Showing posts with label addictions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addictions. Show all posts

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Healing Wounds through The 7 Sorrows





The Seven Sorrows of Mary Rosary

What if I told you that if you pray the rosary of the 7 sorrows, the one Our Lady of Kibeho says are for this time in the Church, that you would be healed.

Praying the rosary of the 7 sorrows helps to heal us because it untwists the lies of the evil one.  When we see the lies we understand the judgments our hearts have made and even the inner vows we may have made in order to protect ourselves.  

No wonder people are free from addictions when they pray this rosary, it is because when lies are exposed and the vows are renounced the strongholds are removed and we are delivered from oppression. 

Click this link to print out your copy of the Rosary of The 7 Sorrows


The Seven Sorrows of Mary Rosary
Exposes lies, judgments and Inner vows , which Heals Wounds, Which frees people from addictions, Strongholds and oppression.



Sin=LUST                                                                

1st Sorrow: Prophesy/Simon;
Heals idolatry of relationship. She went to be purified.  It undoes the impurities of our hearts.

Heals Wound=Rejection

Sin=Greed

2nd Sorrow: Flight Into Egypt;
Heals idolatry of fear, mistrust and idol of materialism.  It teaches detachment from worldly goods.

Heals Wound=Mother and Father Wounds (identity or shame issues) that resulted from neglect or abuse

Sin=Anger

3rd Sorrow= Losing Jesus;
Heals idolatry of control. Rather than being angry, she gave up control and realized that being
powerless was really about allowing God to be powerfully working doing His will.

Heals Wound=Powerlessness and Abandonment

Sin=Sloth

4th Sorrow=Carrying The Cross;

Heals idolatry of fear or desire to use substance to avoid pain or suffering.  He picked up his cross, he did not avoid the pain he embraced his suffering and the task at hand.

Heals Wound=Fear identity issues, abuse in childhood can create a way to self medicate when anxiety becomes overwhelming.  Anxiety disorders are from being unable to face, for whatever reason, that which causes pain or suffering.  

Sin=Pride

5th Sorrow=Mary at the Foot of The Cross;

Heals idolatry of self.  Mary’s pain was her own as her heart was pierced but her concern                      was not for self but for Jesus.  The shame of being seen naked, the disgrace of our
Savior being killed on the cross did not become disordered in her heart, she did not focus on
self but she suffered at the foot of the cross experiencing what must have been the most difficult
moment in her life to bear.  She knew who God was, she knew her Son was part of God's plan of love and she fully trusted in Him at that painful moment.

Heals Wounds=Shame and identity issues, vanity issues and intellectual pride or importance to allow the self to control value rather than turn to the Father for identity

Sin=Gluttony


6th Sorrow= Receiving The Body of Christ;

Heals idolatry of substance for pleasure.  It rightly orders our need of spiritual and physical food to                    
fill the place inside with Him rather than false food, drink or substance.  We are called to Union and Communion, we are called to connections, relationships with others so that we can be seen.  We must be this vulnerable in order to be healed.  

Heals Wounds=Vulnerability Issues, Addictions and dissociative disorders, fear of abandonment

Sin=Envy


7th Sorrow=Christ's Body is Laid in The Tomb

Heals the idolatry of Status.  Christ was not laid in a tomb for a King, nor was he even laid in a tomb that was prepared for himself.  He had no place to lay his head, neither in birth nor death.  The King of King's and Lord of Lords was given the resting place of another because Christ had no status, he was crucified as a criminal and buried as a common thief would have been, in a tomb shared with others without status. 

Heals=Wound=Shame, Neglect, Identity feelings of not being seen or heard or being valued

 Here is the first of the four videos that pray the 7 Sorrows given to us by Our Lady of Kibeho and prayed by Immaculee Ilibagiza, the woman who survived the genocide in Rwanda and wrote the book "Left To Tell" and "Our Lady of Kibeho"



                                                

Monday, July 11, 2011

Extreme Hoarding; A Cry for Love and Mercy


I have wanted to write about the hoarding shows on cable for some time now. As we speak I am watching "Hoarding; Buried Alive" on TLC.

