My friend and I met for dinner at McAllister’s to continue with our Unwanted book study. It’s been over a month since we’ve met in person and the last chapter we had to do via email. In my experience I have learned that it can be useful to try to better understand yourself and your personal history. When you’ve done that over and over it can even still be useful. It’s kind of like the Bible where you think you know it fairly well but there is always something new you can learn.

One of the workbook prompts was, “Reflect on moments when shame has been most pronounced in your sexual struggles”. Again, I have not been over thinking this and am just writing what comes to mind to me first. All I wrote was, “That I could not move beyond my __________ __________ for so long.” Even when I wrote it I thought, “Ugh, please stop” and imagined the blank stare from my friend and her thinking on the inside, “Seriously, why was this such a big deal, this brief thing?”

But I talked about how I finally just had to go into it and say, “Okay, I need to somehow deal with this and find some healing and relief and a way back to my life”. It had taken so many years of my life in the form of mind space. I learned that psychologically you cannot push things under the rug or just expect time to heal something so persistent that isn’t going away. It has to be actively dealt with. Sometimes I think that God afflicted me with something so that I could have the time to go into it.

And other times I feel like the affliction was the result of me not going into it sooner which caused other things to fester, evolve, and grow into something completely unmanageable and destructive, with that destructive aspect manifesting in me and my bodily state. However it happened, I could see how God used it all for my good. She said that as I was sharing that it was helping her too, because she’s had the same feelings of frustration over her slowness to be ready to heal more.

Because hers has been slow too, and it has. Another question which I didn’t have finished was “Consider how self-compassion might counteract shame. In what ways can you practice self-compassion as you address your sexual brokenness?” All I could say was that this was the turning point for me. That self-compassion was the pivotal key to one of the greatest things I was meant to learn. I don’t know if I could’ve ever learned it otherwise. It wouldn’t have been as lasting for sure.