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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
We are like a child who lacks the safety of loving and competent parents. Our inner life has become like a dysfunctional family.
But don't feel badly, don't blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives.
(Genesis 45:5, The Message)
Although the Bible doesn’t describe a great deal about Joseph’s inner struggles as he came to this conclusion, we do have one verse that gives us some insight:
Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: "For God has made me forget all my toil and all my father's house." (emphasis added)
Manasseh was born after Joseph was released from prison and raised to power in Egypt. His name means “causing to forget.”[24] The fact that Joseph wanted to forget his brothers (his father’s house) and what they had done to him shows that his memory of their betrayal weighed on him. Since he didn’t succeed in fully forgetting until he was released from prison, we know that it had weighed on him for a long time – probably about thirteen years (Genesis 37:2; 41:46). It wasn’t easy for him to come to grips with what they had done.
I believe Joseph felt the same Fear, Anger, and Sorrow that any of us would if we had faced what he had. Remember, he didn’t know how his story would end. The only indication he had of a bright future was his faith in God and a couple of dreams (Genesis 37:5-11). How much could the dreams have encouraged him? Even his father, who greatly loved him, doubted their message (Genesis 37:10).
Times of suffering tend to cause us to question the foundations of the universe: “Does God love me? Is He really in control? Why would He allow this to happen?” The way in which we answer these questions determines who we will become. Will it be someone who trusts what God says about Himself, or will it be someone who settles for a more convenient explanation? Will we press through to see Him as the one who “was behind it,” or will we conclude that the events of life happen randomly – that we are on our own?
It can be incredibly difficult to choose God’s way. As Joseph faced each day, how could he explain the fact that he had been plucked from a family of faith to be enslaved by pagans? How could he reconcile his unjust treatment with his belief in the Judge of all? Day after day he didn’t know how it all fit together, and being human, I am sure he spent many painful hours trying to figure it out. In the final analysis, however, it was only as he walked with God for years that the answers became clear.
Most of us don’t handle our trials as well as Joseph did. As a result, our Fun Emotions and Desires, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Sorrow, Brokenness, and Contentment aren’t properly handled, and they lead us into trouble. My early life is an example. In the middle of a trial in which my parents offended me, I tried to stand on my own, which led me to emotionally separate from the people I needed, which left me feeling unprotected, which turned me toward perfectionism, which led to self-abuse, which morphed into a smoking fetish, which opened me to demonic harassment …. I handled the challenges of my young life with a string of devastating emotional mistakes!
Though most people don’t fall in the same direction I did, the same root problem, a lack of practical faith and wisdom in the face of pain, can lead to other problems that are just as damaging. For example, some turn to rebellion. Rather than standing against evil, they try to turn it to their advantage. Their hearts defy anyone who gets in their way, and they attempt to overcome threats by becoming a threat. Even God becomes a target. They conclude that He must hate them, so they do their best to hate Him back.
There are countless different flavors of confusion, but the common thread is that they all fail to reflect God’s heart. When they take root in our lives, they form a “stronghold” in our mind. A stronghold is a way of thinking that keeps us from fully knowing and experiencing God.
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ …
The name I use for the particular stronghold I have been describing in this book is the “Unprotected Heart Stronghold.” It works like this: We feel the pain of evil. We react and try to come to grips with it on our own, a task for which we aren’t designed. As a result, our internal Parent loses its way and turns to unhealthy coping mechanisms like anxiety, perfectionism, rejection, self-chastisement, withdrawal, rebellion, or addiction. These coping mechanisms offer temporary benefits, but they also sabotage our inner life and reshape our personalities. In time, they become parts of our identity. We think of ourselves as “someone who has to be perfect,” “someone who is a rebel,” or “someone who is an addict.”
Though we may achieve some personal satisfaction in “being ourselves,” we don’t effectively handle the realities of life. Foolish choices result in greater and greater wounds over time, and this causes our misled internal Parent to react and turn to the same or new coping mechanisms with greater resolve. Unfortunately, this only compounds our problems.
In time, our pain becomes a permanent fixture in our lives, and our heart flounders under a lack of guidance and protection (thus the name: Unprotected Heart Stronghold). We are like a child who lacks the safety of loving and competent parents. Our inner life has become like a dysfunctional family.
