Feeling Better is Not Always Better

by Jonathan Hart, LPC

In order to experience life more richly and more fully, you must become a student of your own heart and mind.  Many of us walk through life working very hard to feel happy and to not feel sad.  It is a human instinct.  When we feel happy, we accept it as normal and good.  When we feel pain or sorrow, we try to avoid it, snuff it, or overcome it because on some level we believe that it is not normal and therefore it is bad. There is little examination of how joy or sorrow take shape in our own hearts.  This leads us to a blandness of experience that we find acceptable only because we have not tasted the richness that is possible.

Let me explain.  When we feel sadness, our first instinct is often to try to get happy.  It seems foolish to allow the sadness to stay.  If we can't "get happy", we wonder what is wrong with us... which leads to more sadness, and even to shame.  We try to anesthetize the pain with all kinds of things, from shopping to substances to adrenaline rushes.  Somehow the sadness flattens all of these eventually.  Our attempts to feel better are not what they cracked up to be.  We need something different, something more authentic.

What if, instead of running from the sadness we acknowledge it and not only allow it to stay, but poke at it, study it?  What if we learn what it is really about, how it works, why it is there?  This is not an attempt to make it better.  Rather it is an attempt to know it more fully, to give it room to exist.

"Why on earth would I do that?!" you might ask.  The answer is simple: sadness is normal.  If you have lost your job or a loved one, had a friend move away, had a car crash, or had a child move on to college, the sadness you feel is supposed to be there.  It is a normal emotional response to loss.  If you fight it, you will lose.

Rather than fighting it, I suggest making friends with it.  Observe and experience your feelings at the same time.  Get to know it.  Learn how it works in you.  Allow it to be present, and actually feel it for a change.

Do not only do this with sadness.  Do this with joy and contentment and peace as well.  Instead of just rolling past it, pause and examine it.  Feel it more fully.  Know why it is there and how it comes to be.  Pick apart why the joke was funny to you, explore the layers of irony or innuendo.

In short, become a student of your own heart.  Don't measure yourself against others' reactions or patterns: they are not you.  Be yourself, and be yourself more fully. Stop striving for the illusion of perpetual happiness, and strive to know the full range of human experience on a deeper level.

A Prayer in Pain: Lamenting in Sadness, Depression, Grief, Disappointment, Sorrow.....

By: Courtney Hollingsworth, PLPC


I don't think it a coincendence that many of our posts on this blog have talked about the lost and silent feeling that often accompanies pain, sadness, loss, grief, suffering, sorrow, depression, darkness, etc., like here and here and here, to just name a few. In these dark places in our lives and hearts, we are often at a loss for words or just don't know where to start. In the Bible, godly people would cry out to God in prayer from those places, and it is called a Lament. I'm sure you can see that this is the root word for "lamenting." There are many Laments in the Psalms and the book of Job, which God has given us. You can also write your own. A great book on this is A Sacred Sorrow, by Michael Card. Here is a a prayer of pain modeled after the way God has shown us in the Bible.

I jumped into the deep end, or I was pushed, I’m not quite sure.

The water is dark and icy, torrent like a storm.

I can’t even recall what the sunshine feels like on my face.

My tears well up in my heart, and overflow onto my cheeks,

Though they are veiled by the rain.

Do you see my tears?

Struggling to swim, gasping for breath,

My arms grow tired.

Do see my hands reaching for the sky? Do you even see me?

There are weights on my ankles,

And the more I fight, the heavier they become.

I wish I could say my voice is hoarse from calling out your name,

I wish I could say my eyes have never left the horizon, searching for your face.

I’m afraid I have drifted too far out to sea.

If you’re there, I cannot see you.

If you’re there, I cannot hear your voice.

Have you left me to struggle alone?

Do you see me at all, or have I wandered too far?

I told you I was prone to wander,

You knew it was true.

Where was your hand in mine?

Did you forget me too?

I just can’t do it anymore; I’m just not going to make it.

My Shepherd, you have never failed me, you have never let me drown.

I cannot save myself. I cannot protect myself, try as I might.

I must hide in the shadow of your mighty wing.

You see every tear I cry and hold it in your hand, my Comforter.

I long for the day when you will wipe away all my tears.

Keep me firm in your embrace until that day. Hold me fast.

I beg you not to let me drown.

Please do not forget me.

