Shields Up! Part 3

Learning to strengthen my shields was like reconstructing my spiritual genetic code. And my spiritual genetic code is my mindset. Before the Savior retrained me, I was trapped in a mindset that said I shouldn't feel hurt by what others did to me. I thought that the fact that I was hurt meant that I was a failure.

This post is the third part of a three-part post. If you haven't already, read these posts first:

Shields Up! Part 1

Shields Up! Part 2

Finding the Balance in Evaluation

In evaluating my past to understand why I used to Turn and Revile Again, I was getting all knotted up in Toxic Shame. I knew I shouldn't have responded in that way, but I didn't know how else to handle the extremely painful feelings. I didn't understand that it was okay to feel hurt. It was okay to objectively realize that part of the cause of my pain was someone else's behavior. That was not wrong.

I learned that I had to acknowledge the reality of the pain first. People do have the power to hurt each other. And I needed someone else to acknowledge and empathize with my pain. This had to be someone whose judgment I trusted. For me, that was the Lord. 

When he told me that he knew how badly someone else's words or behavior had hurt me and that I was justified in feeling the way I did, I felt so validated. His empathy healed me. But he didn't stop there. He went on to strengthen my shields.

He showed me that there was "a space between stimulus and response." I had a choice to make. Would I Turn and Revile Again or would I stop myself, receive the pain, go to the Savior and cry, but not give it back? If I did return reviling for reviling, that would usually result in more reviling from the other person. And of course, the abuse would have to escalate by degrees the more we hurt each other. How could this response process resolve my conflicts? The answer was that it couldn't. It just made them worse. Learning this bit of knowledge really increased my intelligence, which increased my motivation to stop Turning and Reviling Again. I didn't want to engage in such a futile Conflict Resolution Process.

Additional enlightenment came when I focused on God's way of lovingly correcting me. Every time I Abused or Neglected someone else, I lost the Spirit to a certain degree. I felt awful. It was extremely intense. And I didn't like that at all. 

Before this training period started, I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't know God's language well enough. I thought He was communicating to me that I was wrong and the other person was right. I thought it meant that I deserved to be abused but the other person didn't deserve the abuse I was returning. 

This was a conflict with my perception of God's Justice. That was another major weakness in my shields that had to be reconstructed. I had to learn about his Justice. And so the Lord taught me about it. I learned that I lose the Spirit when I Abuse/Neglect (Extreme NW/NE Process) someone else, regardless of what they do to me. Other people lose the Spirit when Abuse/Neglect me, regardless of what I do to them. Since I couldn't see that latter part happening, I thought I was the only one being corrected. 

Because of this weakness in my shields, I thought somewhere in my unconsciousness that God must not be just, which kept me at a distance from him. When I got it all straightened out, I was saved, rescued, healed, and overjoyed!  

The motivation for me to stop myself from Turning and Reviling Again changed: Was it worth it to me to suffer the pain others inflicted upon me without responding to them in kind in order to keep my shields up and keep His Spirit with me?

YES, it was worth it to me to receive the hurt without Turning and Reviling Again. It was worth it to me because of what I found out! Maintaining my shields and keeping his Spirit with me strengthened me against Abuse and Neglect. NW/NE Extreme behaviors didn't hurt so badly. It took time to develop the strength in my shields. I had to continually nourish my relationship with Him, but in time I became INVINCIBLE! No, just kidding. But my boundaries against the mean things other people said and did have increased incrementally over time. And that has changed who I am. I have become someone different. I started liking myself a lot more. I started liking other people a lot more. I found myself enjoying the challenge of holding isometric in the face of all kinds of Imbalanced Behaviors. My kids' behavior presented a great training ground for me. 

I still can be hurt, especially when I start slacking in my relationship with the Lord, but I've learned how to hold my sharp tongue (for the most part) and to keep my emotions and pain between him and me until I can constructively work out the conflicts that arise with others.

When I read the following scriptures after learning about how his Justice works, I finally understood what he wanted me to do when things didn't go my way. And I understood the rewards he has already put in place for those that maintained the Northern Balance and for those who continuously chose to maintain the NW/NE Extreme Imbalance.

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” ~Matthew 5:44-45

“We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s [or any other man's] transgression.” Article of Faith 2

Listen: "He Showed Me How" by David Archuleta

Knowledge and wisdom passed down by a loving and compassionate teacher are the keys to "bring out the prisoners from the prison."

The first part of the following scripture describes me "before" my training. The second part describes the knowledge he gave me and how valuable it has been to me. Each concept he has taught me has been very much like a precious gemstone.

“O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted; behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires.” ~Isaiah 54:11

Shields Up! Part 2

Neglect: The Opposite of Abuse
I have used the word Abuse as a synonym for reviling. And Abuse is the main word I’ve chosen to use in my writing to describe the NW Imbalance. So, technically Abuse is combining with someone else in a way that hurts them. It is adding a stimulus. It is a sin of Commission.

This post is the second part of a three-part post. If you haven't already, read this post first: Shields Up! Part 1

The opposite of Abuse is Neglect. Technically, Neglect is separating from someone else in a way that hurts them. It is subtracting a stimulus. It is a sin of Omission.

I learned that people could use Neglect to hurt me. The reason behind that is that we all need love. Love is spiritual nourishment. We need it as much as we need food and water for physical nourishment. We cannot spiritually live without it. So without love, we experience Sorrow. And that hurts.

Those who are responsible for our care have the responsibility to physically and spiritually love us. In this way, they care for our body and spirit. So if they Neglect doing this for us, they leave us in a vulnerable place. We are excessively exposed to injury and reviling. Our shields are not fully functional. We have more sensitivities. We’re easily hurt by others who Abuse and Neglect us. 

