In the last century believers in Christ have suffered in increasing numbers. If you want to learn reliable details you can go to http://www.persecution.com/public/newsroom.aspx to learn of what is going on in 2015 worldwide.

God knows how hard this is when His followers are experiencing persecution, torture and in some cases death. Most of us can’t imagine the horrors and the fears of extreme persecution and it is especially hard for those experiencing it to see their family and friends suffer. The truth that it is better to die and go to heaven is as true for them today as it was in Paul’s day. It actually would be far better! But to be in the middle of terrifying persecution is very hard and their love for Jesus and His powerful love for them right in the midst of this can be their strength.

In the same passage we have just been talking about Paul said this:

“Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and God’s provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.” Paul was determined to rejoice in spite of his tough circumstances. But he also told his friends what their prayers were doing. And that because of those specific and powerful prayers he was receiving Christ’s Spirit who was strengthening him in his circumstances.

We can all diligently pray that persecuted people all across the world will experience Christ’s Spirit in ways that are tangible to them in their circumstances. When the 21 who were beheaded in Libya died last month one of their brothers said this: “ISIS gave us more than we asked when they didn’t edit out the part where they declared their faith and called upon Jesus Christ. ISIS helped us strengthen our faith”. To me that sounds like men who had the Spirit of Jesus Christ with them before they died. It’s that very thing we can pray for!

Paul was very much aware of his impending death at the end of his life. He said “And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me.”

Think about his statement. He was commissioned by God to do work that was so important it required him to ultimately give up his life for this work, and this God. Yet even with that inevitable death sentence of persecution Paul was able to say this: “I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.” Acts: 20:24.

Understandably many of us put Paul up on a pedestal for all the persecution he went through. He mentions in one passage that he had “been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.” He says all of this was because he preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people who he believed needed to hear these life giving words. And Paul paid dearly for his bravery.

But Paul would not want us to put him up any higher than the women and men who have suffered persecution for honoring Christ in the last 2000 years. He knows that each of these precious people suffered for something they believed in. And more important for Someone they believed in, Christ. The book of Revelation says that the Devil was triumphed over by people who followed Christ. It says “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Revelation 12:11.

This verse makes it clear that the blood of the Lamb, Christ, was what allowed them to do this triumphing, but it was also through the word of their OWN testimony. We have a testimony that comes from the lives we lead. A testimony is simply the telling of the truth of something you have witnessed. In this case, the testimony was embodied in the life of a faithful person. The “word of the testimony” of the Coptic Christians in Libya was that they were speaking Christ’s name up till the end so all 21 of those men triumphed by the word of their testimony about Christ. And they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

Paul would appreciate your holding him up as a hero of the faith. The Bible says we are to “give honor to whom honor is due.” But when we get to heaven, Paul will be appropriately honoring these men as heroes who stayed strong through their beheadings, because they are. And any who are martyred through death will be heroes as well.

I also think Paul would tell you that any who are persecuted for years imprisoned and tortured but do not die because of it are heroes as well. There will be a lot of honor being given to a lot of precious souls when we are together on the New Earth with God one day. I am so grateful I get to be part of that group that gets to give the honor.

Life is precious to God. We are to honor our life by taking care to live our lives in God’s will. We need to pray for our brothers and sisters and lift them up in prayer all the time because so many are going through things that will test their faith, their endurance and their strength as never before.

Pray creatively. Think about your own life and imagine what you would want someone to pray for you. Get on websites about persecution and learn specifics of real persecuted peoples’ lives and the lives of their families who may be left behind. I have a friend who prays weekly with another friend. They try in their weekly prayers never to forget the persecuted church. Whenever they have an illness or when one of them had cancer, they prayed that if their persecuted brothers and sisters were in their situation that God would provide whatever was needed. Because they knew someone in prison who had a sinus infection or who had cancer would not get medical treatment. So they asked the Great Physician to step in. They believe they are going to see answers to these prayers one day. And get to rejoice with the folks they prayed for.

Pray that all under persecution will have joy and that their unshakable joy in Christ would be a witness to their persecutors. When I read stories in the Bible about the apostles being in prison and singing hymns to the Lord I always wondered how they could do that. But it is possible to have joy because we know that we are God’s children and even death will not separate us from Him. The Bible says: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25) Pick up a copy of Jesus Freaks if you want to hear some amazing stories of modern day persecution and people who could sing in the midst of things they were suffering through.

Even in the midst of our pain it is possible to still honor God and let others see it. “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God” Philippians 1:27-28. Standing firm is one indication of how real our faith is. I know many of us pray for ourselves that we could allow Christ’s strength to pour through us no matter what is asked of us.

Pray that their future glory would overshadow their present afflictions. Our Christian brothers and sisters are suffering at the hands of evil and we need to pray for them. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” Romans 8:18. Our Christian brothers and sisters will get justice in God’s timing and be rewarded for all they have had to endure. In the meantime it is us who need to stay in prayer for them.

Pray that our brothers and sisters around the world would trust in God’s wisdom, strength, and deliverance—not their own. “Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. 2 Corinthians 1:7-9. We must rely on God and not ourselves and pray for others to be strong in the midst of all they are going through.

Pray that God would give them the right words to say as fearless ambassadors for Christ. Pray that those being persecuted can stay strong and stand on the word . . . stand and speak God’s words no matter what is going on. “And also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak” Ephesians 6:19-20.

Richard Wurmbrand explained to a world that needed to understand persecution that he and other believers were indeed being bold in declaring Christ in a Romanian prison. He said “It was strictly forbidden to preach to other prisoners. It was understood that whoever was caught doing this received a severe beating. A number of us decided to pay the price for the privilege of preaching, so we accepted their [the communists'] terms. It was a deal; we preached and they beat us. We were happy preaching. They were happy beating us, so everyone was happy.”

As we watch others being severely persecuted we wonder if we would be strong enough to do this. We need to pray and stay strong in Him for we know the end of the Bible and we are on the winning team no matter what we go through here on this earth. “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison– that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak” Colossians 4:2-4.

Pray that God would protect and deliver them to safety, according to His good and perfect will. Though we don’t always understand His will we know He is still with all of us. Let’s keep each other lifted up in prayer at all times. Many feel abandoned and feel no one cares for them. Many are suffering unbearable things. But they are not alone. Let our prayers continually go before our God and pray that God returns soon for His bride/the church.

We may be called into other forms of action than the duty and privilege of prayer. Letters and emails can have real impact on foreign governments who are wrongly imprisoning people for their faith in Christ. We can take our prayer into action as well. Go to https://www.prisoneralert.com/ if you are interested in writing letters on behalf of these folks. They would love to know of your prayers by hearing about it from you! And their jailers note that these letters are coming in and some have been released because of letters received.

Until then let’s pray without ceasing for others because our prayers are greatly needed. “I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints” (Romans 15:30-31) “At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you” (Philemon 1:22) Paul was like anyone else, wanting to be released back to his friends. That is one of the prayers I pray often for my dear persecuted brothers and sisters!

Our Lord has been preparing our heavenly home. Time on earth is about up and we are so close to the end it seems we can feel it. But until that time we are to take care of each other, love each other, pray for each other, and protect each other as best we can, knowing that God is here with us and knows exactly what is going on. It is in His strength we can go on.

One thing I hope we who are on the prayer team for folks suffering from persecution will never forget. And that is that Christ loves them so very much. Paul says it this way “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” Romans 8:35-37. What a thought. That no amount of persecution can ever separate those precious brothers and sisters from His love…and that they will not just be conquerors but more than conquerors. But it is a wonderful promise.

And this promise meant everything to the 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded last month on a beach in Libya. A brother of two of the beheaded men made it a point to thank ISIS for allowing the victims statements of faith to stay on the video. Besher Kamel thanked ISIS for not editing out the men’s declaration of faith in Christ. The last words of some of the men who were murdered were “Lord Jesus Christ.” Besher was blessed to know that his brothers had remained strong in their faith up to the last seconds of their lives. And if Mr. Kamel knows his Bible well he knows something else about the special privilege his brothers will receive one day.

In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, John is seeing a vision of what is to come. He says “I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God…they came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years had ended”.

The Kamel brothers would love to have lived out their normal lives on this earth I am sure. They had family and loved ones they longed to see. But one day we are going to meet these Kamel brothers. And we can ask them about their experience of being strong in the last days and minutes of their lives. But we can also learn of the amazing privilege they received from Christ in getting to reign with Christ in the first thousand years of His reign. This is a privilege that will only come to a few. Not a privilege any would seek out, but one that Jesus rewards in an amazing way.

