The Best Defense…

It doesn’t happen often, but when someone willfully violates my boundaries and I am struggling to respond constructively (or just to hold my ground), it takes a heavy toll on me – and my body pays the price.

I’ve learned recently that many of us absorb our feelings deep into our bodies.  Rather than resolving issues that may require us to confront people we’d love to avoid, we push the hurt down, away from our thoughts to a place deep in our spirits, and we tell ourselves that we’re handling it well.

But we’re not.

A book I’m reading now makes clear that our health (and fertility) is profoundly affected by our thoughts and feelings.  When we feel helpless and hopeless – or when we push our emotions so far from our consciousness, we can’t even say what we feel – negative physical consequences often result.

How?  Research has shown that anxious, worried, stressed, frustrated, anguished, hostile thoughts and feelings have the power to alter our immune systems, making it hard to fight off sickness.  They can undermine our sleep, making it harder to recover through rest.  They can affect our concentration, making it difficult to think clearly and make good choices.  And much, much more.

Bottom line, they can become the enemy within.

Literally.

That was the epiphany for me.

I’ve realized that when I allow negative thoughts and feelings to dwell in my spirit, I open the door to all sorts of bad consequences.  The chain reaction starts off simply enough.  My skin breaks out, or my shoulders ache.  I narrowly avoid an accident or somehow provoke an argument because I’m tired and distracted.  I’m not hungry, so I don’t eat.  Without the energy to exercise, I skimp on that, too.  Soon, good self-care falls by the wayside.  And before you know it, I look bad and I feel worse.

Without realizing it, my dark mood – and all the negative thoughts and feelings it procreates — propels me toward poor choices that reinforce my sense that everything’s coming against me.  It becomes self-fulfilling:  Bad leads to worse, and worse, and even worse….  Then, someone says, “Are you sick?  You don’t look good.”  The vicious cycle accelerates and within hours – or even minutes — my perception is altered without my realizing it and it affects my ability to see things clearly.

An emotional death spiral begins – and soon, it becomes a spiritual one, too.  God feels very far away.

Sound at all familiar?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The enemy is always seeking a stronghold in our spirits – a place of anger, fear or self-pity that will enable him to set up camp and attack us from within.  It is an opportunistic assault launched when we feel vulnerable (helpless, hopeless) and alone.

We opened the door.  And we can close it.

How?  By asking God to fight our battles.

That’s what I did recently.  I affirmed my right to healthy boundaries, backed away from the person who set off my downward spiral, and asked the Lord to work in his spirit – to convinct him, show him the damage he’d done, and free me from the burden of either defending myself or engaging in an unwelcome “battle” over whether he did me wrong.

I’m confident my body will thank me… as soon as my hands stop shaking.

The Value of Boundaries

What if someone offered to give you a gift to help you make your way through infertility?  Would you be interested?  If they offered to share the secret to restoring a fragile relationship, protecting a vulnerable heart, reducing stress and increasing your sense of peace… would you listen?

What if their advice was practical, actionable, and immediately effective?  Tested and proven?  Intuitively obvious, but almost always overlooked?  Would you be interested?

I would have been.

But when we went through infertility, we kept it very quiet.  So, no one knew to talk to us about how to cope.  They didn’t know how stressed we were, how full of grief, how confused and anxious and lonely.  With no one to talk to and nowhere to turn, we did our best to ride it out while our story spun out of control.

It doesn’t have to be that way for you.

Here’s what we learned the hard way.  It’s helped every couple I’ve ever shared it with – and it’s guaranteed to help you, too.  Set boundaries.  Set them and enforce them.  In his book, Speaking the Truth in Love, Kenneth Haugk calls that “God-pleasing self care.”

Are you surprised?

It works.

Here’s an example.  As we moved from ovulation kits to Clomid to IUI to injections, I got increasingly emotional.  Tears were a frequent occurrence.  Like many husbands, mine responded by moving to the other end of the emotional spectrum.  He got angry.  The more I cried, the angrier he got.  The angrier he got, the more I cried.