Negligence also includes neglecting to teach us relationship skills and to train us how to stand steadfast in Christ, which powers our shields. The combination of both ignorance (as a result of Negligent training) and Abuse results in a high level of vulnerability - shields down.

Degrees of Intensity

The Lord would often show me diagrams in my mind to teach me. He showed me something like the diagram to the right and taught me there are degrees of intensity for both Abuse and Neglect. Not only can others Abuse me by degrees, but they could also Neglect me by degrees. 

And of course, I could do this to others. But He had to help me understand what was done to me first so he could heal me - re-parent me. The result was that I turned around and was able to love my kids from my heart. My sacrifice became intentional and voluntary. I was able to bear their burdens without reacting to their Imbalanced Processes.

What is Love Anyway?

Have you ever studied the semantic concept of Love? That word was pretty confusing to me because of all the definitions out there. But this is what the Lord showed me: The balance between Abuse and Neglect is Love. Love includes standing steadfast in Christ in the face of other people's Abuse and Neglect. It is giving Mercy to those who hurt me instead of doing what comes naturally.

He taught me that love was also about training and giving appropriate consequences. He said that sometimes I should disapprove and correct my children's behavior. In Mercy sometimes I should separate them from the family and put them in timeout.

I asked him how I would know when I crossed the line to Abuse or Neglect. That took Him time to explain to me. We’ll get to that somewhere in the next few posts. For now, just know that it's not wrong to Combine or Separate in order to resolve conflicts. It just doesn't resolve them when we combine or separate contrary to the Holy Ghost's guidance. Combining too much is Abuse. Separating too much is Neglect.

With this information, we can see that most of us were Abused or Neglected to some degree growing up and we still may be experiencing some of that in our present family relationships. It is the degree of weakness in these critical relationships which causes weakness in our shields. With weak shields, we are more vulnerable to even less intense forms of Adversity. And because our ability to bear Adversity is not too high, we are more likely to Turn and Revile Again when our children misbehave, hurt us, or disobey. And that's just how it is.

Continued in: Shields Up! Part 3

Shields Up! Part 1

I was once overly sensitive to the way people treated me. It was like my shields were down. What they said to me, the names they called me, and other forms of NW/NE Processes hurt me intensely. 

But after I was retrained by the Savior, my shields became fully functional and my spiritual boundaries strengthened against those I did not choose to influence me. And I also became more sensitive to those whom I did choose to influence me.

Once I realized I had the capacity to gain control of this choice, I was able to maintain control of my response process.

When I was younger, I was vulnerable to the way people treated me. That continued into my younger-mother years. I unconsciously saw my kids' misbehavior as the way they were treating me. So this is where the Lord had to start retraining me. 

In the first step of his training, he had me look a little closer at semantic concepts such as Adversity, Sorrow, Abuse, Neglect, Love, Justice, Mercy, and Joy. He instructed me to create a list of synonyms for each of the words we studied and then identify their relationships with each other. 

For example, Abuse is the opposite of Neglect. In between these two concepts is Love. This is the Northern Balance. Then he showed me how semantic meanings vary by degrees. People have come up with different words to describe these variations. But they are all related.

For more on how He showed me to organize these concepts, see: The Semantic Word

All of these treasures of knowledge have been a necessary part of my training to kick the habit of what I like to refer to as Turning and Reviling Again - NW/NE Processes in response to NW/NE Processes. After studying these general concepts, we studied examples of them in history where they were played out. When I understood them, I used them to resolve my relationship conflicts. 

Whether the person who hurt me was a coworker, another driver on the road, a parent, a family member, or especially a child, I used the same core principles that the Lord taught me to resolve the conflict. When I understood them, my shields were strengthened.  In this and the next two blog posts, I am going to talk about some of the first semantic concepts that we went over.

To Revile
To Revile is to criticize, condemn, attack, rail against, slander, vilify, or Abuse. It’s also to knock, slam, badmouth, persecute, or crucify. It can be done physically or verbally. The definition we used in a previous post was: to criticize in an abusive or angrily insulting manner. So this is one of our major sources of Adversity. Abuse - other people reviling us. 

When we say that we Turn and Revile Again, we’re insinuating that we are responding to some kind of Abuse that we received first. The scriptures call this "the first offense." It is just another name or synonym for the word Revile. Note the references in the following verse to the first and second offenses.

“And they were doing that which they felt was the duty which they owed to their God; for the Lord had said unto them, and also unto their fathers, that: Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.” ~Alma 43:46

Being guilty of the first offense basically means that you started the fight.

"The second offense" is a synonym for Turning and Reviling Again. When I understood the meaning behind the first and second offenses, I understood this scripture better.  If the Nephites weren't guilty of starting the fight or reacting with hatred, then they were defending themselves and their families objectively. 

So, I learned a key semantic concept: In some cases, God directs us to defend and protect ourselves objectively. If we seek to resolve conflicts without yielding to emotional knee-jerk-reactions and a desire for vengeance, we can clearly and accurately hear his guidance.

I learned that if I did the same in my relationships with others, I would be able to resolve my relationship conflicts with love and empathy even if it meant I had to make choices my kids, my spouse, or my community did not like.

Not being subject to everyone else's responses to my choices was key for maintaining my balance. It was okay if they did not approve of my choices. The important thing was that God approved of them.

When I understood the semantic meaning of the word Revile and that there were many synonyms for it, I was able to find lots of examples of people dealing with Abuse (Extreme NW Processes) in history, and study how they responded to it. I saw how the Lord counseled them, which I also applied to my own relationships.

Degrees of Reviling
I learned that people could revile me a little or a lot. This is speaking of the degree or intensity of the Adversity. 