As you position yourself in these dark times of persecution to be a praying follower of Christ, know that you have been given important work to do. The forces of evil seem to be getting an upper hand. But the Kamel brothers of a beautiful Coptic Christian church got to exhibit the power of God protecting them as they faced death. And the power of Christ truly won out over evil. The ISIS perpetrators don’t know that yet.

The 2nd century church father Tertullian wrote “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The Bible says one day “every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” and that includes the perpetrators themselves. Wouldn’t it be glorious if the death of those precious martyrs and our fervent prayers actually impacted the perpetrators and some of them joined us in eternity as ones who chose to follow Christ?

May each of my brothers and sisters around the world suffering feel the prayers of others for them and may they not give up. Pray that the Lord will give us all strength to endure until the time of Jesus’ return. God bless each of us with His mercy and grace.

http://torturedforchrist.com/

Mark Phelps

Reconnect With Yourself

Have you ever run into an old friend you haven’t seen for years and found yourself picking up right where you left off? If you analyze for just a minute what is happening when you meet up with an old friend, you are initially thrown back into the memories of experiences you had together. Quickly those memories catapult you to the present where you realize that your present selves can still relate to each other. It can be a wonderful experience.

But imagine if the person came up to you and was trying to connect over some amazing escapade you had together but you didn’t remember it. It would be very hard to have a relationship with that person, no matter how much it meant to your friend who still had intact memories. In fact, you might suggest it would be impossible unless you wanted to start over in the present.

Imagine a person who has had a background of abuse and what they have had to go through to survive their traumas. If you have lived with a “normal” amount of difficulty, or challenges in your life it is possible you have weathered each of them and still stayed connected to your core self. Or perhaps you might call it your true self. But, what happens to victims of abuse is similar to the losing of friends. Only in our case we lose parts of ourselves.

When we experience repeated abuse or trauma our minds do an amazing job of protecting us by shutting down on our own feelings and cordoning them off so we can’t feel them anymore. But there’s a huge challenge with that. Your feelings are connected to your day to day life. And your feelings are connected to your memories of your life. If you disconnect from your feelings you are in a very real sense disconnected with yourself. A big part of what trauma or abuse therapy is all about is to reconnect us with ourselves.

Therapists who are wise and experienced at their work understand that abuse victims need to reconnect with their feelings. In my last blog I explained a little bit of how that worked for me with therapists who understood something I didn’t. What they understood was that if I didn’t reconnect with the legitimate feelings and responses to my abuse that I should have been able to express long ago that I was not going to be able to reconnect with the real me.

There is something profound about reconnecting with yourself and choosing once again to truly live. It is like coming back to someone you once were and picking up those pieces but at the same time you will feel yourself able to go on at some point in your adult life with your past and present self reconnecting. Connecting with yourself, since you are with yourself all the time, is a truly amazing step that comes with true healing. It is a wonderful feeling to realize that the person you carry around with you every day is someone you are growing to like, growing to respect, and someone you are championing in a new way.

Just like you might champion a friend or other loved one! You will begin to see yourself as a person who is worth loving and worth listening to and taking seriously, and when this happens you will begin to experience all of life differently. Once this takes place, you will never again be deceived or tricked into believing the lies of the abuser. The reality of the feelings testifies to the truth of the abuse! And the reality of the feelings testifies to the fact that you are still a valuable human being who had the right not to be abused and hurt. And who has a right to go on with life! In a very new and different way!

Immediately following these experiences of connecting with the feelings of my abuse and learning to understand how wrong it was I remember, I had a different feeling in my body. It felt as though more light was getting in through my eyes and more life was awakening in my mind. As I worked through the loss of not having really lived and was able to make the heart decision to live fully alive it felt like I had finally been brought back to life! I had reconnected with me!

I felt the affirmation of the Lord’s love in my heart during these hours of work. I felt a deep sense of His presence, a deep sense of His love, a deep sense of His approval and His approving of the work I was doing. I began to feel more valuable instead of feeling like a piece of trash or just garbage to be discarded. It is a strange thing to have had your abuser treat you like a non-person and to step into the reality that not only are you a person but a loved person! I began to feel the Lord really did love me and He cared for me and He had made a strong commitment to me. It is very difficult to put this experience into words. It was an overwhelming sense that life was okay and that I was now going to live instead of just choose to avoid life as I had done for so many years.

I imagine the feelings I began to feel may be similar to the feelings of a normal new born baby as the baby begins to experience the wonder and the splendor of the world. Or maybe it could be better explained as the baby beginning to feel the feelings of his mother’s love and the elation of being held and adored and loved so deeply as only parents can love a child. The Lord began to give me these wonderful feelings in my heart as I would go into the depths of the wretched feelings in my heart, with Him, and squarely face them.

The Lord was faithful, every time, as I would ask Him to help me and accompany me every time. I honestly did not know what I would find or learn or discover, but I knew my complete need for Him. I would earnestly beg the Lord to go with me into these times of encountering what terrifying pain was in my heart. He was faithful every time to lead me into, through and out the other end of the wretchedness, into an incredible sense of light and hope. I was coming alive and there was hope and a desire for life and a feeling of worth and value instead of feelings of being wretched and ugly and worthless.

I was stunned the day I realized that I had learned how to hate but that it had been explained to me as love. My father actually used the word ‘love’ to describe hatefulness. He used words from the Bible about love, but demonstrated these words with behavior that was the exact opposite. It was truly hateful behavior! There is a verse in the Old Testament that says “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” I have thought of my father many times for the way he did just this by twisting words into their opposite meanings and doing such damage to our young hearts.

During experiences of healing therapy and working on my own, part of what occurred to me, as I began to truly experience what love was from God, that I had NO emotional memory of real love as a child. Not only had my father taught me how to hate, instead of how to love, he also never showed me love. I honestly had no emotional memory, from early life, of love. This was because there was simply no love being shown in the family where I grew up.

By definition, attachment is a deepening affectionate, psychological connection between two people that endures over time. Psychological attachment influences not only our relationships with primary caregivers and later significant relationships and other social interactions, but also our internal senses of identity and the organization of our brains and neurological system (including how we respond emotionally to life experiences). Attachment helps develop a sense of safety, encourages socialization, stimulates intellectual and psychological growth, and influences identity. As a young infant, I did not attach!

I did not attach to a father who slapped me with his open hand and back hand when I was 9 months old and a mother who was unavailable to take care of me. Of course there was some emotional attachment to my mother. But there was a closing; a substantial closing; actually a profound closing off of my heart caused by my parents’ abuse and their neglect. And I and my siblings suffered for it. It saddens me so much to think I did very little attaching as a young baby. When you think of my father’s demands on my mother to sit with him most of the time and that this reality meant babies were strapped in high chairs to either cry alone or be cared for by siblings and not by parents, it is amazing so many of us in our family have married and been able to build family relationships.

As I began to do the healing work, in both cognitive and emotional ways, a significant thing happened in that process. I began to learn who the Lord was. By His Holy Spirit working within me I began to learn what His love was. I began to feel where before I had only been able to experience things through what I read or thought about – things I put into my intellect. I began to feel love. The Lord’s love!

I began to feel God’s love in my soul; I felt it in my heart, instead of just having the words about God’s love in my intellect. I experienced the reality of God as my strong tower, as my strength, as my shield, as my shelter, as my hope, as my very present help in time of need. Such passages I am borrowing from in these phrases relate to the truth about the Lord, that I had put into my brain, but now, through healing, I was beginning to feel this love deep in my being, to my very core. The Lord steadily impressed His love upon my heart and I will forever know His love! It was truly an amazing process and one that has changed my life.

Because I began to experience the love of the Lord something else happened that was incredible . . . I began to experience the love of my wife. She had always loved me, just as the Lord had always loved me. But I had only sort of existed with her, though all the while she had loved me. Living in that sort of dead, unfeeling state was very hurtful and painful for my wife, though at the time, I had very little sense it was even happening.

Part of the challenge with growing up with abuse is you think your experiences are normal. The sense of deadness you feel in your spirit is just the way you think life is. So you don’t have the ability to even connect the dots to your lack of feeling and other people’s very great pain. But I had begun to trust, by faith, that the hard work of therapy would help, and that it would truly make a difference. And I was certainly helped along by therapists with years of experience with abuse who were able to tell me that I was indeed making progress and to hang on for more change! I had made the decision to get some help, to do the work of healing therapy, but I just could have never imagined what good and life-giving results would come.

When you have never experienced love, deep in your heart, you don’t have a frame of reference to understand how love even feels. How would I have known what love felt like having never experienced it? The truth is my wife was THE first person who had ever loved me. It was a brand new experience for me and I had no peg to hang it on. But the good news was now that I knew the difference things would never be the same, ever again.

