Tag Archives: heart break

Good Grief: Mourning a Past Relationship

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There’s nothing as heartbreaking as experiencing the loss of someone you love. Many people struggle with the delicate balance of moving on from their loss and the need to fully grieve this painful and complicated experience. Grief is a natural and necessary human response to loss that includes a range of feelings and reactions, from denial to anger to depression.

Our loved ones may understand our need to grieve when we experience the death of a loved one, though they might never know the depths of what we’re feeling. But the loss of a relationship due to breakup can also be hard to work through if people don’t “see” the impact the loss is having on you. Well-meaning friends might tell you to “move on” or “chin up” and your sense of grief can intensify under this type of subtle criticism. But it’s good for us to work through our grief and fully express our pain while still embracing hope for our future.

Love And Loss

One of the hardest things about loving someone is that we can often love someone who we know we shouldn’t marry. Whether it’s not having the same spiritual convictions, or whether there is some type of toxicity they bring to the relationship that you know will put you under, you can very much yearn and for someone that at the same time you know you must give up.

On the other hand, you may have been “released” from a relationship in a cruel way, blinded by the quick cut-off. Regardless of how the loss occurred, you may be in the throws of grief and wondering if there is a way out of the dark sad feelings you’re experiencing.

The following four steps can help you process your grief and come out on the other side of healing.

Feel It Fully

Allow yourself to feel and fully process what happened. This is an area most of us are not good at. To feel the pain of a loss is not something we want to soak in for long. But not only do we need to acknowledge these painful feelings, we have to also process them and work through them. We have to try to take the emotional reaction out for a moment, and critically look at what happened and evaluate all the facets of the loss and how it occurred. This takes time.

This is when grief can become a slowly realized truth.

Recognize God’s Love

Grieving and feeling sad over a loss does not mean you are not trusting God. Grieving is a healthy part of loving and of living, and God is the author of life. He does not expect us to act like robots, minimize pain, deny its reality in our life, or over-spiritualize and try to move quickly to the “victory.”

Grief is dealing with the truth of loss and hurt in the light of God’s love.

Take Time

Work through the resulting painful effects of loss in your life today. It’s not helpful to fill our hearts with replacements for what we find painful to deal with. Avoid making big, life-impacting decisions that might just be symptoms of your grief crying out and not reflections of your true self.

Be patient with yourself; acting impetuously out of grief will often bring you more hurt and loss.

Seek Joy

Allow yourself to feel joy when it rises. For many, it seems impossible to grieve over the loss of someone and still be happy at the simple blessings of life. Grief ebbs and flows; it may lessen for a season and return when it gets triggered by a memory. Feeling grief and joy is a complicated but natural experience.

Even in your Grief, allow for moments of joy.

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Read more at https://www.christianmingle.com/believe/mourning-your-past

Recovering From Rejection After A Big Breakup

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Rejection is one of the hardest things to handle and the most insidious in the way it does damage to our self esteem. Things can appear to be going so well in a budding relationship, when all of a sudden you get a text or a phone call saying, “We need to talk.” When the phone call ends and so does the relationship, we can be left broken hearted and questioning our self worth. But it’s really not the Rejection itself that does the damage– it’s often what we believe about ourselves when we’ve been rejected.

Lost And Found

After a painful experience of rejection, we need a time of recuperation. Recuperation isn’t just about recovering from something; it’s also about regaining something. Often when we’ve been rejected, we lose our confidence, and our self esteem plummets.

In order to recuperate when you’ve been rejected, you’ve got to re-interpret that message of rejection and replace it with one that more accurately reflects the work of your ongoing personal growth and your hope of a lasting future relationship.

Here are 4 ways to replace the message of Rejection with the appropriate message of Hope:

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(Read the rest of my Article at BELIEVE– “Dating. Marriage. Relationships the Christian Way.”)

Depression: How To Let the Light Into Your Darkness

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Many Christians have battled depression, but few feel comfortable talking about this all too common problem. It’s often too deep for words, the darkness and sadness we feel. It can be caused by a clinical disorder that requires medical intervention. For many of us, though, depression is a complicated experience often having to do with our delayed response to a season of stress, grief or an earlier trauma in our lives that we never dealt with.

These dark places in our past leave memories we often don’t want to deal with or speak of, and that’s understandable. Unexpressed grief and sorrow, though, will only resurface in one way or another, often ushering in waves of depression. But there’s much healing and freedom when we bring these past painful experiences to the light.

Turn the Light On

Scripture tells us that in bringing our sorrows and grief to Christ, we can be comforted in knowing He understands our pain as he was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Is 53:3). There’s no judgment when we come to God in prayer about our weakness or pain. God has a way to bring light into our dark situation, and it begins with a simple but powerful word—Confession.

