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I’m trying to be
a devout Catholic and I struggle with depression since I’m 10 years old and with
Borderline symptoms since I was 15. I’m a 25 year old female. I’m in a psychiatric
hospital for nearly three months now. And I’m studying your information and trying to
live more in prayer. The Jesus Prayer is such a relief for me because I struggle with a
pressure to do everything right and always do my best.
Please excuse my English, it is not the best! :)
I think I have a trauma from when I’m 15 and I found so much
relief and gained so much wisdom from your explanation or perspective on BPD. Sadly I
retraumatized myself with boyfriends and men.
I would like to ask you about dealing with emotions. I have a problem
with recognizing the emotions I am in the present moments. Afterwards I find it easier to
analyse what happened and can explain it. Also I struggle with counteracting towards the
emotions. For example if I’m lonely, feeling sad, I want to die, then my impulse would be
flirting with men, any attention from men. My doctor here said to learn to sooth emotions
by activating positive or the opposite emotions like feeling safe or secure. So for being
tired, rest. Feeling scared then I should lie in bed with a blanket. Will that really help
me?
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 our doctor has told you about psychological
techniques that depend on self-discipline. For a reason that I will explain later,
self-discipline usually fails for many persons. So, let’s consider a better method of
dealing with emotions.
Experiences, Distress, and
Spirits
The first issue to consider when trying
to recognize and deal with emotions is that our emotions are part of a natural process
working in us at all times to alert us that something is either hurting or pleasing us.
Thus emotions are not bad; they are simply reality. Beginners, however, often confuse emotions
with beliefs, fantasies, and
temptations that can lead us into unhealthy behaviors. These
beliefs, fantasies, and temptations are all different things that can be distinguished
by persons who have had psychological training, but it can be very confusing for persons
just beginning to learn how to live healthy lives. Therefore, for your healing, it will
be best not to speak of emotions but to speak of
experiences.
A second issue is the matter of recognizing
that your experiences can take on many different forms. Consider this list of some common
psychological experiences that can disrupt your mental functioning:
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Addictions, anger,
anxiety, boredom, competitiveness, demoralization, depression, despair,
discouragement, disobedience, doubt, dread, eroticism, fear, frustration, gluttony,
hatred, illness, immodesty, impatience, ingratitude, intestinal distress, irreverence,
loneliness, lust, manic pressure, masturbation, oppression, panic, pornography, pride,
procrastination, rumination, self-blame, self-loathing, self-punishment, sensuality,
social acceptance, strife, weariness, worry, victimization, and violence. |
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To a beginner, the variety of these experiences
can be overwhelming; these experiences, however, have one common element: they either are
distressful in themselves or they lead to some form of distress. Therefore, for the
beginning of your healing, it will be best to speak simply of the fact that your experiences
often result in distress.
Finally, consider that the sacraments of
Baptism and Confirmation endow a person with the Holy Spirit, and that the
fruits of the Holy Spirit, though many, lead to a general
life disposition of peace and calmness. Furthermore, as any devout Catholic should know,
evil spirits constantly try to obstruct the holy work of God. One way
that they do this is by manipulating our psychological distress so as to combine it with a
spiritual distress that disturbs our peace and calmness and sends us into harmful behavior.
Therefore, for the beginning of your healing, it will be necessary to understand that those
distressing psychological experiences I mentioned previously all have spiritual counterparts,
and that to manage your psychological experiences it will be necessary to use your Catholic
faith to deal with spirits.
Deliverance Prayer
This, then, leads to the issue of deliverance
prayer to renounce particular spirits.
Note here that we cannot renounce our
psychological experiences because they are simply psychological reality. We can deal
with the reality of our psychological experiences in two related ways. First, we can
use psychoanalytic techniques to understand how our present experiences link back to
childhood traumas that were in themselves distressing, and then we can use self-discipline
to take command of our current behavior. Yet many of us, if not most of us, constantly
fail in self-discipline, because self-discipline often remains stuck in the pride of self
and does not extend itself to divine grace. But that failure does not have to extinguish
hope. Despite our own weakness, we can call upon our faith and renounce the spirits that,
in manipulating our psychological experiences, try to increase our distress, overpower
our self-discipline, and send us into harmful behavior.
But, before you can renounce each particular
spirit in the moment as it appears, it will be best to acquire practice in renouncing
the spirit of general distress. You can do this by using the following prayer formula
whenever you experience any distress.
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In the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ, I renounce the spirit of distress and the hold it has over me. And I
ask our Lord Jesus to send it to the foot of the Cross. |
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Then sit quietly and pray the Jesus Prayer
(“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”). You can do this most effectively
if you use Rosary beads and pray the Jesus Prayer on each bead, so that in one circuit of
the Rosary you will pray about 50 Jesus Prayers. As you pray, reflect on the list of
experiences I described earlier and ask for the grace to understand more deeply the
specific spirit of distress that has been afflicting you.
It may take many repetitions of this process
to discern the name of any particular spirit that afflicts you, but, if you do it regularly,
you will slowly grow in understanding, and you will become proficient in quickly naming
the various spirits afflicting you. Then you can use the deliverance prayer formula to
renounce any spirit, such as the specific ones named above.
Summary
In summary, then, follow this general
routine:
1. Whenever you notice any distress starting
to arise in you, use the deliverance prayer formula to renounce the spirit afflicting you.
(With practice, you will be able to name the particular spirit, but, until you gain
experience, just renounce the spirit of distress. Then use the Jesus Prayer with the
Rosary beads to help identify the particular spirit that was afflicting you.)
2. Continue to develop the practice of
praying the Jesus Prayer as much as possible during the day, with or without the
Rosary beads, just to strengthen your faith and bring a general sense of peace and calm
into your daily life.
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