I often describe the recovery work I was doing reconnecting with the pain of my past abuse as being analogous emotionally to the experience of waking up in the middle of surgery when the anesthesia has worn off too soon! You would feel a searing pain from the surgery that you know you should not be feeling. There isn’t anything you can do about it! Here you are in horrible pain and now you have the work to do. You have to make the choice to do the work necessary to work through the pain. That is truly an apt analogy for some aspects of the grief work and the trauma work that come from abuse.

I awakened metaphorically with such a grief and agony and fear as I began to feel pain coming back. I felt so frightened and insecure and truly disoriented. And then after several months came the anger over the way my father had treated me. Some of my emotions during that time could have been expressed by sentiments like ‘I don’t want to be here! I didn’t ask to be here! This is the last place I want to be! How did this happen? What did I do to deserve this? I was born without choice. I was given this horrifying situation without anybody consulting me about it! I want to be away from here; I want out of here now! Who do you think you are doing this to your family? This is going to stop and I mean NOW!’

So many times I experienced darkness, fear, anxiety, despair, terror, hopelessness, rage, profound sadness; and all these emotions were simply what came as I reconnected with my feelings about my abuse. These feelings were in my heart, down deep in there. I just had no conscious awareness of it. When the emotions surfaced I realized the way God made us, the way He made our hearts, the way he made our minds and our bodies would naturally have had me experiencing just these types of searing and gut wrenching emotions both in my body as well as in my mind as I thought about the injustice and the cruelty that was done to me and my brothers, sisters and mother.

God gave us the capability of healing. He made us with the ability to eventually experience the pain of war or trauma or abuse or whatever terrifying emotions, to be open to them, completely aware of the circumstances, so that we could ultimately heal. We can only be open to it so much at one time, and the healing process really does feel like it happens one day at a time. But because He made us in such a way as to be able to experience the real pain of the emotions, He gave us a true gift.

By slowly reconnecting with the original events and emotions of our trauma we eventually are able to experience the pain fully. And once we have done that we find the pain subsides, it reduces, and its negative unconscious control over our lives subsides, too. The blessing that comes from this is we are able to live our lives without the effects of that pain having unconscious control over our emotions and over our behavior.

Finally we are living our life in the present, with an ability to connect to our past as we need to. And having dealt with and felt the emotions of our past, those emotions can no longer blindside us as we live our lives out. The control the unconscious pain had over me was reduced over time. Perhaps the reducing of the pain was only a little bit each time, but it is truly incredible the difference it made in my heart and my life. Each small change felt like big change to my heart.

It is incredibly good news: God made our minds and our hearts with the capacity to heal. He gave our minds the ability to get through wars and natural disasters and concentration camps and child abuse but He also built into our minds the ability to re-consider decisions made and emotions experienced and to change them. God equipped our hearts with the capacity to re-experience hurts. And when this is done in a supportive environment, the healing effects of tears, crying, mourning and grieving is nearly as real and complete as if we had been able to cry, grieve, mourn and resolve the matter at the time it occurred. It is truly an amazing gift, this gift of healing.

The only way out is through. Truly . . . the only way out of abuse is to go back through it and live it again, this time with support, love, and understanding, all resulting in a different resolution than earlier in your life.

As the Lord restored my heart he taught me that being a man involves strength and courage as well as humility, gentleness, kindness, peacefulness and goodness. God helped me understand balance. My father had taught me that being gentle showed weakness in a man, and that kindness and gentleness were bad. Sometimes when I think about the way my father lived it is as if he never read the Bible he preached. He mocked humility and kindness and most certainly showed disdain for the demonstration of love and understanding. My father instinctively exploited and seized upon weakness in every person in whom he found it, and crushed the person in whom he found any vulnerability!

If you have been abused, you no doubt have anger and would like to reject the abuse and the behavior of the abuser! That is an understandable reaction. Anger and rejection are very good things when they are focused on the right matters and the behaviors worthy of rejection! But anger is a very big and very energizing emotion. And sometimes it wants to destroy everything in its path. However, when we are responding with anger, we have to be very careful not to reject important but subtle truths, as you unravel the lies. The greatest tragedy while striving to restore your heart and life from the effects of abuse and lies would be to embrace other lies, perhaps even more insidious lies, in the process.

The Lord is always good! He is able to save us completely and restore a broken heart and a broken life. He provides light where there had been darkness. He offers hope in place of despair. He gives peace and comfort where there was turmoil and unsettledness and pain. He calms the mind and comforts the heart.

When turning your life right side up The Lord is able to sustain and protect you through it all. You can go into your painful memories and experiences knowing there is an anchor and strength to hold you steady, and enable you to come through the storms of reliving the horrors and anguish of abuse. When you have been orphaned, literally or figuratively, or have been rejected by your family, The Lord is able to restore you back into a family and bring individuals into your life who will love you unconditionally.

Because of who I know the Lord to be, I cannot imagine a greater tragedy than for a person to reject The Lord in response to being abused. Whether you were abused by a church or by your family, or both, I want to tell you something critical to your going forward. The Lord was not the one who abused you. People abused you. People went against what the Lord wanted them to do and behaved wrongly. The Lord talks about these people in His word. He tells the truth about people who mistreat and abuse and hurt little children.

Matthew 18: 6 – but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Matthew 18: 10-11 - 10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven. 11 For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.

The Lord loves the little children, and that includes you! He says harm may come to little children but woe to the one who brings the harm. He’s not the one who brings the harm! But He is able to save you from the effects of the harm. This is one of the most wonderful truths of God’s word. He is able to restore and heal and establish your life!

If you turn your back on the Lord because of what people have done, you will not be giving Him the opportunity to do His healing work in your life. You are very important to the Lord and He loves you. He does not want you to turn away from His help. He wants you to run to His open arms. If your injury does not allow you to do this right now, He understands. He will put people in your life to help you along the path of healing, if you open your heart. People who can help you and eventually you may be able to run to the open arms of the Lord.

Please don’t close your heart to the Lord. It is understandable for you to do this especially when wrong teachings about the Lord and His Word were used to hurt you. It is understandable that you don’t trust. Your strong intellectual opinions help to protect you from further hurt. And you don’t want any more of the religious stuff. And you shouldn’t. I don’t want any more of the religious stuff either. Religion is what man does. Christ’s life was what was able to save us. Not man. Man can’t save you.

It is difficult to trust again and I understand. It is extremely difficult to see through the fog of pain. Sometimes the fog is more like huge thick dark endless storm clouds and the person lost in these clouds has no way of telling where they are or how near any light they may be.

So I am asking you, would you consider opening your mind to the possibility of healing? I would be glad to listen, if you would be willing to reach out to me. I would be glad to listen to what has happened to you. I want to know your hurt and your sorrow! And I don’t want you to turn your back on the Lord or on yourself!

Mark Phelps

Truth Is Your North Star

One of the most important aspects of therapy is pinpointing the truth. It is important to learn what is true about your life experience. It is healing to learn what is true, no matter how horrible the truth is. Abuse and injury is accomplished in the dark. It is hidden. Abuse includes isolation. The mind and heart and soul are isolated from others and from the truth. The abuser relies on deceit and lies and secrecy in order to abuse and hurt.

It is necessary for each of us who have come from abusive relationships to bring the abuse experience into the light of day. Through words and emotion, and connection with another caring person, the hidden areas of the heart that have been left hurt and isolated can be brought into the light and be brought back to life. The only way out is through. The abuse has to be revisited sufficiently to allow the one in need of healing to be able to connect to the truth of what was experienced during the abuse, and the truth of what is right.

In addition to my primary work with the husband and wife therapists, I spent two years in a therapy group that met twice a week. It was made up mostly of women, with only an occasional man who would come a week or two and then be gone. The group was specifically designed to allow individuals who had been abused to further their recovery by sharing their abuse and feelings and needs with others; and learning to listen and comprehend the experiences and feelings of others and provide support for them. All the work was done under the supervision of one or more professional therapists.

Each night we met the group would work for about three hours. Two or three or four individuals would work on some specific experience of abuse during the group session, while the others in the group would support and listen and relate to and encourage and ‘come along side’ the person to help them understand and heal from their abuse. The work I did with this group was some of the most important work I did, in healing my heart and restoring my life.

I learned to listen to the feelings of others. This had never been modeled for me by my parents so I was in new territory. I learned what feelings were – the guideposts for our heart to understand what was happening in our lives – and how to respond to feelings in a healthy, constructive way. I learned the importance of being valued and cared for and having my feelings validated by other human beings. I learned about life and feelings and emoting and living an authentic, purposeful, intentional life.

I learned, from watching others describe the abuse they had endured, how devastating abuse can be and how much it can affect our hearts and minds. Abuse colors our inner world with darkness and fear and alters our reality. Abuse from a father or mother can suspend important, foundational development of intellect and emotion. It can sidetrack our lives. It can detour us for years and years and in some cases, forever, if work is not done to repair the damage and heal from its effects.