Before I originally wrote this post in August 2018, I wrote another post called Turning & Reviling Again. In that post, I described how much it hurt me when my brother told me I was fat. But it was a lesser degree of Adversity when it was just him than when he got all of his friends to tell me I was fat.  

When the Lord was retraining me, he taught me that if more people abused me, the intensity of my pain increased. It would hurt me more.

When my kids misbehaved, it seemed to echo the way I was treated when I was young. I had an intense reaction to it. It was like they were abusing me too. And I had to understand that even when kids treat parents badly, it is a form of abuse. But for them, they are just learning how to resolve their conflicts and obtain their desires in Northern ways. They need time and a steady parent who sets the example for them. But since I didn't have that example or understand the role I needed to play, I just experienced it as abuse.

Also, I examined how people could lightly criticize me or they could go on and on about how wrong I was and how right they were. This meant that higher levels of duration and frequency also increased the intensity of Adversity.

 

Additionally, when those I had relationships with got really specific and detailed in their criticism, the Adversity Intensity would increase. 

Finally, there is one other way that Adversity can be increased: If someone with whom we have developed a deep relationship hurts us, it is especially painful. This is what happened in Jesus' relationship with Judas Iscariot. When someone very close to you betrays you, it is especially painful. 

Learning about the cause of the pain I experienced in my relationships helped me immensely. He was teaching me that my pain was real and that it wasn't the problem. In this way, he validated my feelings and empathized with me. I learned that it was important to understand why I may get intensely upset about something when others thought all I needed to do was to take a chill-pill.

What hurts one person may not phase another. That’s because we value things differently. We're all unique. We all have different weaknesses and sensitivities. Knowing someone else's gives us the knowledge of how to love them better or hate them worse.

In the past, I was not able to take criticism and teasing lightly because my shields were not up. I was allowing everyone to define my value because I didn't have a strong enough relationship with a Cause.

If you have been reading my posts for a while, you know how I define the word Cause. I will define it here for those who haven't. A Cause is a trainer/mentor/provider/evaluator/exemplar. It is someone you trust. You can talk to him (or her) when you are upset and he doesn't make it worse. He makes it better because he knows how to resolve conflicts and obtain desires within the Northern Threshold. He has your back. He knows when to empathize and when to draw the line. The Savior has played this role for me. 

I didn't have a close enough relationship with someone like that until 2006. Once I developed that relationship with Him, my shields became fully functional.

How intensely other people revile us added to how sensitive we are, creates the level of Adversity that we experience.  The level of Adversity I experienced often exceeded my ability to stop myself from Turning and Reviling Again.

If you have been raised with NW/NE parenting and are struggling with parenting yourself and struggling with your emotional balance, I hope that what I have learned will help you strengthen your shields.

Continued in: Shields Up! Part 2

Spinning Like a Wobbly Top

The default when we are born into this world is that we all experience the Lord’s Peace continuously. It is given to us in the Northern Threshold and it is incredibly sustaining. We may not even realize we are being supported in this way until we separate ourselves from it by centrifugally spinning outward into NW and NE extremes. His Peace wanes as we increase the width of the arch of our spin. We move centrifugally instead of centripetally – our arrows point outward towards the imbalance instead of inward towards the balance.

"For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

"And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world; and the Spirit enlighteneth every man through the world, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit." -D&C 86:45-46

In order to best understand what I'm talking about in this post, you should have previously read these posts:

I Have a Tale to Tell

I Learned My Lesson Well

I Know Where Beauty Lives

It Shines Inside You

The Secrets I Have Learned

Somebody Save Me

In 2006-08, the Lord taught me about these concepts. I learned about the semantic meaning behind the words Peace, Energy, Faith, and Sacrifice. 

Peace

Peace is comfort, spiritual nourishment, and rest. It is when we feel loved, cherished, cared for.

Energy

We experience an outward flow of Energy, which is somewhat painful when we voluntarily sacrifice for others.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is when you expend effort and forego personal comfort in order to provide Peace for someone else. You parent in Mercy. Mercy is Justice over Time. You give your kids a space and time to learn, make mistakes, and grow. You do not exercise an excessive amount of Justice upon them. But you do train and educate them so they can learn higher-level functional relationship skills over time because God's Justice (the objective reality we all live in) incrementally increases over time.



Faith

We experience Peace when we put our Faith and trust in someone who has the will and capacity to help us bear our burdens – someone who voluntarily sacrifices for us. We hope to be parented in Mercy. We hope to have a space and time to learn, make mistakes, and grow. We submit ourselves to be trained and educated so we can learn higher-level function relationship skills over time.

I capitalize these words in my writing because I was trained to choose one word out of many synonyms to represent a semantic concept. That has been hard because every word adds a different brushstroke of meaning to my visualization of each of the variables.

Voluntary Sacrifice

Learning about these concepts helped me to understand that I needed to be sacrificing for my kids in Mercy. Mercy is just another word for the Northern Threshold. So, learning my role for them was very helpful. Parenting in Mercy is hard. It requires muscle, strength, sacrifice. It is supposed to hurt, but not be overwhelming. When I strive to parent centripetally in the Northern Threshold, I experience both the pain of Sacrifice and the Savior’s Peace, which when balanced is Joy.

It was important for me to understand that there was no other way for me to experience Joy. No one else could give it to me. Not even the Savior. I could experience his Peace, but without my Voluntary Sacrifice, I could not experience Joy. And I craved the Joy. I didn’t want to just sit around a feel comfortable because that actually turns into boredom and depression, which is the Northeast side of the Compass. I will talk about that in my next blog post. In this one, I will focus on the Northwest side.

Northwest Parenting

So, I already was sacrificing for my kids. In the 90s, when I was living in New Jersey and then later in Westminster, Colorado, the sacrifice parenting required of me was at the top of my NW threshold. Too often it escalated into overwhelming.