At the time, it felt like our emotions were directed at each other.  In truth, we were expressing what we both felt about the situation.  But it seemed like there was never a way to rest from the angst and drama, to take a timeout and focus on something else – until we set some boundaries.

We agreed that, once a week, we would set aside an hour to talk only about infertility.  We would give each other our undivided attention and express any thought or feeling with as much intensity as we wanted or need to.  Then, for the rest of the week, we would not talk about it at all.

Does that sound crazy?  Impossible?

It was fabulous.

Here’s why.  There’s only so much you can say about battling infertility.  Only so many times you can cover the same ground before you start making it worse for both of you.  Boundaries helped us by insuring we would focus completely on the problem and rest completely from it.

Here’s another example.  We learned to keep insensitive family members at arms length.  After a heartbreaking phone call (when they celebrated realizing theirs would be the first grandchild because I’d just miscarried), we recognized their habit of enjoying success at our expense.  So, we set some boundaries.

We quit answering their questions about the next pregnancy.  We responded to thoughtless remarks with silence.  We side-stepped optional engagements, and protected each other’s fragile hearts during mandatory ones.  We were never ugly, but we were firmly self-protective.

Were they offended?  Maybe.  Was that our primary concern?  No.  We needed more peace, less vulnerability, and a greater sense of control in a situation that was largely out of our control.  Haugk calls that “God-pleasing self care,” and it helped tremendously.

Try it.  It can help you, too.

The Secret

What if someone offered to give you a gift to help you make your way through infertility?  Would you be interested?  If they offered to share the secret to restoring a fragile relationship, protecting a vulnerable heart, reducing stress and increasing your sense of peace… would you listen?

What if their advice was practical, actionable, and immediately effective?  Tested and proven?  Intuitively obvious, but almost always overlooked?  Would you be interested?

I would have been.

But when we went through infertility, we kept it very quiet.  So, no one knew to talk to us about how to cope.  They didn’t know how stressed we were, how full of grief, how confused and anxious and lonely.  With no one to talk to and nowhere to turn, we did our best to ride it out while our story spun out of control.

It doesn’t have to be that way for you.

Here’s what we learned the hard way.  It’s helped every couple I’ve ever shared it with – and it’s guaranteed to help you, too.  Set boundaries.  Set them and enforce them.  In his book, Speaking the Truth in Love, Kenneth Haugk calls that “God-pleasing self care.”

Are you surprised?

It works.

Here’s an example.  As we moved from ovulation kits to Clomid to IUI to injections, I got increasingly emotional.  Tears were a frequent occurrence.  Like many husbands, mine responded by moving to the other end of the emotional spectrum.  He got angry.  The more I cried, the angrier he got.  The angrier he got, the more I cried.

At the time, it felt like our emotions were directed at each other.  In truth, we were expressing what we both felt about the situation.  But it seemed like there was never a way to rest from the angst and drama, to take a timeout and focus on something else – until we set some boundaries.

We agreed that, once a week, we would set aside an hour to talk only about infertility.  We would give each other our undivided attention and express any thought or feeling with as much intensity as we wanted or need to.  Then, for the rest of the week, we would not talk about it at all.

Does that sound crazy?  Impossible?

It was fabulous.

Here’s why.  There’s only so much you can say about battling infertility.  Only so many times you can cover the same ground before you start making it worse for both of you.  Boundaries helped us by insuring we would focus completely on the problem and rest completely from it.

Here’s another example.  We learned to keep insensitive family members at arms length.  After a heartbreaking phone call (when they celebrated realizing theirs would be the first grandchild because I’d just miscarried), we recognized their habit of enjoying success at our expense.  So, we set some boundaries.

We quit answering their questions about the next pregnancy.  We responded to thoughtless remarks with silence.  We side-stepped optional engagements, and protected each other’s fragile hearts during mandatory ones.  We were never ugly, but we were firmly self-protective.

Were they offended?  Maybe.  Was that our primary concern?  No.  We needed more peace, less vulnerability, and a greater sense of control in a situation that was largely out of our control.  Haugk calls that “God-pleasing self care,” and it helped tremendously.

Try it.  It can help you, too.