Experiences and lessons victims have learned during times of abuse are incorporated into the fiber of their being differently than other life experiences and other life lessens because the experiences of abuse heighten our emotions. The heart knows what is right and fair and it also knows when it is seriously wronged. Psychological and emotional injury is as real as any physical injury. The difference is wounds of the heart are invisible so nothing is done to clean out the infection and repair the damage to allow healing to begin. And the abuser scoffs and laughs at the victim in their misery and reinforces what they have done, in many cases, by shaming the victim even further but also enforcing the code of silence surrounding the victimization. And often the abuse is repeated over and over. There is plenty of reinforcement of the abuse and little or no reversal, or time for recovery.

Shame results from being abused. Shame is the feeling of being bad, being no good, being worthless for something that was not your fault at all. Guilt is the feeling of being upset or feeling bad because of something you actually did. These are very different concepts and it is important for all of us to make the distinction between them. Guilt comes from having done something bad. Shame is feeling and believing you ARE bad because of another person’s bad behavior and abusive treatment of you.

Adults can further confuse these concepts as they are responsible for their own children. I heard a story about a woman who said to her husband when their little daughter was screaming out in pain over an earache as they were driving down the highway and they were not able right at that moment to get this child to a doctor. The mom said “I feel so guilty.” What the mom was actually feeling was a different emotion than guilt. Guilt comes from doing something bad. The mother was doing nothing wrong, and in fact was hoping to pull over at an appropriate exit on their road trip and try to find a doctor to care for her daughter. What she was feeling was immense empathy or compassion. Women may even be more prone to say they are feeling “guilty” over something they cannot “fix” than men do. But it helps to distinguish these three important ways of responding to life, that of guilt, compassion and shame.

Shame is what a young child takes on when the child incorporates the feelings she felt during and after the abuse and eventually feels this way about herself. At some point the child or adult is no longer able to separate out the behavior of the abusive adult and the way it made her feel, with the way she now feels about herself as a person. The feelings of shame include the feeling of being dirty as a person, and feeling bad as a person. People in our group therapy sessions talked about the feeling of wanting to shower and be really cleansed from this wretched feeling of shame. And shame keeps you from accepting yourself; your own feelings and your own emotions and your own experiences; both in the present and as you are working on the past.

But as you begin to have experiences of healing from shame, you gradually begin to accept yourself, to respond more kindly to yourself, to respond more gently to yourself. In this very beautiful and necessary process you begin to be accepting of what you are feeling and coming to grips with how shame has affected you. You begin to learn . . . to trust yourself and your own feelings. What a glorious experience!

You are, in a very real sense, experiencing what it would be like to have lived in a more normal healthy upbringing. As healthy children grow up they begin to learn they are separate, distinct beings from their parents and learn that they have a right to their own thoughts, feelings and perspectives on life. This can be a little scary but also exhilarating for a growing child to figure out that she is a person with a legitimate viewpoint that should be listened to. And then the child is able to have the freedom of mind and heart to apply themselves to their lives. Abuse victims who don’t have a true sense of self are robbed of the ability to respond to their own life as if it is theirs to command and direct.

Working with this group I began to learn to feel my feelings and to bring the invisible into the light where it was visible and tangible, and it could become real. What I am trying to say here is the abuse itself “becomes real” by the speaking it out in the presence of others. It was real to begin with, but the abuse victim experiences it as real when others hear about its truth. When it becomes real, the heart responds to the truth and begins to experience, not only the facts of the abuse, but the emotions that went along with the abuse that have been lying dormant for years and, in some cases, for decades.

As the abuse is identified, quantified, named (so to speak), and addressed, the appropriate emotions are finally experienced and the healing begins. Depending on the severity and longevity of the abuse, the healing work takes quite a period of time. For me, some of the main themes of the abuse took several years to finally resolve. And the work I did included integrating the truth of what had happened in both my thoughts and my feelings.

In addition to working with therapists one-on-one, and working with the group, I was also able, because I had both the time and the opportunity, to do some work on my own. What that meant for me was intentionally seeking out material that would help me grow. In one case that meant I would listen to a good teaching about healing from abuse. In another situation that meant I would learn the truth about God and the way He felt about me and others who had been hurt or oppressed by others. This kind of learning began to open my mind and my awareness and my emotions to aspects where I needed to learn more or needed to heal.

I have said abuse therapy is like the peeling of an onion. As I got to any new layer of healing I realized there was much truth I needed to learn. The abuser has kept the abuse victim in the dark by speaking lies to them. One of the ways we fight back is to bring truth in to combat the lies. So, in each layer I had to figure out what lies I had been taught and find powerful truth to help me crawl out of the hole. You will realize you have made a lot of progress in your recovery when you feel ready to just let the healing process continue and you go where it leads you. And in this way it is a unique process, but you can learn from other survivors of abuse by what they experienced and learned.

I would do this healing work either at my house when my family was away, or on several occasions, when I had to drive south to San Diego on business. I lived in Orange County, in California, and would drive to San Diego. I got to know the exits south of Camp Pendleton quite well. I probably stopped off at least ten of the exits between just south of Camp Pendleton and the exit to Del Mar, over a period of two years to ponder things God was giving me to think about, to sometimes be ready, to cry, to think through a situation. Those exits became markers for me of the very real healing I was able to do.

Either something on the radio or something I had been thinking about before I left the house or something on a cassette tape I was listening to . . . Something would bring to mind an issue that was stirring in me and this would then stir the emotion to the surface. When the emotion hit hard I would then take an exit, for safety’s sake, and find a place where I thought I would not draw attention to myself. Then I would give my heart the time it needed to do more work if it was ready and able, at that particular time.

If I was ready; and many times I was; I would get some of my best work done during these times where it was just me processing my own life. Remember I said that in a normal upbringing the child realizes she has a valid perspective on her own life and can think through her own journey? Well that is what I was doing at these exits. I got some of my best work done, in fact, while I was alone in the car, as I was finally giving myself opportunity to bring the truth I was learning into specific parts of my own life. I would connect with something in my heart. A lot of these experiences involved emotion that was from early little boy stuff, where I had been so hurt and shut off and had made the emotional decision not to live as a very little boy but to just exist and kind of be a robot in life, to just go through the motions.

As I did this work over a long period of time, my heart began to come back to life. This work of connecting to these early emotional memories involved some of the most visceral emotions I ever experienced as a part of the healing process. I would cry from deep inside my body with extremely hard, wrenching kinds of crying and it was very agonizing. I realized I was connecting to those very early feelings of the little boy who had been so brutalized and whose heart was so terrified and so sad. And my experience was, that I found the Lord right there with me, going into these broken parts of my heart with me, as I would fall into these feelings, and I sensed His presence so strongly, with me in these experiences.

During one important, incredible experience, I remember being able to make the conscious decision to live, on purpose. I decided within my heart: ‘I am born, I am on the earth, and I am here in this situation, and I am making the decision to live intentionally!’ What an important decision to make! To choose to live purposely and be engaged in my own life! This was after some extremely intense crying; I made the decision that I was going to live. I was making the decision, on purpose, to live my life intentionally, fully, instead of just continuing to exist. That was a huge turning point for me and I can tell you that living my own life and no longer with the lies of the abuse governing my actions, I truly moved forward in a new way.

I realize each of our experiences of abuse, whether a one-time abuse, or long-term abuse, is unique. My experiences may not be resonating with your specific circumstances but I hope the general principles are. Which is that you have a right to your own viewpoint of your own life. And that if lies have been told to you or done to you through abuse there will be a reorientation of your life that will take some effort. You are like a rocket that has been shoved off course by the wickedness of abuse. You probably need huge doses of powerful, life-giving, amazing truth to offset the things that happened to you. Know that your ship can be pointed in a new direction.

If you start into your healing process it may seem like some days you have barely moved your ship off its course of shame and destruction. And the lies may seem far easier to believe than the truth. But over time, your ship will start moving, imperceptibly maybe, day by day, in a different direction. And your feelings will begin to start to reflect that change. And it will give you relief and lighten your load. A little bit. A little bit, and then more and more. And one day you will look back over your shoulder and realize you are becoming someone very new.

I long for that day for you! If you need encouragement to begin this journey or to continue it, feel free to contact me. We are in this journey together!

Mark Phelps

Hanging On To Myself Because No One Else Did

Do you remember how old you were when you realized that no matter how many good people were in your life that in one sense you were living this life alone? That as much as you might want to share your life with other important people there is still a very solitary aspect of living on this planet. Each of us has to navigate certain aspects of our lives alone.