The decisions that lead to the Unprotected Heart Stronghold often take place while we are still children. In my case, I turned to perfectionism and self-punishment as a ten-year old. I was only eleven or twelve when my subconscious mind created the smoking fetish, and I was sixteen when I found myself unable to send away a swarm of inner voices.
It didn’t seem fair. I was a kid. I wasn’t at an age where people tend to think about spiritual warfare. I was hoping I would do well in baseball and bowling; I was exploring music and wondering what next year’s basketball season would be like.
I didn’t really care about the devil, but the devil cared about me. He loves to prey on the unsuspecting.
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
The devil came after me like a roaring lion. He took advantage of my youth, my family, and my ignorance, grabbing me before I knew what I was doing in an attempt to devour me. By God’s grace his attempts weren’t fully successful, but they inflicted enough damage that I developed my perception of life from within his jaws. His teeth pierced my fragile emotional life, and I saw the world through the lens of his cruelty.
My internal Parent warped under the pressure, and I blamed and punished myself for my vulnerability. I tried to grab control of my life and force myself to feel what I believed I should. I told myself that it wasn’t acceptable for me to have the sorts of problems I did, but I couldn’t undo the damage.
A misguided internal Parent is at the heart of the Unprotected Heart Stronghold. It steps between us and reality and interprets whatever happens according to its distortions. We fail to see the world as it truly is, because our internal Parent keeps us from seeing it through the eyes of our Father in heaven.
For example, a friend may attempt to help us by offering constructive criticism, but if we have a misled internal Parent, we are likely to interpret our friend’s words as condemnation. We end up hearing the threatening message we have been trying to avoid from within rather than the helpful advice from without.
When we read verses in the Bible about God’s judgment, a misled internal Parent can turn these verses into a sense that God is rejecting us. We feel as if He is saying that we are hopeless sinners who will find nothing but His hatred. Instead of hearing the promised blessing and empowerment that comes from knowing Him, we hear an unbearable threat.
Evil spirits often add their power to the deceptions of our misled internal Parent. Their spiritually charged lies (often pretending to be the voice of God) join with our misperceptions to give them greater intensity. Anxiety and condemnation take on new dimensions of intimidation. Permissiveness masquerading as tender love becomes incredibly persuasive. Even when we recognize that we are hearing the voices of demons, we can’t completely send them away because they are repeatedly invited back by the deceptions we have internalized and fused into our internal guidance system.
Under the Unprotected Heart Stronghold, a misled internal Parent can even turn God’s love into a threat. For example, when He allows situations that expose our weaknesses so He can reveal His strength, we feel vulnerable. We react and resort to our coping mechanisms with seemingly irresistible compulsion. If the situations are not quickly resolved, rage and panic rise within us. We feel as if God is trying to harm us, and we cry out against the perceived lack of love.
If the stronghold gains enough ground, we can reach a point where our hearts close themselves to many of the sources of life and nurture that God has sent to feed and care for us. We don’t trust people; we declare our circumstances to be so unfair that we are helpless against them; we envy others for enjoying what wasn’t given to us; we resent life. Once we have closed off enough sources of nurture, the lack of goodness reaching us may cause us to feel as if we live in a parched desert. At that point, it will seem that our only hope of any satisfaction is in an addiction of one sort or another.
The irony in all of this is that our internal Parent, which if healthy would protect us from threats, has turned into a threat in and of itself. It does its job of caring for us so poorly that it ends up damaging us. I am an example. When I turned to perfectionism and self-punishment, my internal Parent was attempting to protect me, but the severity with which it handled this job was worse than much of what I was trying to escape.
The smoking fetish was similar. I attempted to protect myself by using my sexuality to meet my emotional needs. The fetish comforted me and made me feel as if I was nourishing myself, but it created a sinkhole of desire. The relief of an insane fantasy world increased the danger to me from the real world.
Resisting the Unprotected Heart Stronghold also felt dangerous. When I tried to find safety in obeying God and turning from the fetish, I had to go through the seemingly impossible task of standing against the host of emotional and demonic forces that had become oriented around it. The hedge of thorns tore at the fabric of my being, making me feel as if I was more likely to go insane by resisting than by letting the fetish have its way. My misled internal Parent told me that, for me, it was OK to disobey. Requiring myself to face such an inner storm was something a loving God could never require. The best I could do was to give in to sin and pray for a miraculous change.