I’ll compare Sacrifice to running. In order to be a parent at the level I understood that to be, I was continually required to sprint at the top of my zone, and I was hitting my spiritual heart-rate-max too often. And this exhausted me. It made me feel like a total failure. I looked around at other moms “running beside me” that seemed to not be struggling at all. They were in the center of their zones. So, what the heck was wrong with me?

I wanted to keep up. I wanted to be a good mom. I had planned it that way. Why couldn’t I do this?

Even though I was struggling so intensely, I would not leave my post. In looking back, I see myself as Horton the elephant in the Dr. Seuss story, “Horton Hatches the Egg.” I was definitely as stubborn as he was in my commitment to stay home with my kids no matter how difficult the sacrifice.

“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An Elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”

The storms and other sources of adversity that threatened to push me out of my nest were not only coming from external sources, but they were also coming from an intense internal source. I’m saying that my own inabilities over-intensified the way I felt more so than the storm itself. I wasn’t as patient and long-suffering as Horton. My parenting skills needed work. There were many times when my performance was subpar. I needed to be educated, retrained, strengthened, re-loved, re-parented in order to weather these storms more like Horton did. 

His Re-Parenting Process

It helped me immensely when the Lord showed me how to diagram my Processes (Faith and Sacrifice) and Effects (Peace and Energy) using a Compass as a metaphor. It empowered me with the knowledge of what was happening inside of me and how I could control it.

Northwest

He showed me that this is what was happening when I veered off into the Northwest:

Too Little Peace

I experienced hunger, discomfort, and unrest. I could not feel loved, cherished, or cared for. This is where the intense desire to be saved was coming from.

Too Much Sacrifice

I was Sacrificing too much for how little Peace I was receiving (or had received growing up). I didn’t anticipate motherhood being that hard. When conflicts arose, I didn’t know how to resolve them in a functional way – in Balanced Mercy. And this is all relative. I wasn’t completely dysfunctional. The issue was that I wasn’t happy with the level of my functionality. It seemed to sharply conflict with the eternal person that I really was. Thus, the intense battle within me. I needed to increase my ability to voluntarily sacrifice, but I didn’t know how. I needed to learn more Justice over Time = Mercy.

Too Much Pain

There was too much Energy flowing out of me because I was trying to parent my kids in the NW with too much Justice. I experienced too much stress. I was expecting too much of them and myself too soon. I didn’t know how else to do it. This was how I was raised. I mean, I didn’t like the disciplinary methods used upon me when I was a child and knew I should not discipline like that, but I didn’t realize that my expectations of children were one of the products of being raised like that. This was my understanding of Justice and Mercy. I definitely was not able to see that I was even contemplating these concepts at the time. But in hindsight, I could see that I was constantly trying to figure them out. While I would not let the abuse pass down upon my children if I had anything to do with it, I wasn’t yet able to figure out this Justice and Mercy thing. Therefore, I was a wall against the intense internal Justice that I had been raised with. It was continuously trying to force me to pass this onto my children, but I fought it like crazy to stop it. So much internal conflict.

Too Little Faith

This is where my relationship with Jesus Christ came in. I didn’t know that he had my back. I didn’t know how interactive he could be in my life. When it came to the day-to-day motherhood routine and all the little conflicts that arose between me and my kids, I didn’t realize I could trust him. I didn’t know about his Mercy for me. I had heard all of my life about Jesus Christ. I had loved him from a distance. I just didn’t know what his Atoning Sacrifice had to do with me, how it applied to me. And I didn’t know his governing style. So, I had too little faith in him. 

The Northwest side of the Semantic Compass is Fear or Anxiety. The Result was that I was spinning like a wobbly top ready to topple over.

Somebody Save Me

When I was a young mom living in New Jersey during the early 1990s and trying to raise two little boys, I was often very impatient with them. And sometimes I was angry with them. 

They didn’t want to listen to me, broke a lot of rules, got into a lot of things they shouldn’t have, hurt each other, hurt me, and made the house an ongoing mess. 

When I sat down to build Legos and blocks with them, I tried to build something creative and interesting, but could never get very far before they would knock it all down. They took total pleasure in this. I think this is funny now, but at the time it was pretty frustrating. 

Symbolically, I wanted to build things up, develop, achieve, and grow. And they wanted to knock things down, experiment, play, and test boundaries.

I was always cleaning up the spaghetti and green beans that they threw on the floor, changing explosive poopy diapers, trying to identify the source of their discomfort and crying (ear infections, constipation, diarrhea, flu, colic, fevers, etc.), and searching for ways to keep us all educated, entertained, and spiritually fed during the long days at home with no car. We only had one, and my husband drove it to work every day.

And in regard to my mind…I couldn’t stand Barney. Sesame Street was okay. I eked some drops of intelligence from Reading Rainbow that prevented my mind from wasting away into literally nothing. 

In conclusion (as my daughter Laura would say), I had a good reason for feeling impatient and angry. Motherhood was a heavy burden. The sacrifice was really intense yet extremely boring, and I couldn’t seem to find much relief from it. 

So, after I responded to situations by yelling or tossing a boy onto his bed in frustration, I wanted to experience comfort and understanding for what I was going through. Instead, I felt awful feelings inside of me. And I felt like a total failure. I could not stop my boys from misbehaving and making messes and neither could I stop myself from getting upset about it. 

I felt trapped in this never-ending cycle of failures.

At the time, I could not explain what was happening, let alone why. I rarely wrote in my journal throughout these years, but when I did it was to reach for someone to save me during some of my most intense emotional periods.