What I think makes this realization harder for those of us with long-term childhood abuse is that for many of us there never really was a time we felt safe. And it doesn’t take long to realize that for most of us, if we didn’t feel safe, it was because of something pretty big in our lives. For those of us with abuse it’s usually either that we had a parent abuser or we had a parent who wasn’t able to stop the abuse that was happening to us once they found out or we had a parent abandon us entirely. And what this means is parents fell down on their jobs. Just didn’t get done the one thing we all expect out of parents. And that is to protect and defend their children.

It is devastating to feel the despair and hopelessness that permeates your heart, when you truly begin to realize the personal loss of not having had a father and a mother. Now in my case I had parents who were present in my house. They directed a whole lot of what went on under our roof. But they were pretty much unavailable to do what parents do for children. Which is interact with them, teach them to read, spend time with them, give advice for living life, and the myriad of things parents do.

My father/abuser did not really want to be a father and my mother was not allowed to be a mother because my father believed he needed her more than we did. But in whatever way abuse keeps parents from parenting it is overwhelming. The realization initially is: ‘you are on your own, whatever you do will have to be done with your own strength, and there is no source of strength to draw on for what you need because you are empty inside’. The emptiness I am speaking about is the well in each child that gets filled up by loving, caring parents or other adult caregivers. Children of abuse are always empty on the inside.

Part of the reason I tackled this aspect of my healing, the emptiness that existed in me from not having had loving adults in my life, was because I knew I couldn’t parent my own children from this place of emptiness. You can’t give away what you don’t have. For me, the primary reason I chose to bravely go forth into the process of healing my losses is because I love my girls and I had the Lord in my heart. The Lord provided strength and hope! My girls gave me the motivation!

It takes a lot of strength to plan, to dream, and then to be able to take action on your plans and dreams. It takes strength deep in your heart to live a life of integrity, following the dictates of your own heart. Such strength mostly comes from a strong foundation laid during the growing up years, from the love and nurturing and support of responsible parents. It is not natural to grow up without parents. God made us with a need for parents and it is very difficult to properly prepare for adulthood and to effectively manage the responsibilities of adulthood without a father and mother, (or a caring, loving parent substitute) and the strength of their love in our hearts.

But God promises He will be a father to the fatherless . . . and He is! God is faithful in this! He truly is . . . a father to the fatherless!!

As a young adult, one way I had managed without a father was by finding male role models.

Dr. James Dobson of ‘Focus on the Family’ was one role model that God brought into my life. Dr. Dobson was not a role model in person, but he had a daily radio program in the late 1970’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s and I often listened to his program. Depending on the particular program, over the years I learned various important lessons. His wisdom and teaching in my life really filled in some critical things I had never been taught at home.

I learned from him more about healthy relationships. I learned about the role, beliefs and behaviors of a good husband. I learned more about the role, beliefs and behaviors of a good father. I heard about what it was like to have a strong father who loves and supports you, because Dr. Dobson was very close with his father and he would freely describe details about his experiences with his father.

I learned about what it was like to have a loving mother who was respected and loved by her husband. I would often cry as I listened to Dr. Dobson’s programs because I was realizing what life could be like and how to live the life I wanted to live. And I learned what life could have been like for me and my siblings had we had healthy parents.

I would often do an extra amount of work listening (not that I had planned to, but it worked out that way) when it came near to Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Dr. Dobson would have live phone calls of fathers and sons talking. I listened to these callers and learned and imagined what it could be like to be a godly father; what it should have been like to have had a godly father. I was very motivated to learn what I had not learned from my parents because I knew all I learned would end up being a blessing to my girls. They were so worth it to me that I pushed myself to keep learning and keep growing for their sakes.

I had a similar experience on Mother’s Day. I heard live calls with mothers and children speaking to one another. Though it is not the same as having your own father or your own mother speaking to you, if you open your heart and open your mind, the Lord can do amazing work and restore a great deal of what was lost, and enable you to live a more full life in the present. And all of this truly can come with wonderful teaching, nurturing, modeling and care of others in your life. You can tap into healthy, solid people whose health seems to spill over onto you when you are feeling parched and without direction.

My wife can tell you how many hundreds of hours I have spent watching The Andy Griffith Show. My father was very similar in appearance and charisma to Andy Griffith, and they both kind of had a southern accent and were from the south. So there were physical features, voice intonations and mannerisms similar between the two men.

I have watched The Andy Griffith Show hour after hour to see the relationship and learn from the relationship that Andy had with his son, Opie. The actor who played Opie is Ron Howard, and Ron Howard and I are the same age. Even at the beginning of the show; I would watch Andy and his little boy walking together on their way to go fishing and I would imagine what it would have been like to walk along together with my father, leisurely holding hands; Opie spontaneously running off to throw a stone in the lake, then back to his father to hold hands again. I couldn’t imagine doing this with my father, but it helped me to watch these two. Through imagination, and good models to watch, I was able to fill a lot of the hole left in my heart from not having grown up with a loving father.

In some of the episodes, Opie made the typical mistakes and experienced the typical struggles of a young boy. I was able to watch his father respond with gentleness and kindness and understanding of the mistakes of his son. Other episodes allowed me to see Opie having done the right thing but his father, Andy, would have made the assumption that his son had done the wrong thing. It was absolutely riveting to me to watch a father honestly apologize to his young son for having misjudged and unfairly treated him. And it was very healing to watch a father respond with kindness and understanding when his little boy struggled with insecurities and failures.

You would be surprised how healing it is to watch what should have been done even if you did not experience that same treatment yourself. I believe God has given us the power of our imaginations for all kinds of important things and I truly believe healing is one of His best uses of it. I believe that is one of the blessings of community. In community people can see each other living out their lives. Sometimes we see each other make mistakes, but sometimes we see each other doing it right. My father was so afraid of allowing his children to be around a real, transparent community of people that I simply did not experience the ups and downs of good people trying to live their lives.

Abuse in our family robbed me of seeing things done well or done right or done lovingly. It just didn’t happen! My experiences were only the negatives of my family’s lack of love and good parenting. I was rarely given the opportunity to witness caring, decent marriages or parenting and if I did I actually just had to stumble across them. The healing that I experienced from watching Andy Griffith came through the repetition of watching positive scenes and from having an open heart and open mind to what I was seeing. I let those images and the emotions connected to them wash over me and heal me. I was choosing to be all I could be in spite of what my life had been.

I also had the opportunity to meet men in a Bible study who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. I spent a lot of time with them and I really attached myself to them! They taught me and showed me aspects of life and important life lessons I had not gotten from my father. There were even men my age, and a little younger, who I was able to learn a lot from. They might have been more like brothers but I was filling a father deficit in my life and all these wonderful men, as well as my father-in-law were a big part of helping me get on the road to healing.

But even this type of work in choosing to draw from and learn from positive role models takes emotional strength. Part of what was happening as I watched the lives of these men was that I honestly didn’t understand what I was seeing. I couldn’t understand why their lives were so “right” and why there was such peace in their lives. It really was an oddity to me at first. I had always thought my father had armed me with all the “right answers.” What I got from these men was how to live right. The difference was just profound.

What began to hit me was that my father had been all talk. He may have preached on Sunday mornings but he never lived out godly, solid, mature life. He never gave us positives about what to do and how to live. He just gave us some rules. He never gave us the do’s, but focused on the don’ts.

What I found in the lives of the Christian men was a strong doctrinal foundation that they would talk about if the subject came up, but mostly they were living godly lives, day by day, and loving one another and supporting one another, and loving their wives and being fathers to their children. These were men building into one another's lives and being as Christ to one another and being servants to their families. Honestly, I was stunned and could find no fault with their lives, basically. I had a lot of learning to do to get my head and heart around this profoundly different world I found myself in the middle of. It was nothing like the life I had lived with my family and my father.

I began to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ - and began to understand, for the first time, what that verse was talking about. I remember sitting down with the pastor one time with my list of questions - and leaving with a most incredulous feeling that I had come in with guns loaded and left with a feeling I had never felt before. This pastor was a man of grace and love, who was not dogmatic (though he knew the Bible) but a man who accepted me and invited me into his church. I felt embarrassed, inadequate, foolish . . . and so wonderful all at the same time. I could not stay away as this man drew me toward his church and his ministry, much like Christ has drawn me with His love, and much like several of the men I have grown to know and love.

The Lord provided all this teaching for me even though it might have been later in my life than I thought it should have been. These good men in my life taught me by the example of their lives and their love and encouragement to me. They chose to take time away from their own families and pursuits just to show me and teach me what I needed to know; what I should have been able to learn from my father. They taught me what it would look like to have a godly father but also how to be a godly father. They were amazing mentors, brothers, and friends.

