Week 4 of the series Glory Days in the Mind: When Escaping Inside Keeps You From Living. Quick answer: When years of daydreaming or rumination leave real life feeling flat or unreal, the way back is not to fight your mind but to return, gently and often, to the present. […]
Faith & Mental Health
143 posts
Week 3 of the series Glory Days in the Mind: When Escaping Inside Keeps You From Living. A gentle note: this post touches on sexual abuse. Please read at your own pace, and see the support details below. Quick answer: If your daydreams are always about being someone better (braver, […]
Quick answer: Maladaptive daydreaming is a compulsive retreat into vivid inner worlds for hours at a time, often to escape loneliness or pain, until real life starts to suffer. Underneath it usually sits a belief: the real me isn’t enough to be loved. Fighting the daydream rarely works. Naming that […]
There are some words that, when you say them, carry a power or energy behind them. They trigger a response. I often hear the sentence “I’m not religious, but …” and immediately I know what the person is saying. Well, I think I do. They have the word “religion” loaded […]
Feeling worse before better? Discover the ancient path of down before up. I once saw this very funny cartoon. The first image showed a nice ‘up and to the right’ graph displaying how we think life should work. Progress, easy, smooth, success and without any struggle or challenge. The next […]
Feeling broken inside? Discover the birth pangs metaphor from Romans 8 and find hope in the sacred waiting between now and not yet. I’ve felt a groan recently. A groan that is happening right now. A groan that longs for something more. I hear it in the conversations I have. […]
Lose your true self to others? Explore the cup metaphor of self-love, break codependency patterns, and embrace how God uniquely made you. It was a gradual decline. Slowly they lost interest, but like a boulder rolling down a hill, it gained momentum until it was seemingly unstoppable. They had lost […]
It felt like they were trying to earn my approval, my love, my acceptance. That if they just did things right, then I would give them some sort of a royal nod of approval. Earned love, I believe, is not really love. Earned acceptance and approval always has this fear […]
Who is on the throne of your life? What is keeping you anxious? Perhaps something needs to change. Back in the eighties, Bob Dylan came out with the song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody.’ In the song, Bob goes through many life scenarios of who or what you might serve. You may […]
It was an echo. A wave of emotion hit them, just like as if it was yesterday. Boom. They were right back there, experiencing the same thoughts and feelings. Sitting on that beach. Warm summer sun. Joyful sounds of children playing in the surf. Wafts of barbequed sausages coming from […]