Somebody save me

I don't care how you do it, just save, save

C'mon, I'm waiting for you

Listen: Save Me by Remy Zero 

(This song was used for the Smallville Television series)

I noted in my journal that I was reading my scriptures every day and praying. I also read to the boys from the scripture readers for kids and sang hymns with them. And I was going to church every Sunday. I was doing everything I knew to keep God’s commandments, but apparently, all of this was not enough. I ended those journal entries with the conclusion that I did not like myself and sometimes even confessed in Toxic Shame that I didn’t like motherhood either.

I feel my wings

Have broken in your hands

I feel the words unspoken inside

When they pull you under

And I will give you anything you want, oh

When I look back on this time period and other events throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, I recognize that I was in a type of bondage that I did not know how to get out of. Spiritually, I was experiencing anxiety and depression.

I see the world has folded in your heart

I feel the waves crash down inside

And they pull me under

And I would give you anything you want, oh

You were all I wanted

And all my dreams are fallen down

Crawlin’ around and around…

Out of all the years I have lived since this time and all the trials I have gone through, these early motherhood years were the hardest. I mean, I have had harder trials, but I had the strength and the relationship with the Lord to bear them. During these early years, even though I was reading my scriptures and praying I hadn’t yet developed a close enough relationship with him. And so, it was this combination of my distance from him, subsequent weakness, and the intense long-term sacrifice that kicked my butt.

There is an even deeper reason for why this failure hurt me so badly. Before I even met my husband, I had made a sacred covenant with God in which I told him I was ready for the sacrifice that motherhood required of me and I was willing to stay home with my kids. I was determined to be there for them and not leave them alone. This meant everything to me and I wanted so badly to be true to this commitment to God and to my kids. And I thought this determination would be enough to succeed. It wasn’t.

Somebody Save Me! 

In 1999, I remember getting to a low point and asking my husband for a priesthood blessing. I had been pleading with God for years in my prayers to “please, help me be a better mother.” In the blessing, I was promised that because I had been constantly asking him for this for so long, he would give it to me. Later, I would understand better why he put it like that. It became an opportunity cost to some of my other relationships.

Soon after this blessing, I was prompted to learn about nutrition and exercise balance. For the next five years, I journeyed along this pathway and I found greater healing, strength, and joy.  The first blog post that I ever wrote was about this part of my journey: Anxiety & Depression

But by 2006, I was still struggling with my role as a mother. Some things had settled down. I had read a lot of parenting books. I had learned how to eat and exercise in balance (as mentioned in the Anxiety & Depression blog post). I had more time to develop my personal talents. The kids were a little older and in school. We lived in a large house on a couple acres of land and had more money to spend on toys, sports, talents, activities, travel, etc. With experience, I had improved my parenting skills, but I still was not there yet. 

Inside me, I was still crying out:

Somebody save me

Let your warm hands break right through

And save me

As you may remember from my previous posts, during this same time I was studying semantics. I had begun to realize that I could figure out whatever I wanted to figure out. I just turned my eyes on it, studied it with the techniques the Lord was teaching me and could see it. And when I applied what I was learning to my life, it solved the problems.

I turned my focus on parenting. I knew that much of my salvation had to do with my getting this parenting role down and doing right by these four beautiful children that God had entrusted me with. I could not pass on what was passed on to me. I had to somehow stop it. I wanted this so badly. My attitude was:

I don’t care how you do it, just stay, stay

I was willing to do whatever it took. Just show me how… and stay with me.

What does it mean to be saved? 

I had very little understanding of what was meant by being saved before I looked at it. It was one of those words I just glossed over when reading because I had seen it so many times. And in my earlier years, I didn’t really like to talk about being saved because the Holy Rollers that used the term made it sound super weird. They seemed to hype it up and define it in a way that did not resonate with me. And then I heard other people making fun of this Holy Roller presentation of God’s grace. But I would not make fun of God or his grace.

In my studies and through the last sixteen years of training with the Lord, I have come to understand what the words Saved and Salvation mean:

Sustainable Compatible Relationships

Sustainable Joy

As a Child (of my parents and of God), I am loved, nourished, evaluated, and disciplined within the Northern Threshold. 

As a Parent, I love, nourish, evaluate, and discipline my children within the Northern Threshold - in alignment with God's will.

As a Wife, I am balanced with my husband within the Northern Threshold (see my Soulmates Marriage blog).

As a member of my Community, I love, nourish, and look for the good in others, empathetically forgiving, while objectively working together to resolve what’s not working

It sounds so simple. And it is. But because of the Fall, agency, adversity, Satan, and the subsequent imbalanced incompatible relationships and situations that complicate everything, the solution also gets a little more detailed.

Just stay, stay 

C’mon, I’m still waiting for you.

If you are struggling with parenting, I am going to share how the Lord saved me in this role in the next few posts.

The Secrets I Have Learned

I remember a morning when I was five years old. My mom wanted me to wear a dress to kindergarten. But I didn’t want to. So, there arose a conflict between us. I was vehemently screaming, “I don’t want to wear a dress!” when I saw my stepdad coming up the basement stairs. I thought he had gone to work already. He usually wasn’t there at this time of the morning. But there he was, an angry look on his face that I recognized all too well. I stopped screaming immediately and I turned around and ran back up the stairs. He came after me…

Above Image: Guiding Light by Annie Henrie Nader

This is part 5 of "I Have a Tale to Tell"

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

What followed was extreme NW parenting. I won’t describe the details. They don’t matter now. What matters is what I learned AND did not learn from this and many subsequent interactions with him between the ages of 4 and 10.

In evaluating this story and my stepdad, I want to address the semantic concept of Evaluation, which is on the Southern side of the Compass. It has been important for me to know and be careful about the way I evaluate relationships, people, events, feelings, and results. This is because the way I evaluate others is the way I evaluate myself.