Facing Plenty

By Jonathan Hart, LPC


Philippians 4:12-13 (ESV)
I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me.


The concept of "facing plenty" has bugged me for a long time.  We don't often use the language of "facing..." when we are talking about a good thing.  "I was facing a time of wealth and comfort, but I made it through by the grace of God."  But this is the language Paul uses: plenty and abundance are something to be faced, in a parallel way to facing lack and poverty.  There are unique challenges in having plenty and abundance, and they can be as difficult as having want and need.


Part of the challenge, I think, comes from our habit of thinking that plenty and abundance are "the norm" and that anything less is a burden to be borne and overcome as soon as possible.  I can't imagine relating to abundance in this way.  "I have too much money.  I have to get rid of it somehow and get back to scraping by from check to check!"  How many people are dropping into horrific debt in order to "maintain the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed"?  


When we are in pain, grief, loss, hurt, or distress, we do one thing uncommonly well: we complain.  We articulate our pain, we feel every inch of it and talk about it in the hopes of finding someone who can identify with it and tell us it's OK to feel that way about it.  What if we "complained" about our abundance the same way?  What if we treated our abundance and surplus the same way we treated our challenges and loss?  We don't often do this because of our misconception that plenty and abundance are the norm: we are entitled to them and therefore they are not noteworthy.

I encourage many people to "wallow" in their good times, to store them up in memory and savor them richly.  I encourage people to concentrate on being fully present in the joy of the moment and holding on to it so that when it passes (as it inevitably will), we can more fully recall it and taste it again in our mind.  Articulate and "complain" about how good things are, much as we articulate and complain about our pain, because joy and pain alike are part of living in a broken world.

I am not talking about disassociating from joy and pain, as much of Christianity is taught to do: "Times are bad, but the joy of the Lord is my strength!!  I don't feel the pain because Jesus is so good!"  I am actually encouraging us to feel the joy - and the pain - more fully.

This practice can give us much more resilience and strength to last through the difficult times.  We can soothe our hearts and minds on the fact that pain and shortfall are not all that has ever been, that resources come and go, that pain, like joy, is temporary in this life.  The seasons continue to turn, and life is more than this present moment;  the joy of last year still exists, even though this moment is hard, and the joy that I knew then will come again in time.

This practice helps us hold on more tenaciously to times of plenty as well.  We can practice the recognition that this joy is temporary and that it is a gift, rather than an entitlement. Nothing draws our attention to life more than a death in the family.  Nothing raises our awareness of the value of our spouse or children than to hear that a friend has lost those most precious to them.  If we can practice this mental discipline of savoring our joy and plenty because it is temporary, we will live and enjoy it much more fully.

Every Sorrow

By: Courtney Hollingsworth, PLPC

We work hard to evade pain and suffering. In many ways, we keep from being honest. We fool ourselves, our family, our friends, we even try to fool God. When sorrow, the uninvited visitor, knocks upon our door, we pretend not to hear it. We minimize, diminish, distance, rationalize. How often do you say or think, "It could be worse," or "It's not that bad?" But eventually, all the effort we put into pretending away our suffering begins to fail us; the knocking turns into pounding and the door of our denial comes crashing down.

As pain and healing were married at the cross, Jesus cried out in lament. When we refuse to lament in the midst of our pain, we ignore the cross. We ignore the pain inherent in it and the healing conferred by it. Dan Allender says that a life lived “in the mire of denial is not life at all. If the Lord Jesus came to give life, and life abundant, then a life of pretense involves a clear denial of the gospel, no matter how moral, virtuous, or appealing that life may seem.”

Despite our heart's inclination to hide and deny, it is a gift that God not only already knows about our disappointment, fear, sadness, and thirst, but that he is big enough for us to approach him with it.  And he desires that we do so.  He calls us to offer everything to him.  Every joy and every sorrow.  We can attempt to avoid our suffering, but we will thereby forsake the intimacy with God, and with others, afforded in it.

We work so hard to isolate all of our painful and angry emotions in the dark corners of our hearts. In doing so, we isolate ourselves. No one invited in. No warmth. No light. Restorative living requires us to visit these places of darkness in honesty, to ask others to accompany us there, and to cry out over what we find there. Where do you need to look with honest eyes and cry out for your own suffering? Where in your life and story do you need to remember that your God is big enough for your pain?