Chapter Twenty-One. The Pain Drain

Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good

Pain and temptation no longer had to become permanent fixtures in my emotions. I could drain them away as I found joy and peace in the plan of God.

Love is a Choice

In 2002, I read the book Love is a Choice.^[65] The ideas in the book combined with other insights I had seen over the years to form the Emotion Commotion Chart. Up until that point in my life, the lessons I had learned about my emotions were scattered and unrelated; there wasn’t a “big picture” to tie them together. Once I put together the Emotion Commotion Chart, I had the ability to organize what I was feeling and better understand my progress.

It was also while reading Love is a Choice that I realized what was behind my smoking fetish – how my subconscious heart had formed it to handle my distraught emotions about my mother’s smoking.^[66] The combination of the Emotion Commotion Chart and this discovery about my past helped me to understand a good deal about what was happening inside of me. Much of what I have shared in this book came as I worked out the details of these two insights.

I gained so much useful knowledge as I read Love is a Choice that I reread some chapters four or five times. The book is about addiction, and it explains that this is a condition in which a person becomes dependent on drugs, people, feelings, or activities. The book lays out how compulsive behaviors take root and grow in a person’s life. It also shares how to deal with the pain that tends to lead to this condition.

I had read Love is a Choice close to ten years earlier without receiving nearly as much from it. The work of the Holy Spirit over my recent past had prepared me in a new way for its message. Never before had so many influences come together to open the words of a book to me. God had clearly set up a string of Appointments that were climaxing as I read.

For example, I had spent the past two years examining my emotions. Many of the problems Love is a Choice described were the same ones I had observed without being able to make sense of them.

In addition, the authors wrote that the family a person grows up in often has a huge effect on how they see life. I read the book near the end of two years of learning about my family as I spent time with my mother, who was dying from cancer.

The book also described the problems that tend to show up in those who live with addicts (who when they become codependents are addicts of a different sort). Codependents often try to make up for the sins of others. I was reminded of what God had been speaking to me about mourning over the sins of others rather than feeling the need to fix them.

Finally, the authors described the fact that addicts tend to deny what is going on in their emotions. This reminded me of my street-fighting approach to life. It didn’t quite match the <page 126>normal forms of denial, but it was a way of working around my emotions rather than working through them.

Though I didn’t yet think of my problems in terms of an abusive internal Parent, Love is a Choice helped set the stage for the day I would. It reinforced what the Holy Spirit had been showing me about taking a more loving approach towards myself. The book added to my confidence that I should embrace my emotions and trust God to reshape them. I could see that He was giving me a huge piece of the wisdom I needed to do this well.

Rediscovering Contentment

Figure 20 shows the final piece of the Emotion Commotion Chart, Contentment. I had already started to discover it as I had learned to Grieve. Reading Love is a Choice brought it into clearer focus.

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There were no guarantees that my life would turn out the way I wanted, and that had always been a problem for me. I could intellectually embrace the idea that God was wiser than me, but when it came to living with His choices – this was beyond me. I accepted His plan with my mind, but my emotions refused to agree.

I felt unprotected. I had watched my life spin out of control when I was too young to understand what was happening. Then I had pushed through a hedge of thorns that defied what I believed a <page 127>loving God would allow. …It had all taken a toll on me. I resented God for what He had allowed. Why hadn’t He stopped it before it started? Why hadn’t He used His power to quickly deliver me? What kind of Father permits His child to live in a war zone for so long?

I didn’t want to give in to resentment, however, so I had used whatever I could find to avoid it. I held on to the hope that following Jesus would relieve my inner turmoil. When all else failed, I internally yelled at myself and forced myself to continue in His truth.

The long hard battle had damaged me in ways that seemed impossible to reverse. As I read Love is a Choice, I sensed God reassuring me that He had a plan to undo the damage. It involved the ability to Accept my losses (the Acceptance arrow) so that I could find Contentment in them (the Contentment box). His emotions would mix with mine in a way that would allow me to move beyond Grieving into heartfelt joy. I would learn to rest in His love as I grew in faith to truly believe that He was working everything for good.

Contentment is the word I use to summarize all of the feelings that come when we believe that a good plan is progressing to fulfillment (joy, peace, satisfaction, a sense of vindication …). It means that after we have mourned the realization that there is nothing we can do to make our world be what we feel it should be, we can still experience happiness. We can discover that even if we have faced a disaster, God can work it into a future that is better than our wildest dreams. Trust becomes an emotional reality through the work of the Holy Spirit. Life makes sense as spiritual facts take root in the deepest places of our heart.