"With what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged." -Matthew 7:1-5

The Southern Balance

The South is the ideal way of evaluating the past and present things that happen. We divide these results into two categories: successes and failures. Of course, on the Compass, there are degrees between total success and total failures. In semantics, every concept has incremental degrees between the two extreme points like the degrees between light and darkness that make up the Zone.

So, the South represents the ideal way to evaluate success. Ideally, when we achieve success, we acknowledge that we have been a contributor. Our choices, our actions, our words, our thoughts, our sacrifices. We also acknowledge that there were others who played a significant role in achieving it. Others include God, our parents, teachers, friends, children, extended family, spouses, or other community members. 

We need to remember that there are so many people who have come before us and who have contributed to our present privileges and resources. Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Fathers, whoever invented plumping, automobiles, and computers. There are so many more. Seriously, we cannot forget that we stand on their shoulders. It is important to acknowledge that it is always a team effort to accomplish our goals.

It is also important to evaluate accurately because when we go into the next goal achievement process, we won’t try to do it in an extreme NW/NE way, in which we think that some things ride on our effort and sacrifice alone (when they don't) AND at the same time leave other more crucial things undone. When we evaluate in Extreme Imbalance and the going gets tough or when the going gets super boring, we are likely to abuse and neglect ourselves and others. It is not a sustainable evaluation process.

If we evaluate in the South, we are very aware that in our next goal achievement process, we need to find the balance in the team effort. When we engage in this type of process, we will achieve a greater degree of success together.

Evaluating Failure through the Southern Balance

The South also represents the ideal way to evaluate failure. We acknowledge that we have contributed to the problem. Our choices, actions, words, thoughts, and NW/NE ways of doing things were most likely partly responsible for a failed outcome. We also acknowledge that there were others who played a significant role in causing the problem. Others include God, our parents, teachers, friends, family, spouses, and other community members. 

We all are falling together because of this bumper-car-state we are in. And we need to experience this Fallen state in order to develop REAL sustainable compatible relationships. The bottom line is that sacrificing for each other enables us to develop bonds of love that cannot be developed in any other way. If there were not REAL opportunities to sacrifice, these bonds could not form.

Southeast Evaluation - Pride & Shame

The Southeast (SE) way of evaluating is when we take too much credit for successes or too much responsibility for failures. 

Taking too much credit is pride. It is thinking that we have obtained our privileges and resources by the strength of our own arm without any help from anyone else. We think we deserve all the credit. That’s the extreme. But it is still an incompatible way of evaluating when we don’t attribute enough of the credit to others. 

Taking too much of the responsibility for a failure is Toxic Shame. Shame and guilt are within the Zone between the South and extreme SE. Sometimes that kind of evaluation is helpful and contributes to our motivation to change. Changing is about developing better relationship skills that bring us Sustainable Joy. But Toxic Shame will result in the opposite. It will lock a person up and ruin people and relationships. 

Southwest Evaluation - Inhibition & Blame

The Southwest (SW) way of evaluating is when we take too little credit for successes or too little responsibility for failures. 

The semantics behind taking too little credit for successes is somewhat hidden in our society. It is vague and squashed out because so many of us are attempting to avoid the extreme imbalanced evaluation of pride. But when we take too little credit for the actual contributions we have made to a success we end up with low self-esteem or low confidence. We are inhibited, hesitant, doubtful, nervous, insecure, unsure, and wavering. We might think it is the saintly thing to do to attribute the success completely to God or to others. But where does that end us up when we go into the next goal achievement process? In the NE. In a NE goal achievement process, we think God or others will do everything for us to accomplish the goal. And if it doesn’t happen, then what? Should we blame them for the failure? 

Toxic Blame is the other side of the SW coin. The Lord has trained me to think of this constructively. If we blame too much of a failure on someone else, we miss opportunities to turn failures into successes. We get so hung up on something that has happened to us and we think the solution is to talk about what others have done to us over and over again. There is a time and space to talk about it. And we need to do that. But when that is our eternal resolution process, we are not understanding the power that the Atonement of Jesus Christ gives us to make lemonade out of lemons!

The opportunity to change things is made possible by his Atonement. He comes in as an opposing power to the Fall. The Fall causes the bumper-car experience. When something bad is done to us, we inadvertently are forced to do something bad to someone else. Bumper cars. Or you could think of it like dominoes. When one falls, it hits the next one in line, and before you know it, everyone is down.

The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the Space between Stimulus and Response

Jesus Christ creates that space between the bumper cars or between the dominoes. He can help us create that space in ourselves. Even though something bad has been done to us, we can be trained to use our choice, our will, our strength to refrain from passing it along. Instead, we turn to Christ with the pain and sorrow. We turn to him to receive his comfort, peace, and strength. And we turn to him for retraining. I have found that process completely healing and satisfying. More on that later.

But let’s get back to evaluating my stepdad. The Lord has taught me how to evaluate in the Southern Zone. He has given me time to talk about what was done to me and what it subsequently caused me to do. There were many times that I needed to vent. He was there to allow me to do that. I needed that space and time. To force me or guilt me into forgiving others before I was actually ready to do it from my heart is not a sustainable process. To objectively evaluate the pain and sorrow that I experienced throughout my childhood and into adulthood because of the way I was raised has also been important. I used to perpetually evaluate my past from both the SE and SW extremes. Learning how to evaluate in the South has freed me from many of the chains of bondage that have kept me down for so many years. 

My stepdad parented me from the extreme NW/NE. Too much discipline, too soon, and not enough patient training. But he did this because his parents disciplined him in the same way. Before he married my mom, he turned to the Lord to change some of the dysfunctional behaviors he had learned from his upbringing. For example, he didn’t pass on alcoholism to me or my siblings. I am thankful to him for that. 