There are many programs currently on cable dedicated to the issue of hoarding. For those of you who are unaware of what hoarding is, let me try and explain. Hoarding is the collecting and or keeping of possessions. The common word would be "stuff".


The "stuff" that they keep is piled up so high that in some cases, the people must hold on to the ceilings to steady themselves as they walk from room to room. As a viewer of these shows, I see the piles of junk for what they are, junk. I see rotten food, urine in bottles, dolls, diapers with feces in them or feces tied into shopping bags, crafting supplies, clothes, knick knacks, boxes and in some cases chickens, pigs, and rats making a house unlivable to most persons, but not to the person who is a hoarder.

People who hoard have fail to use or discard the many items they collect. They do not see the items surrounding them as hazardous or unsanitary, rather they see it as their possessions, for better or worse. People who have a compulsive need to hoard are impaired in more ways than just the basic activities of life like cooking, cleaning, bathing, sanitizing their homes or the like. It is my opinion, based on a personal observation and a degree in Psychology, that compulsive hoarders are impaired in their ability to love and be loved.



The hoarder surrounds him or herself in "things" because they believe that the things do not judge them, do not hurt them and will never leave them. Because many of them are deeply wounded, perhaps even suffering from emotional affirmation deprivation disorder, they have no understanding or experience of unconditional love and so, because human beings are made for love, these wounded souls create their own relationships of unconditional love, not with people, but with things or sometimes with their pets and the more of them, the more love they believe they are experiencing.

I often wonder why the therapists on these shows do not think to take the compulsive hoarder to another hoarders home. You see the hoarder forms an attachment to their piles of garbage. To the onlooker, we see paper wrappers with rotten food in them. The hoarder, they see the item they opened last Thursday and ate while thinking about happier days. They laid it aside thinking they wanted to keep that memory and so the food rots in the wrapper. To the viewer, they see bottles of urine in old juice bottles all over the floor. To the hoarder, they see a necessity of life, their toilet is broken and so the bottles allowed them to deal and cope with a situation they have no power to rectify since they truly are powerless in this dysfunctional love relationship they have united themselves to.


It is almost like a very dysfunctional marriage. Based on this premise, I wonder if a hoarder saw another persons pile of dysfunction, a home filled to the ceiling with 8,000 tons of garbage, wouldn't they see it as garbage? After all, if the stuff is about a personal connection to things, if the personal element were removed, wouldn't this facilitate an opportunity to bring understanding of the dysfunction of it all to the hoarder? It seems like it could be a possibility, yet every therapist and counselor on the show, fail to see this is more than a behavioral response to stress. This is a dysfunction and a wound to the very soul of the individual. This is the soul making visible the invisible. This is a demonstration of Theology of The Body.

Theology of the Body is the teachings of Pope John Paul II, now Blessed Pope John Paul II and one of the important things to remember is that not only are we to understand we are made male and female but we are also made for relationship. We are made for union and communion. We are made for love. We are also body and soul and the body is the way in which we live out our call to love and be loved. When a soul is deeply wounded, the body will make visible this woundedness. I believe hoarding is just one of the physical manifestations of a a wounded soul and the persons inability to love and be loved.


All of us are called to union and communion, family. This is the nature of the trinity. God is love and this love is revealed through the 3 persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As men and women made in His image, we too are called for union and communion, in other words, we are made to love and be loved. Family is manifested when a man and a woman unite their lives to each other in marriage.

When a person suffers deep wounds from childhood, generational sin, abuse, addictions or other, their understanding of how to love and be loved becomes disordered. To a wounded person, other people can become so frightening, yet the call to love so strong, that they replace people in their lives with "things" and so begins their dysfunction. The hoarders believes they are united to their hoard, they believe they are in communion with it and in a very unhealthy and disordered way they attempt to live this out. They live in the pile of garbage, use it to cover themselves up to stay warm. Every choice they make and every minute of every hour is consumed and affected by their stuff. It cuts off their ability to be in relationship with other people and so they become trapped and bound by it. The garbage becomes all that they know all that they love and all that serve.