Reclaiming Contentment

This all might seem so simple to you that you will wonder why it took me so long to discover it. Remember that my Contentment tended to show up in “smoking fetish form.” It didn’t feel like, “…I have learned in whatever state I am to be content” (Philippians 4:11). It instead felt like, “I will be content when I can accept myself as I feel I am – including my strange sexuality.”

For example, one day I felt a desire to celebrate a victory in the Lord by smoking a cigarette. The implied message that came with this was, “This is who you are; the only way you can be happy is to go with it and ignore the fact that it will lead to trouble.” That message caused my critical internal Parent to react with a corresponding message: “How could you think this after all that God has done? You really have to wonder if you are hopeless.”

The conflict put a damper on any warm sense of well-being and satisfaction that had come from my recent victory in the Lord. It made it hard to feel Content.

I prayed and asked God how He wanted me to handle that. Within a short time, I realized (with some shock) that my desire to celebrate in this unhealthy way was actually a sign of my growth in the Lord. Contentment was returning to me. I had chased it into hiding for years because my critical internal Parent had reacted to its “smoking fetish form.” Now I had a chance to embrace this emotion as a good creation of God. Of course, I wouldn’t let it lead me into smoking …but I would nurture it in faith. Jesus was allowing me to feel it so He could reshape it to be what it was meant to be.

I saw more clearly that my sense of wholeness and peace had become tied to the fetish. A hedge of thorns does that sort of thing: it corrupts good emotions so they pull you toward foolishness. The answer for me wasn’t to scold myself and squash my emotions; it was to work with them as God restored them. They were the part of me that was capable of experiencing Contentment – the “peace of God which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). I needed them, and my <page 128>Father was sending His Appointments to heal them from their Broken condition, gradually shifting them from “smoking fetish form” to “Jesus form.”

A pattern was emerging in my life. An emotion would show up in smoking fetish form, and I would recognize the Holy Spirit’s work in helping me to feel it, in spite of the fact that I only seemed to be able to feel it in connection with mental images related to the fetish. I usually didn’t need to keep those images around for long, often only a few seconds. Then the emotion would last on its own for a time, which gave me a chance to see how it worked in my life. As I repeated this process many times, the wisdom of God entered my heart, the emotion grew healthier, and it slowly lost its connection to the fetish.

This was not at all what I had expected. I had expected that God would remove the fetish in some way that would require me to stay as far away from it as possible. I now believed, however, that He was leading me to move toward the fetish and away from it at the same time. I moved toward it by cautiously allowing damaged emotions that I seemed unable to feel without it. I moved away from it in two ways. First, I continued to avoid it in my actions, and second, I worked with the Holy Spirit as He slowly healed my damaged emotions to be a healthy part of my life.

I had previously thought that allowing the mental images, even for a few seconds, was a compromise with sin. Now, I thought of this as a part of my journey into healing. I wasn’t a healthy person turning back to sickness; instead I was a sick person honestly facing his sickness in order to find healing. Sin had infected me as a child, permeating my personality like a virus depositing its debilitating DNA into my being. As a result, unhealthy images had become intertwined with my good emotions. The amazing thing was that the Spirit of God was now untangling the unhealthy images from my inner being. He was enabling me to experience the worst parts of my personality, not only without falling into sinful actions, but also with a growing wisdom that was transforming me from the inside out.

Grief in Repentance

The complete Emotion Commotion Chart became a roadmap for my inner life. I found that in some situations all I needed to do was to live out of Fun Emotions and Desires mixed with some Self-Control. That was the most enjoyable path. At other times, I needed to find additional motivation from Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow. And when all of that wasn’t enough, I mourned in Brokenness, letting God lead me down the path to Contentment. There was a time and way for every purpose (or desire) under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1; 8:6), and He was giving me the grace to know what those times and ways were.^[67]

For the path through Brokenness, the book I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Love is a Choice, taught me to experience far more Grief than I had imagined I should.^[68] By the time I read it, I had accepted that I should mourn the pain caused by both my sins and the sins of others, but I didn’t know that I should also mourn the pain brought by giving up my sins. I had formed emotional attachments to them, and working through the sadness I felt over losing them was part of the process of repentance.

<page 129>This was unexpected and complicated, because I knew that my wife would be hurt if she found out I was grieving the loss of wayward sexual tendencies. (What wife wouldn’t be?) To make matters worse, the mourning associated with my smoking fetish was not going to be a small part of my life. My hedge of thorns was large and complex, with many flavors of emotional attachment. My heart tended to emotionally depend on it in a baffling number of different ways. It was going to take many episodes of grieving spread out over years to untangle it from my personality.

Part of the process was to learn that I could not harshly judge myself for the slowness of my healing. I had to respect the fact that a human heart can rarely work through strong and complex emotions in a single day. It may need to slowly process the sense of loss in order to properly say goodbye to its sins. It may need to pursue God and His wisdom for years in order to gain the skill to fully leave folly behind.