It was difficult to understand how I could trust God. When I tried to rest in Him rather than striving in my own strength, I fell to the fetish. When I tried to obey, I felt like I was squashing my inner being and imposing unnecessary internal suffering. Rest and obedience seemed to be opposites, as if my only choices were either a calm trusting disobedience or forced robotic legalism. I couldn’t make sense of it. Where was the Christian life of love, joy, and peace I read about in the Bible?
All of this illustrates how the Unprotected Heart Stronghold creates “arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). It places the deceptions of our internal Parent (our conscience, nurturing emotions, and judgmental emotions) between us and Him. When we try to experience Him, we stumble onto the layers of misunderstandings, coping mechanisms, and demonic activities that make up the stronghold. Obedience feels as if we are submitting to an incompetent dictator rather than the Perfect Father. Though we may sense His love, we have trouble knowing how to apply it to the basic needs of our heart.
When we continue in the Unprotected Heart Stronghold for many years, we can feel assaulted by life. Misled expressions of our Fun Emotions and Desires, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Sorrow, Brokenness, and Contentment build up inside of us and take on seemingly unmanageable proportions. They become ten times harder to handle than they were when we started. No situation seems safe; too many threats spring from within.
I found the Unprotected Heart Stronghold humanly impossible to pull down. It was so woven into the fabric of my personality that I couldn’t even recognize it. I was unable to separate my good emotions from the distorted forms they had taken. Fortunately, “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). Jesus gave me the wisdom and power to gradually see what was happening and find answers.
I have written this book because I believe He will do the same for you. He will work in your life to make your internal Parent an expression of Him, pulling down the stronghold and healing you in the process.
Your emotions will be transformed to the point where they resemble a healthy family. Hope, courage, forgiveness, gentleness, encouragement, and tough love will replace the dysfunctional coping mechanisms of the Unprotected Heart Stronghold. You will face your problems, overcome them by His strength, and put on the love, truth, and character necessary for recovery. Your internal Parent will become your Heavenly Father’s representative, pointing you toward His grace and truth.
But here is the hard part: you need to start becoming like your Heavenly Father while your life is still diseased and unhealthy. The Unprotected Heart Stronghold is rarely torn down in a single day; it usually takes years. We might like to be instantly healed – to one day wake up with all of our problems fixed – but we usually make progress by taking small steps to reflect His heart. Your internal Parent will, for a time, continue to act like as an abusive parent would, and your internal Child will continue to react as an abused child would.
God’s love is big enough for that, however. As you put Him on in a daily battle, the Holy Spirit will tear down the Unprotected Heart Stronghold one unloving attitude and misconception at a time.
The battle will be complicated by the fact that some of our coping mechanisms were put in place to avoid worse coping mechanisms. When we give up one, we may find a more frightening one hiding beneath it. For example, as a married adult I developed the unhealthy coping mechanism of disconnecting from and suppressing my emotions. This helped me to keep the smoking fetish from rising to the surface where it might damage my family. When I removed this coping mechanism, the fetish climbed from its dungeon and gained a greater presence in my conscious feelings.
I kept my actions under control, but I wondered if I was selfishly pandering to my weaknesses and would eventually hurt my wife and children. It took me quite a while to become confident with the idea that allowing myself to feel the fetish was a positive and necessary step toward recovery. Doing so allowed my emotions to come into the light so they could grow to become a healthy part of my life.
The Holy Spirit is up to this task. If we are willing to humble ourselves and follow Him, He will give us the wisdom to understand which risks we should take and which we should avoid. He will show us where we have strayed and how to get back on track. He will enable us to find the self-control to face our passions without acting on them in wrong ways. He will train us to discern the difference between His voice and the chatter of demons.
By His grace, we eventually find the ability to remove enough coping mechanisms to re-experience many of the emotions we mishandled when we were young. It is a tough process, but as we walk through it we see the ways in which we stopped growing properly, we are able to correct our mistakes, and we grow to be the people God designed us to be in the first place.
The rest of this book will tell the story of how that happened for me. God took me step by step down the Obedient Behavior and Attitudes side of the Emotion Commotion Chart in order to set me free from the Unprotected Heart Stronghold.
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