Kintsugi Company, A Non-Profit Organization
I often say that supernaturally I’m an emotionally sensitive person. Naturally, however, I’m not. I can easily detach from everything. This has been a helpful tool when I’ve gone through some difficult times, especially in times of intensive therapy. But I can’t use it for what did in the past.
It’s just as important to love ourselves as it is to love others. Loving your neighbor as yourself indicates that. When the emphasis is placed on the neighbor and not ourselves, the idea can become distorted. Are we to hate ourselves? Or be indifferent? No. We are to love ourselves as God loves us. We are “neighbors” as much as anyone else. And we are loved.
As I thought about that moment, I began to understand what it meant to feel the aggression about injustice. As the emotions started to flow, I could feel the intensity escalating. There was definitely a good vs. evil, God vs. Satan battle going on in the spiritual realm. The enemy had several footholds in my life that I wasn’t even aware of until I began the process. My sister gave me things to say out loud. This at first was very uncomfortable and a felt a bit silly to me. But then I felt God say, Make it your own.
Using self-defense as a therapeutic tool is a surprising thing. You don’t expect emotional issues to come up while you’re learning to kick, punch, and do life saving techniques. But they do. It really seems inevitable. It’s hard to deny what’s happening. But if you’ve been harmed in some way, felt powerless, or been exposed to ongoing abuse, there is a very good chance you will find yourself confronted with the resulting pain and emotions.
Helping someone overcome fear so they can perform the task before them is huge. It takes small, incremental steps of desensitization to help someone over that hump sometimes. Sometimes it requires pushing them in the deep end of the pool and let them figure it out. In the case of my sister, she needed the slower method and a lot of convincing. We started out with just figuring out how to get up and down off the floor. Then we moved to sitting on her knees and backside repeating the falling motion over and over. She needed to overcome that fear next. This went part went on for some months.