At one point along the process of therapy, my therapist and I agreed that it would be good for my progress if I were to call my father on the phone. It was very frightening for me (actually it was terrifying for me) but I prepared my mind and heart – worked up the courage – and eventually, after several weeks of preparation, I placed a call to my father. By this point in my life my wife and I had already experienced the miscarriage of three sons and we had adopted our first daughter. My wife and I had been married quite a while by this time. My father did not know any of the details of my life because there had been no contact at all between my father and me since I had left home some 19 years earlier.

In making the call, after overcoming the fear and anxiety, I made an attempt at conversation with my father, after he came to the phone. I realized later, he was only willing to take my call because he thought perhaps I was calling to tell him I had repented of my sin of leaving him (or whatever sins he imagined were in my life) and was going to come back to ‘The Place’. When I had barely begun to speak, during the first 30 seconds of my speaking, my father interrupted me.

All I had gotten around to telling him was that my wife and I had miscarried three boys and had finally been able to adopt a precious little girl . . . and he interrupted with: “God hasn’t given you any children because you are a reprobate. God hates you and has not given you any children so you don’t have any children and have to stoop to raising someone else’s reject. You better get yourself right with God and get back in ‘The Place’ or you are going to end up in hell”. I told him I was calling to talk a little bit and see how he was doing and to let him know a little bit about how I was doing. But he was not interested in conversation, only attacking me hatefully. I just had to end the call.

The Bible says “the glory of children is their fathers” which clearly speaks to how important a father can be to a child. That day my father did not choose to be my glory but my profound sadness and disappointment once again. I think that phone call was important for me to realize again that my father never really had anything to give other people but disdain. It seemed that disdain was the primary emotion he showed everyone except those people in his life who had done exactly as he told them to do. He wanted puppets.

But when I made that call to my father that day all those years later I just wanted to be his son. Not someone to be judged and condemned but someone to be loved. To have a give and take between two men who could listen to each other’s hearts and minds. What a gift that would have been to me. As it is, I was reminded during that phone call of the real truth of my father. He only wanted us in his life if we bowed to his wishes in every way. This conversation allowed me to finally move on realizing he had nothing good or wise or useful to offer his son Mark.

But his son Mark was moving in a very positive direction. I was learning the truth about who God really was, His love for me, who I was, and how much I had to learn still to be the man, the husband, the father and the citizen I wanted to be. I was taking steps every day along the journey of healing and that path was getting brighter each day. Not all abusers are going to say they are sorry for what they did. Mine never did. But that didn’t stop me from continuing my journey toward wholeness and healing. I wish for you the same! One step at a time, one day at a time…

Mark Phelps

The Only Way Out is Through

Child abuse is a very lonely business. The child going through abuse goes through it alone. S/he may have others witnessing what is going on, other siblings who are suffering as victims, too, but the bottom line is that it’s very, very lonely. And the child has so little ability to understand or cope with the horrors happening to her. All she can do is quickly adapt to her perpetrator’s patterns of abuse and try to decrease their frequency if she can.

You’ve heard me say that the healing process from abuse was like peeling the layers of an onion. And one of those layers was the loneliness and sadness because of all the years I spent without parents being present in my life. Oh, my parents were physically present in my house. And I was provided a roof over my head and food to eat. And I had profound sadness because for years I had watched my father mistreat my mother and brothers and sisters. My father may have been physically present, at times, but he was not available emotionally. No person is perfect and no parent is perfect. But most parents are ‘good enough’, giving their children basically what they need. Each child needs a Mother and a Father physically present and emotionally available in their lives and to not have this gift is very sad and causes great loneliness in our lives and significant hurt to our hearts.

I worked in therapy on the sadness of the loss of not having a father who spent time with me. The therapists would use the example of my having missed out on playing catch with a baseball and gloves or heading to an amusement park or even going to a park just to relax together, all with my dad. I could remember other boys whose dads spent time with them or supported them and loved them. I imagined what it would have been like to have had a dad who was safe, with whom I could speak and get ideas or encouragement or support; a dad who would listen to me; a dad who was healthy and could help me plan a future – education, career, a family, to eventually become a father – to be creative, to assist me in living up to my potential. Each of us needs the hand of a loving, solid, stable, nurturing father and it is very sad when this is missing from our lives.

I did a lot of grief work! I learned ultimately you can’t fool the mind. The exact precision with which God made our minds is stunning. Our souls have a father ache and a mother ache. As children we need our mothers and we need our fathers! God has apparently put into the core of our beings - deep in our souls - what we need - and He has set it up for us to get what we need from our parents. But when parents don't parent - or when they abuse their children, it leaves holes and scars in those children’s hearts. And the scars are as real, or more so, than scars left on our bodies from physical injuries.

It took me many months to grieve the loss of the father I never had. I fell into a black hole that felt like the size of China! When doing this work with my therapists it seemed like they were rescue workers having to go down in and rescue mine workers who have been trapped in a mining accident. My therapists had to go down very deep into the caverns and tunnels and holes of my life to get me out of where I was trapped. And while they were down there it was very difficult work for everybody; extremely painful, tedious and agonizing work! But the only way out is through; back through to the surface! Every dark tunnel and cavern needed to be traversed as I slowly worked myself out of the dark blackness back to the light of day. I cried and sobbed and grieved and wept and screamed and gradually raged my way out of the black hole back into the land of the living. And that land had good in it I could not have imagined.

During this work of grieving I was experiencing the profound sadness of a small child who was feeling the destruction of himself and his mother and his brothers and sisters at the hand of his own father. I was so sad for all of my family! I wept and grieved for my own mother and father who had to have been such broken souls to allow their lives to reach such depths of despair that they would end up abusing and neglecting their own children the way they did. I cried such deep tears of sorrow and grief for my father and mother. This specific work was a significant part of the hard work I did that allowed me to reach the point of full forgiveness of both my father and mother. I was able to sufficiently understand, and feel their brokenness so I was able to genuinely forgive them from deep within my heart! Truly that was an amazing day in my life where I reached that point.

There were times when I physically could not do any more grieving work. I had to take a break and come back later in the day, or in the evening. Some of my recovery work required four or five sessions a week with my therapists. When I would hit an especially intense pocket of pain I would work and work until I fought through the anguish, despair and sadness and reach a new plateau of relief and calm.

My stomach and chest would burn with pain, I had pounding, throbbing headaches, and I often spent every ounce of the emotional and physical energy I had to do this work. It was during these experiences I realized how closely linked our bodies are to our emotions and how profoundly our emotions effect our bodies. In the Bible mankind is presented as having a body, soul and spirit that are inextricably linked. That we are not just parts, but one whole amazing being and that all parts are beautifully connected. I now believe that in a new way as I went through therapy and experienced healing in my whole being.

Perhaps you are wondering how I handled five sessions in one week that were that intense. When I would return home after doing this hard work I would be like a wet noodle, all rung out. It would feel so good to get back home where I felt safe and loved. And it gave me such joy to get to pick up my little girl and hug her and spend time with her and my wife. I would read to my daughter and spend quiet time with my wife. For just a bit, all was right with the world!

Sometimes I would take time to walk in the park or go down by the beach and look at the water and listen to the waves. The beauty of creation would allow me to relax and restore my mind. I discovered that allowing my mind to relax was very important and it gave me time to reflect on all I was doing. I realized I was making progress and eventually could really tell a difference in how I was feeling. At times I could tell I was starting to feel some relief from emotional pain because of the work I was doing. And it allowed my mind a chance to rest and would enable me to be ready for more work. And taking time to relax helped me to feel grounded again. With so much moving and shifting within, it was important at times just to get regrounded.

I was careful not to traumatize my family with aspects of my healing work though I would, from time to time, describe a little of the work I was doing with my wife. I would tell her I had an important breakthrough or that something was particularly difficult or painful. But for the most part, my family was a source of love and joy and laughter and support in my life that was a solace and a help to me, and a way to give myself a break from the painful work for a while. It would be wonderful if those of you thinking of starting into therapy had a few friends to support you in your journey. And if you would like to, you are welcome to connect with me as you are going through it.

During this healing work I came to a full realization of the profound loss of not having a father in my life. And I realized the consequences of being without my father even in my present life. Without a proper foundation being laid as a child, the work a father might have done has to be done later on in adulthood, on your own, with the support of friends and family. Years pass and time is lost. What could have been; what should have been; will never be. But there is hope! A person can go forward with what is learned, and keep making more of a life in the present. Life truly does have the opportunity of new beginnings.

Learning how to want a future was very difficult for me; that part of me that was deeply hurt as a little boy. I am talking now specifically about that little boy (or little girl) part of the heart. That part of our being that was present when devastating abuse took place! In that part of my heart it was more natural and much easier for that part of me to feel despair and just want to quit. When father’s fail to actively love their children, and abuse them instead, the effects are devastating!