Confession isn’t just about the admission of sin or mistakes we’ve made. It’s also about an admission of our own need, our own pain, and the truth of our painful experiences.

Confession is part of the labor of love that is necessary for proper self love or self care. It’s also part of the work we must do of grappling with grief—not ignoring it, not stuffing it, not denying it. It’s got to be done. And when you do, you turn the lights on inside you, and find that there is nothing hidden there that God can’t heal.

Here are 3 aspects of confession that we can incorporate into our lives that will help us when we are experiencing a season of depression…

(Read the rest of this post at  Believe)

The Sound of a Healthy Relationship

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Nothing really shocks me when it comes to the reality of relationship problems many of us experience. So over the years, I’ve had the privilege of couples asking me to help spiritually counsel them in their troubled relationships. I’ve listened to women weeping, and men with averted eyes of pain, sharing their stories of relational breakdown. And the sound of weeping, angry words, and anguished questioning breaks my heart. It breaks God’s heart too.

But there is another sound that is literally music to my ears. It’s a secret, almost indiscernible sound that occurs in healthy relationships. And when I hear it, I get excited for that couple and their future. It’s not romantic music playing in the background or the sound of someone whispering sweet nothings in their partner’s ears.

Let me tell you about the sound of a couple on their way to growth, wholeness, and lasting love. Listen in as they talk to each other and deal with their baggage and their pain. Here’s what you’ll hear with your spiritual ears, if you listen carefully:

It’s the sound of chains falling. Bondages being broken.

When I see a couple that knows how to not only care for one another, forgive each other– yes, all that– but actually knows how to powerfully and prayerfully counsel each other, then I know that couple will make it. They will go the distance. They can overcome any obstacle, trial, or challenge in their relationship.

I Didn’t Sign Up for That!

You might say, “Lauren, I’m not a trained counselor! I didn’t sign up to do counseling when I got married.”

But you don’t have to have a Master’s degree to counsel your loved one. You don’t have to have thick psychology textbooks on hand to speak to your spouse the words that will break that despair they’re battling, that bondage they’re under. You just have to lovingly listen, and know the Bondage Breaker Himself, Jesus Christ. He will break every chain of deception and despair that’s on you. His Word speaks with authority.

And it’s not that you have to be a theologian and understand every nuance in every verse. The basic principles are there for even a child to understand: He is for us, not against us. He gave His life for us so that we can have abundant life. It’s His will that we forgive each other, bear with each other, love each other. And it’s not His will that we are in bondage to any secret sin, addiction, or pattern of defeat.

So here’s how you start: agree that you won’t ever lie to each other about what you’re personally battling. Agree that you both may have negative patterns developed from your past that need to be changed. And agree that in your relationship, you will pray for and fight for healing, wholeness and personal growth. Pray for that repeatedly.

And I’ll Be There…Always

Be committed to being each other’s counselor in the best sense of that word–because the Holy Spirit is our Counselor.

John 14:15-17 …I will ask the Father to give you another Helper, to be with you always. He is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor recognizes him. But you recognize him, because he lives with you and will be in you.

The Holy Spirit comforts and helps us. He counsels and convicts us when we’re going off course. And while we don’t have the perfection of soul to convict someone of sin (leave that to God) there is something powerfully important about His ultimate function on earth: He is always with us. Ask God to help you function the same way, with your fiance or spouse. Commit to being there for them, always, in that same attitude.

Unstoppable

In our 33 years of marriage, Bill and I have counseled and comforted each other countless times. We have often joked about sending each other a bill for our counseling services rendered to each other. We’ve logged thousands and thousands of hours of prayerfully listening to each other unburden ourselves of hurts, fears, and painful memories from our past. And because of that trust built, the healing received, and the comfort of counsel given, we’ve become unstoppable as a married couple.

So reassure your spouse of your commitment to them. Tell your loved one, “I want to see you well. I want to see you whole. I want to see you walking in everything God has destined for you. And I’m not going to stop listening to you and praying and declaring that over you. ”

Let them hear you say that. Say it with conviction. And live it out.

Then get ready to hear that wonderful sound that lets the two of you know–you will make it: It’s the sound of Chains Falling.

Falling Like Rain: BREAK UPS

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I love old maxims and proverbs, things like “Into every life a little rain must fall.” But I have a new saying of my own for all my single, dating friends out there, experiencing hope and heart ache–

Into every life, a little Relationship must fall.

Little Relationships are Relationships that are puny in perspective,  and powerless to go the distance. They’re short-legged because they run out of steam from rushing ahead with emotion only to find there’s no substance after just one week of dating or after just one major disagreement. The first major fight you have, he’s all shaken up. She thinks the sky is falling.

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