But it is difficult to absorb the full force of the impact from previous generations and completely stop it from passing on to the next. Some of it usually squeezes through. I know this because I experienced it myself. 

When I became a parent, I had no idea there were dormant dominos inside of me. I mean, I knew what had happened growing up, but I thought that just knowing that it was not a good way to parent was enough. It wasn’t enough. The dormant dominos woke up when I was faced with the challenges of parenthood. I also parented in the extreme NW/NE at times. In one of my previous posts on Paradoxical Parenting, I referred to this as Survival Parenting.

Read more details about my parenting experiences in these posts: 

It's My Party

Before & After

Children Need to be Disciplined

The fact is that children need to be disciplined. They don’t have compatible relationship skills yet. They are focused on getting their own needs met. They scream and yell. They throw tantrums. They kick, hit, punch, push, and bite in their attempts to resolve conflict and obtain their desires. They aren’t always the little angels that many people like to portray them as. But they do have that angel side. They are a dichotomy of angel and devil (think Jack Jack). And parents have to figure out how to deal with them. 

The Lord showed me that the key to remember is that we all have desires and conflicts. It is not wrong to desire something. It was not wrong that my stepdad wanted me to learn how to resolve my conflicts in a more reasonable way than screaming. We all would prefer that our children did not scream their heads off when things didn’t go their way. But I did not learn a more functional way of resolving my conflicts when my stepdad responded to me with extreme NW/NE discipline.

I didn’t learn the following principles from these interactions: 

1. When things don’t go your way, stay calm and try to patiently discuss the pros and cons of each viewpoint. 
2. Use gentleness and intelligent conversations to persuade other people if you seriously believe (or know) that your viewpoint is the better choice. 
3. Evaluate who has the final say on what should be done. Children have the right to choose many things, and it is good to give them as many chances to choose for themselves within the NW/NE boundaries as you can. 
4. Parents should let children experience consequences instead of resorting to Extreme NW/NE parenting to prevent them from happening.
5. Parents should give children appropriate consequences within the Northern Zone to train children before they go out into the world and suffer harsher consequences because they didn't know better.
6. Developing compatible relationships between parent and child and obtaining these Balanced Northern Relationship Skills are more valuable results than getting your way using brute force in the moment.

The Secrets I Have Learned

I have spent years being ashamed of disciplining in extreme NW/NE  during my early parenting years. Even though I too absorbed much of the force of the impact and did not pass along much of what I experienced to my children, there was still some that squeezed out of me during the toughest moments. I have cried many tears of regret and shame. I knew better but I did not know HOW to discipline in the Northern Zone until the Lord came for me and rescued me. Literally rescued me. He gave me the power to absorb much more than I was able to do alone.

What helps me to evaluate my past-self appropriately is the following variables:

1. I was consistently praying for help throughout those years
2. When he came for me (or I finally had enough, and came to him with a heart sufficiently broken) and showed me the HOW, I changed

The semantic secrets that he shared with me stopped the domino effect in me. That doesn’t mean I was a perfect parent, but I became very functional. With the Lord, I parented my kids within the Northern Zone. We teamed up together. I asked to know his secrets. I devoted my time to studying them. When he showed me what he was and taught me his relationship skills I didn’t just write them down and try to publish them. I applied them. I had questions. I asked him. He answered them. My knowledge increased. My accountability increased. That accountability led me to change my dysfunctional ways of resolving conflicts and obtaining desires to more functional ways. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. A better way of saying that is that I couldn’t live with myself living with the Lord if I didn’t. I’m not talking about Toxic Shame. I’m talking about admiration and love. He is what I respect. He is what I see. I am not happy unless I can see him. And I am not happy unless I am continually striving to balance myself in the North as he balances himself.

I Have a Tale to Tell

The tale I have been trying to tell is not about the Imbalanced things that have been done to me. Yet they do play a part in the story. How could I possibly value the freedom and the Sustainable Joy I experience now if I had never experienced the sorrow? 

My focus and my complete joy is the tale of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I'm telling the story of how he came for me and in doing so I hope to propagate the news that he has the power to come for everyone. This is the secret: If you have sorrow, thank your lucky stars! You now have the capacity to experience joy to that same level of intensity that you have experienced sorrow. But you need to ask and choose to listen and commit. 

If you have a tale to tell like mine - of how He has already come for you, I encourage you to share it to strengthen others' faith in Christ. 

If you're still in the middle of your story and are experiencing extreme pain and sorrow, I hope this story I am sharing will strengthen your faith in Christ and give you hope!

Listen: Live to Tell by Madonna (clean)

It Shines Inside You

Over the next few years (2006-2008), I couldn’t help but apply what I was learning through personal revelation to my life. When I saw the truth, I realized I needed to correct myself as a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend. The Lord was Justifying me by showing me himself. And he is Truth. He then let me choose to make the adjustments. He wasn't motivating me to change through criticism. I was motivated by just looking at him and seeing the most beautiful person I had ever laid eyes on.  Everything inside me desired to be like him. I mean, talk about beautiful! There is nothing like it. And then in hindsight, seeing what he was doing, how he was handling me, there is nothing I admire more. To be loved by such a person. To even realize that such a person actually exists, is the best thing that ever happened to me.

This is part 4 of "I Have a Tale to Tell"

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

It Shines Inside You

As my relationship with the Savior developed, I continuously crossed through thresholds of experiences. The intensity of his light changed in relation to my proximity to him. My proximity was measured by the sensitivity of what I call Effect Sensors. 

Effects are the feelings we experience when we evaluate or interact with another person. It is their energy or light. It is like every person has a specific flavor or taste. This is their Spirit and their presence. Some people might call this an aura. I'm sure there are a thousand ways to describe it. We experience the Lord's light when we think, talk, or behave like he does. When we align our way of doing things with his, we can sense who he is. When we conflict with his way of doing things, we experience varying degrees of conflicting Effects.  