When someone arrives to help them clean out their homes and rid them of their hoard, the hoarders seems receptive. As they show the TV crew around their homes, I notice a lightness of heart and quickness of step that seems to indicate a feeling of liberation. Perhaps revealing the hoard to an outsider allows them to see with new eyes what has always been before them. Usually the person with them is a trained counselor and so it is my belief that it is the non-judgment and willingness to "love" on the part of the counselor that causes this receptivity. Image it, you walk through your pile with a stranger, they see, yet do not leave you but promise to stay and help you.

It must be a breath of fresh air to the person who has been hiding for so However, as fast as the feeling of hope that this breath of fresh air brings into their lives, it is promptly replaced with the distress symptoms of the deep wounds that caused this dysfunction in the first place. They begin to feel hopeless, fearful, powerless, rejected, shameful, and more. These manifest through many forms, anger seems to be a big one. Anger is actually a need for control and is based on a deep abandonment wound. At some point in their life, they were abandoned and in that moment the enemy proposed a idea. That idea was that they were unlovable and that they would always be alone. If they consented and agreed to that idea, it became a stronghold. Strongholds are the way the enemy gets his foot in the door. Once we have come into agreement with the enemy, we begin to experience all the disorder that being in agreement with the devil would bring.

Some become hoarders to cope, some become addicts, some neurotics, we are all unique and unrepeatable human beings and so our reactions to disorder and dysfunction will be as unique and individual as our very person. The reason the hoarders go from happy to angry and fearful once their hoard begins moving from their house to the dumpster is because each of the items being removed has a great significance to them. The thought of taking away their hoard, feels like a stripping away of their safety net, a stripping away of a sort of relationship. The relationship they had with their hoard had soothed and comforted them in some way for a very long time and the thought of being parted, opens up the wounds of abandonment once again.

If these shows truly want to help these people and not just provide us with entertainment, then they would stop treating the symptoms and begin addressing wounds. If a person has a brain tumor, you don't give them an asprin, you remove the tumor. These people are manifesting distress symptoms in hoarding. To clean up the hoard and to talk about how to organize gives them some coping skills but does not bring any healing to the wounds that have generated this disorder to begin with.

Distress symptoms are a Mercy from God. They are like a neon sign that you see when you are driving down the highway looking for a motel vacancy to stay the night. The flashing sign with the arrow pointing the way to warm bed for the night is a perfect example of what a distress symptom is. God gave every human being free will, this means we are not robots but that we can freely choose to live out our lives however we wish. We can love or not love, we can believe in God or not. He does not force himself on anyone. However, for every action there is a reaction. If I drop a ball it will hit the floor and bounce. It will follow the rules and natural order of things. If a person abuses another, free will allows that to occur. However, God always brings a better good out of every situation. When a person is abused, God's permissive will allows it, NOT his active will. I have been abused, however, because of this breakthrough therapy that I experienced at the Theology of The Body Training and Healing Center, I have been healed in ways I never thought possible.


You see when we experience a distress symptom, something in your life that is causing distress, in inordinate emotional reaction or belief in yourself or others, this is that neon sign. It is God's way of pointing you to a place where you have, of your own free will, come in agreement to a judgment about yourself. "I can't do this" a powerless wound, "I will do this alone! I don't need anyone!" These strongholds are patterns of behavior that persists in our lives and we just cant seem to change these things. This become a taste of hell. They become the barriers and the moats that lock up our hearts in this hell. Anger is the root of abandonment, lust is the root of rejection, greed is the root of fear and mistrust. The neon sign, the distress symptoms show us what and where we are really wounded because Christ desires us to receive healing and freedom in this area. He will not trample on our free will, so the distress symptom, is the neon sign flashing over and over inviting us to come and rest in His motel. His motel, is His Sacred and Merciful Heart.
http://TobHealing.org

If you know someone who has a problem with hoarding, share this article with them. The next time you watch the show, contact these places and tell them to look into inviting someone from The Theology of The Body Training and Healing Institute because unless they deal with the cause, they will only be treating a symptom.