During one particularly significant therapy session I was able to speak plainly to my therapists about my despair and my desire to just quit; I wanted to just stop and get off the merry-go-round of life because of all the pain I was experiencing. I told my therapists that my honest feelings were that I just wanted to bring an end to my life so I could end the pain. I was not suicidal but was describing the feelings in this deep inner early part of my heart. I mentioned the inner thought I had of just pulling my vehicle into on-going traffic as a quick, effective way to kill myself just to end the pain.

To help me with this, my therapists, who knew how crazy I was about my wife and our new little adopted daughter, decided to do some role playing. At the time I did not know specifically what my therapists had planned.

As we were working, all of a sudden the therapists started making the sounds of an ambulance siren and police sirens, as they began to act out a scenario. My therapists role-played a call going out to 911 because there had been an accident on the road between my house and their office. As their role play unfolded I soon realized it was me involved in the accident. In a fit of despair, I had suddenly pulled my car into oncoming traffic and there were several life threatening injuries as a result of the accident. Remember, this was just role playing!

When the ambulance arrived, (in this role play) I was in critical condition and the therapists suddenly started asking me questions:

‘What are you going to do Mark?’

‘Can you hear your wife crying? She is screaming in horror!’ (The wife therapist screamed)

‘What is your little baby girl going to do without her Daddy?’ (The wife therapist cried out in the voice of a little girl – ‘Daddy, oh Daddy’)

‘Can’t you see what this is going to do to your little girl?!’

‘Are you going to just lay there and die?’

‘What will they do without you?’

‘What will their lives me like?’

‘What’s going to happen to them?’

‘Mark, what are you going to do?’

‘Are you going to live? . . . or are you going to just lay there and die?’

As they asked me these questions, they would shake me like they were attempting to awaken me.

At first I felt this was kind of stupid and I was really embarrassed. I just lay there completely still with my eyes closed, frozen on the floor. Even though I tried, I just couldn’t feel any emotion. I just told my therapists that my life insurance policy would be more than enough to take care of them. So, again my built-in childhood protective mechanisms were trying to help me not feel.

Then out of nowhere, I started crying, then more crying, then suddenly I was crying so hard I couldn’t stop. My crying became just very deep, hard sobbing and crying until my body began to writhe with the sobbing and deep crying. I had finally begun to connect with the hopeless despair in my soul!

It may be that way for you in your recovery as you begin to recover normal feelings and emotional connections you would naturally have to situations. If this happens you may find yourself going from a moment that seems emotionless to one that is a tidal wave of emotion. This is actually a very healthy reconnecting with your emotions that you have shut off for years. We were designed by God to be a very connected mind/spirit, will and emotions. As this process of reconnecting with your emotions happens you are reconnecting to your whole self.

My therapists were helping me to feel the reality of me not being alive; my not wanting to live, and I began to connect with these feelings of despair and hopelessness deep in my heart. I realized it was not just some selfish lack of concern for my wife and daughter when I was pondering driving directly into oncoming traffic. I was truly hopeless at that moment and didn’t know how to recover hope.

After a long period of intense emotion that night, and with much assistance from my therapists, feelings of wanting to live began to quietly stir in me. I began to realize, emotionally, that I really had some amazing, wonderful reasons to live! Of course I already knew this in my adult intellect and heart. But this process allowed me to begin connecting with my early heart; the young heart of me; the part of me that had wanted to die. The work we all did that night was the beginning of profound change in my life!

Of course, after that evening, I continued working for many more months. In that process I learned more and more and slowly changed my heart toward a feeling of hopefulness. Ever so slowly I began to develop a sense of excitement and passion for life.

I don’t know where your heart is today as you read this blog. Some of you may be in the throes of despair and honestly believing there is no climbing up out of the cavern of hopelessness. I was right there with you the day I imagined the “solution” being my own death. But now that I am on the other side and have experienced hope and dreams and passions and simple pleasures again I want to encourage you. There is a beautiful Psalm that says “Weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Let me encourage you to hang on for some joy in your life. What a wonderful day that will be…

Mark Phelps

The Gift of Anger

Let’s face it, most of us choose therapy because we’re in a whole lot of pain. People have described the process of therapy as peeling back the layers of an onion. The first layer you come to helps you understand part of the problem but you figure out that underneath that layer are a whole bunch of other layers! For me the first layer was definitely terror. As I began to really think about my past abuse it just terrified me. My father had done a very effective job of terrorizing me and memories of the past abuse could get me immediately back in that place of being physically cold and shaking and feeling like I was a slug on the floor who could not even move.

After I was able to work through my terror the second layer was sadness. And then would come something I never expected to grapple with. That was as I was slowly beginning to connect with the anger I should have felt, as a little boy. My therapists and I talked about how one day I would begin to experience the feeling of anger.

That sounds kind of strange. It sounds like somehow I misplaced the ability to get angry along the journey of life. But it’s exactly what happened. At least anger towards my father. Maybe it would be more accurate to say the emotion of anger was conditioned out of me. It was conditioned out of me because being angry against any wrongs my father had done to me in my growing up years was met with swift and brutal abuse. So, anger, I guess, really did get misplaced along the way of my life as an effective way of processing violations or wrongs done to me.

Or perhaps a better way to describe it is to say the anger got displaced. Remember I have said you can’t fool the heart? God made our minds to work a certain way. This includes the gift of anger. Human beings need anger to give them the strength to respond to and fight back against hurt and injustice. I had a volcano of rage in my soul from years of living with my father. But I learned to suppress this rage as a way to survive.

Rage does not just go away. Human beings cannot suppress anger out of existence! It showed up on my face as looks of anger at my wife. Undeserved anger! It came out in my body. The slightest routine irritations of life became bursts of anger at people all around me. I verbally blasted the fast food worker that got an order wrong. I unloaded a barrage of expletives at the vendor or supplier that did not get supplies or materials delivered in time or in the way I wanted them. I unloaded on the bill collector who called to ask about their payment. The customer service representatives at utility companies or government agencies regularly got a piece of my mind. I was known as ‘Mark the Shark’ by all of our company employees. Bankers and loan officers and most everybody around me in my life knew not to cross me.

Once a man told my wife he needed to take a tranquilizer every time he saw me because of how intensely I moved about everywhere I went. I could not keep my body still, constantly moving my legs or tapping my fingers. Once a professor blasted me for my incessant tapping of my pencil on the table while he was lecturing; “Are you neurotic?!” he yelled. I did not even realize I was tapping my pencil. At night, after a full day of work, with no more work to do, I would eat everything in sight. Nacho flavored Dorito chips and ice cream were my favorites. I put on fifty pounds. I had a generalized anxiety in my body that I could not contain or subdue.

The rage in me had to have an outlet and it was spilling out in so many ways in my life. But the most damaging outlet was how it showed in my demeanor; facial expressions and tone of voice, at different times, with my wife. I was not about to hurt my wife physically, but I was a very painful person for her to be around. And it took a profound toll on her life and on our relationship!

I read books on how to be a better husband. I read books about how to build positive relationships with others. I read books about how to develop and maintain a positive attitude in life and how to set goals. And I made valiant efforts to stop blowing up at people over petty matters. These books were helpful to me. And it made some difference in my treatment of my wife and the treatment of people in my life. But I remained unable to contain the rage inside.

I could not work hard enough or long enough. I could not run far enough. I could not find enough people to mistreat. I could not find enough junk food to eat. My wife could not think of enough ways to be “good enough” to fix my hurt and anger. Nothing I did, or that my wife could do, was sufficient to get rid of the rage deep in my soul! The feeling of rage I was trying to stuff was destroying my life and causing profound hurt to my precious wife.

What my therapists knew well was that people who are not allowed to have access to their own feelings and are not allowed to express them appropriately struggle in life. But they also knew that people who are finally allowed to express legitimate feelings, even ones that are long overdue, are able to make great strides in healing. My therapists knew that not being able to be in touch with appropriate anger ABOUT the abuse and beatings done to me was impeding my ability to be a vibrant adult who could live and walk and breathe as a free man and be available to love my wife and my daughters and my employees and people I would come into contact with.

When we began to dig into this process of trying to “recover” my anger at my abusers my therapists were very careful and very purposeful in helping me feel okay about this process. Nothing happened in my therapy without my explicit permission. I had wonderful therapists. We had talking sessions, pre and post sessions each time we got together. My therapists provided these times so I would understand exactly what they were hoping to accomplish and give me the ability to debrief what had happened at the end of each session. These sessions were critical to my truly incorporating the truths of what I was experiencing. I owe them a great debt for the wonderful work they did with me.