Our Effect Sensors are our ability to sense Effects. Traditionally, we refer to these sensors as our hearts and our spiritual eyes and ears. Jesus often made reference to them with phrases like this: "He who has ears to hear..." 

Effect Sensors can be numbed by repeatedly overstimulating them. They can also be scattered by repeatedly going to conflicting sources for nourishment.

We experience physical and spiritual Effects. If we overstimulate with physical Effects, our Effect Sensors won't be able to sense spiritual Effects as well. If we scatter our Effect Sensors, we might be able to sense spiritual Effects, but they will seem of little value to us.

Throughout this period of my life (2006-2009) I discontinued consuming physical and spiritual Effects that overstimulated or scattered my Effects Sensors (as he instructed). This left a large vacancy in my life and an intense desire to fill it. My sensitivity or ability to sense the Lord's Effects increased correspondingly. I filled the emptiness with learning more about who he was.  

After studying with him, I would return to interacting with my husband, my kids, and my community. And if I behaved in a dysfunctional way, I was acutely aware of the light decreasing in my Effect Sensors, whereas before, I wasn't. This was also true of my thoughts. If I was evaluating things in a dysfunctional or imbalanced way, I could feel his light decreasing. In short, the intensity of the light fluctuated depending on what I was thinking, saying, or doing. 

I knew how I felt when I was with the Lord. His Effects were intense. Having experienced them, I sensed the change in their intensity when I engaged in imbalanced processes, such as losing my temper or sharing experiences that were too personal.

My Vision of The Compass: North

So now we come to what happened to me when I was a child. I have to tell the story in an empathetic and objective way so that I will not deviate from His Effects. My goal is to Justify like he Justifies. I will use the Compass that he showed me to objectively recount the way I was raised.

On a compass, the spindle can point to the North, Northwest, or Northeast. It can also point to the South, Southeast, and Southwest. Its arms point to the East and West. I will add diagrams later. I've done them a million times, so I will look for the best ones to include here. But first, let me just get this story out.

So, these points (N, NW, NE, S, SW, SE, E, W) on the compass represent the pattern of the semantic concepts behind words. We’ll just talk about the Northern variables for now. 

The way a parent treats and raises a child can be North, Northwest, or Northeast. Let’s say that the North is the ideal way to raise a child. It is the way God would raise us if he were our father (wink). And I’m speaking of God in the singular form, but semantically I’m referencing God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. It takes a village. 

North = Nurturing and Disciplining in Love

North nurturing and disciplining is the ideal way to raise a child. It's giving her the best love and the best chance to succeed.

Northwest - Too Much

Northwest (NW) is raising a child with abuse. Ab – Use. This word means that the way you are choosing to nurture and discipline a child is not going to lead to a sustainable compatible relationship with her. And it is not going to train her to be successful in her relationships with others now or when she gets older. So, if the North is ideal, there is still some wiggle room between the exact North and the extreme NW. There is a Northern Zone. This zone represents the normal yin and yang way that we all live. Sometimes parents need to discipline with more NW consequences and sometimes they need to discipline with more NE consequences. But they are still within the Northern Zone. They correct with love, with the goal of achieving sustainable compatible relationships. 

And let me take a moment to define what I mean by compatible relationships: In a compatible relationship, everyone receives physical and spiritual nourishment and opportunities for growth according to their needs. Each is able to deal with the others' yin and yang deviations within the Northern Zone. And not just deal with them, but voluntarily carry this weight out of love.

Northeast - Too Little

Northeast (NE) is raising a child with neglect. Neglect is when a parent does not discipline the child enough. There is not enough training and education for her to learn relationship skills. Again, there is a Zone between the North and NE. There are times when refraining from active discipline is the best solution. Putting a child in timeout is often an appropriate Northern solution. If a child gets out of control, timeouts are a good way to separate her from the situation and give her time to think about what just happened and calm down. 

However, too much of anything can lead to undesired results. Developing sustainable compatible relationships is the number one priority. In the moment, there may be a degree of conflict, frustration, sorrow, etc. But if the overall paradoxical result is sustainable compatible relationships, we know we’re on the right track.

People have come up with different words to represent the semantic North, NW, and NE meanings that exist independently. For example, in this post, we have put the word Discipline on the Compass. We might need to add an adjective in front of it to confirm that the Discipline is Northern, such a Fair, Balanced, Moderate, Productive, Constructive, Life-changing, Loving, etc. 

Extreme NW Discipline is usually referred to as Abuse. We can evaluate some synonyms to get a better view of this concept:

• Mistreat
• Persecute
• Misuse
• Injure
• Hurt
• Harm
• Damage
• Oppress
• Offend
• Scorn
• Revile

Extreme NE Discipline is usually referred to as Neglect. Some synonyms for this word are:

• Fail to look after
• Leave alone
• Leave undone
• Ignore
• Disregard
• Pay no attention to
• Shirk
• Not Remember

Additionally, we can identify some synonyms for discipline within the NW and NE Zones. 

We can put any concept on the Compass and see that it can be separated into these three points of semantic meaning. It's basic Goldilocks metrics:

1. North = Just Right

2. NW = Too much

3. NE = Too little

But the thing that has been the most difficult for me to comprehend is that if parents discipline in the NW, they will also discipline in the NE. The one actually causes the other. So even while they are too harsh with their correction, they are also too lax in productive training. Productive discipline lies within the Northern Threshold. Because we are all learning how to be Northern parents, we may start out with a wider NW/NE swing. But the goal is to decrease the arc of that swing over time as much as we possibly can.

To be continued...HERE