This made moving past my fetish similar to watching the slow death of an old “friend and foe” with whom I had both fun times and harmful times. I had to experience my mixed emotions in order to resolve them and walk into the future.

There was also the fear of being labeled a “sexual pervert.” The thought that someone might publicly brand me with that title because I was allowing myself to feel twisted emotions made it tough to let them remain in my heart for long enough to work through them. Seeing myself through the potential negative reactions of others left me feeling frightened and dirty. My instinct was to pull back from that possibility and protect myself by running from my heart. Recovery required me to fight this instinct.

I saw that I tended to avoid embarrassment by treating the fetish as something apart from me, as if it was a demon that I could simply cast out or ignore. Instead, it was woven throughout my deepest self. There were demons involved, to be sure, but they were being welcomed by my emotional dysfunctions. I had to embrace myself in God’s love in spite of the sorts of harsh judgments I feared might be made against me.

Even after I had learned the ugly facts about the fetish, it still felt precious to me (in a terrifying “I can’t believe I feel this” sort of way). A part of me considered it to be a monster, but another part clung to it as beautiful. That was perhaps the hardest revelation to accept. I couldn’t just confess my embarrassing sins, renounce them, and be done with them. I had to mourn and process them in order to separate the good emotions from the bad expressions they had taken. I had to treat my heart as valuable even while it took on shameful forms.

The Holy Spirit led me through the filth in order to reclaim the buried gems. He helped me to navigate a process that was impossible for me on my own. My internal Parent slowly strengthened and grew to maturity. God gave me the confidence – His confidence, His emotions working within me – that this journey along the edge of insanity would eventually lead to freedom and joy.

…Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

(Psalm 30:5)

The LORD your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.

(Zephaniah 3:17)

A Whole New World

I nicknamed the path from Sorrow through Brokenness to Contentment the Pain Drain.^[69] It represented a major new emotional skill that gave me the ability to parent myself toward answers that had eluded me for decades. Pain and temptation no longer had to become permanent fixtures in my emotions. I could gradually drain them away as I found joy and peace in the plan of God.

This made a huge difference in the way I perceived life. Previously, the only way I could successfully handle suffering was to use it to drive me to work harder. There were benefits to that, and I continue to work hard today, but before the Pain Drain there was a tremendous down side. The suffering tended to reshape my emotions to replay the pain and temptations over and over, so they built up within me until life seemed unbearable.

Now God was touching that need. He was showing me how to relieve the pain and temptations. This allowed me to make decisions that contradicted my emotions without wondering if doing so would add one more layer of unresolved conflict to my already overburdened soul. I was able to deny myself (as Jesus said I should) without feeling as if I was running roughshod over my heart. I could refuse to compromise with sin and yet respect myself as I did so. The Christian life became an entirely different experience for me.

My overwhelming burden began to lift. Psychological wounds I had buried for years surfaced, and I now had the ability to find God’s healing. I examined my early troubles with my parents, my emotional confusion, and my tendency toward addiction. I mourned the failures in my relationships, my sexual circuitry, and my approach to all of life. I grieved that my misunderstanding of repentance had caused my life to become like a street-fight for so many years.

In short, I stopped avoiding my inner turmoil. I laid my honest feelings about God, my family, my ministry, my reputation, my job… on God’s altar. All of the weakness and ugliness came out. It was a difficult process, and I sometimes wondered if I was descending into depression, but the Holy Spirit met me again and again and pulled me out. He gradually helped me to discern the difference between my good Grief and the misleading influence of evil spirits who tried to turn the experience into a never-ending pit of self-pity and despair. He taught me the path through Brokenness to freedom.

This went on for many years (and it is still happening in some ways today) …but something amazing happened. As I allowed myself to feel, God explained what my feelings were about. He showed me the mistakes I had made and how to turn from them. Out of my human hopelessness, He birthed a new set of hopes, a supernatural vision of what my life could be. It was as if I was being introduced to a whole new world – a world that had answers to my perplexing problems that had seemed so unsolvable.

I was at last able to face my buried resentment toward God. He had seemed so unconcerned with my distress. He had incredible power and wisdom, and He claimed to love me, yet He had allowed me to struggle in pain year after year. I felt as if I needed to forgive Him …but how can someone need to forgive God? I didn’t know how to make sense of what I was feeling.

Now I could feel Him holding me as we explored my forbidden issues. He was carefully opening my eyes to see past my distorting confusion. He was exposing and delivering me from the demonic voices that had been my companions since youth. The shroud of darkness that had <page 131>hidden the Unprotected Heart Stronghold was being pulled back as He used the Pain Drain to bring me to Contentment.

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