These sessions discussing ways to manage anger happened on several occasions so I always knew ahead of time what would be safe ways to vent my anger. And this was in preparation for me one day connecting with the anger I should have been able to have against my father as my abuser. They were preparing me for the day those feelings would begin to well up in me. My therapists understood the mind/body connection and that when my anger against my father came I might need mental as well as bodily ways to express it. My therapists did not want me to hurt myself, or others, once I began to feel the anger. So my therapists left plastic bats and soft chairs in the room and maintained a supply of heavy, soft pillows and soft exercise mats.

These mats were just large enough to absorb blows and not allow damage to hands and fists and knuckles. I mostly used the really soft (like for tumbling) mats - three on top of one another - so I did not hurt my hands - and I walloped the life out of them a bunch of times. And I used the plastic bats on the chairs while standing. I was on my knees usually when I would hit the soft mats. Just tools to help vent rage without hurting people . . . or self. Very simply, it allowed me to connect and vent anger that ended up being the way I could connect to my deep sadness and it made a huge difference for me.

Doing this work did not increase my anger in any way whatsoever. It allowed me the freedom to connect to the anger. This work was done with just me and my therapists. It was not a circus by any stretch of the imagination. It was very serious business, as far as I was concerned. My anger had hurt my wife for far too long and God gave me the grace to be able to connect to the anger, finally, and I got rid of it. God allowed me to empty myself of the intense anger and brought me to the deep sadness and the softer feelings of hurt and brokenness deep inside me. This was something that truly set me free as a person. To be done with all that intense anger.

The first time I started feeling the anger that I should have been able to express to my father for what he did to me it seemed almost impossible to think I should ever express it! My therapists encouraged me to say whatever I needed to say but to “stay” initially in the very safe place they created for me. The safe place was simply me lying on my back with my eyes closed. I was able to talk back to my father (so to speak) while continuing to lie on my back with my eyes closed. I was safe enough and started to be able to speak the exact words I wish I could have said to my father years ago when he abused me. Eventually I was able to start yelling back at my father, so to speak, but I had to continue lying on the mat while doing so. And I eventually was able to begin opening my eyes as I spoke and yelled, still while lying on my back.

After many months I was able to get up on one knee and talk back to my father. Then after a long period of time I was able to get up on one knee and yell back at my father. After an extended period of time I was able to begin to stand up on my feet and talk back to my father. And then finally after nearly two years of work I was able to stand solid on my two feet and yell back at my father! That was a massive breakthrough for me!

It was very healing and strengthening to me to experience this. Other words I would use to describe this feeling of being able to speak truth to my father would be freeing or empowering. It was refreshing to be able to get my rage and anger out at my father. So I would cry intermittently in the midst of it, tears of anger. Sometimes the reality of what had happened would hit me as I was raging and I would go into angry crying - then at times, even more intense rage and even angrier crying.

And all the while it was draining out of me the pent up anger of years of having no voice about my own abuse.

As I would yell, my therapists would continue to rage and act out my father’s behavior and say things my father would have said, to continue to act out abusing and attempting to further control me. This included my therapist threatening me with a beating if I continued to yell. And he would threaten to beat my ‘mother’. In my early experiences, the therapists acting out my father’s behavior resulted in me shutting up and feeling really scared. They understood the process I was going through and we always debriefed what was going on with me and the fear and the shutting down. After many experiences, I was eventually more able to continue yelling and arguing. This was very healthy for me to express the legitimate anger I felt at being beaten and screamed at and humiliated as a child.

Later as I connected with my anger more and more, I was able to start using the plastic bat to hit the soft chair as I yelled, or I would just hit the pillows or mats with my fists, either standing or on my knees. I had many sessions of working on my anger. Anger that very much needed to be expressed at some of the abuse and torture and mind control my father had put me through. All with the goal of helping me become an integrated human being who was living in real time with the emotions I was experiencing being the emotion of the day I was in. And not carrying around 35 year old emotions that had never been expressed!

Over a long period of time I had begun to connect with a little anger from time to time but I was still having a hard time feeling real anger toward my abuser. During this time of struggling to connect with anger I mentioned this to my therapist on one occasion. I said “I still just can’t feel anger. I just don’t see what I have to be angry about”. It was just an honest statement to my therapist about what I was experiencing. I did not think any more about this as we started into our work that day. As I was relaxing and the therapist began to do his normal reenacting of my father’s rage and verbal abuse the therapist did something he had never done before. As he reenacted the verbal abuse and physical abuse of my father, speaking as if he was my father, the therapist began to taunt me.

He said: “Oh, you’re too weak! You’re just a little coward! You’re a little sissy! You’re a pansy! I can do whatever I want to you and you can’t stop me. I can beat your mother whenever I want to because there is nothing you can do about it. I can beat your brother Nathan and you will just stand there because you’re too scared. You don’t care what happens to your brother Nathan or your sister Katherine or your brother Fred. You’re more worried about yourself and staying safe. You’re too scared! See, you’re just a coward! Big baby! Why do you just lay there! Cat got your tongue?” Then he just laughed and laughed.

If I thought I did not have anger up to now, I want to tell you something! That day, listening to the words of my therapist, I went into a rage that day. I connected with a rage that I would have never imagined I had in me. It was like taking the finger out of the dam. The rage erupted and came pouring out of me. My therapists’ taunts were tapping into some of the deepest pain I had ever felt. And were describing very well both the horrible things my father had allowed himself to do in our family, but the fear that kept us all from acting to save our mom and siblings from his beatings. My therapist, by even using my father’s horrible evil laugh, had recreated for a moment what it felt like to live with him. My father did horrible things to us and laughed at us as he did them.

For us to understand abuse in our family system means coming to terms with the fact that the abuse we witnessed is a particularly painful part of our pasts. Your own abuse, and beatings and being screamed at and belittled you just dealt with yourself. Somehow you got through it. Each time it happened. But to watch others have to go through it and be paralyzed in your fear and not able to respond is just a nightmare to have to go through. And for my therapist to be taunting me and saying I was a coward was just more than I could bear that day. What was particularly cruel about it was that any abuse victim wrestles for years with the agony of “what I could have done to protect others.” The abuser might very effectively brainwash you into understanding you have no way out, but you still feel the guilt.

That day when the rage and the anger toward my father’s actions and horrible, destructive words came out like Mount Vesuvius was an important turning point in my life. So often we think of anger as something that must be tamed or gotten rid of. And truthfully most of the time it is something we must be very careful about. Anger and rage normally just destroy the people around them. But in the case of people of trauma and abuse, the response of anger towards the abuse is not only appropriate but very necessary to going on in life. Unexpressed and unexamined anger and rage will simply go inward and destroy the abuse victim if she doesn’t find a healthy, constructive way to express it and release it.

During my most intense experiences connecting with and venting anger I beat the soft mats and pillows with all my physical strength and I screamed and yelled with all of my voice until I was hoarse. I vented anger; beating the mats with my fists, hitting the bats against the soft chairs, and screaming back at my father (so to speak) for over an hour non-stop. I would lift my fists over my head as high as I could and slam them with all my physical strength against the mats and pillows. I would scream the truth at my father about what he had done to me, to my mother and to my brothers and sisters!

Ultimately, hour by hour, day by day, I took back the power I had forfeited to my father and took back my heart. I cannot tell you how important or how wonderful it is to get your heart back. To get connected with the real you in the present and be able to accurately look at whatever happened to you in your past. And express the emotion that so desperately needs to be expressed about what happened to you.

I was able to work through my anger over a period of two years. It took me over six months before I was able to first experience my own anger toward my father and his abuse. If all of you normal folks out there reading this blog think about not being able to even experience anger for a full six months of therapy it lets you see how much my coping behaviors as a child were truly walls around my heart. And while initially they had served to protect my little child self, it also made it so I couldn’t connect with all the healthy emotions necessary to live a complete, healthy adult life.

My therapists were wise practitioners who knew I needed to work through other emotions before I would finally be able to reach and connect to my anger. But they also knew that beyond the legitimate anger, was a garden of subtle, beautiful emotions God meant for me to have and even enjoy that had not been available to me. I grew up in Kansas. It makes me think of the movie the Wizard of Oz and how it was for Dorothy and her friends to go to Oz and see everything in color. I was a kid who had seen life in emotional colors that were largely black and white and shades of grey. Through beautiful, ethical, caring therapy I was opened up to a world of good and healthy emotions that have been a delight to experience.

Some people are able to connect with their anger far sooner than the deeper emotions (for them) of sadness. Each of us will be different if we have had to stuff emotions to protect ourselves! Please be patient with yourself as your buried emotions begin to come back to the surface where you can deal with them.

I do hope you are able to glean little bits of wisdom from my experience, but if you don’t, remember that you will have your own beautiful journey of healing that will get you back in touch with many things that seem unavailable to you right now. Freedom from fear and anger! Freedom from the storm within you that is likely to burst out. And freedom to go on to live the amazing life you have within you!

Mark Phelps