What Are Hang-ups - Part 1

alcoholism and codependency and I want to talk about something in a couple of videos that I think is a secret or something we don't talk about a lot that really helps us find freedom. It's a key difference for all of us who are seeking to find freedom. It takes a lot of work and it can be tricky but it's a really important part of our recovery process and like I said I think it tends to be overlooked and that secret is identifying your hang-ups leads to freedom. We've talked about hurts, hang-ups, and habits for years in celebrate recovery and in fact they've been a handy shortcut for us to talk about who celebrate recovery is for, right? It's for anybody with a hurt, a hang-up, or a habit. But what we have found over the last many many years is that it isn't like I come to celebrate recovery as someone who only has hurts but doesn't have hang-ups or habits or I come to celebrate recovery with somebody who only has habits but not hang-ups or hurts. It's that we all have all three. We all have hurts. We all have hang-ups and we all have habits. It's a simple thing that we say but like many of the simple things we say in celebrate recovery, what's simple on the surface actually holds deeper meaning. Here's the thing, our hang-ups are costly. I like to say that they're sticky and they're leaky and we're gonna talk about why they're each of those things but they're costly because they can often dictate how we act. We should probably back up and talk about how hang-ups are formed. It's a cycle, right? And it all starts with how we've been hurt. I'd love to say that it's possible for any of us to escape being hurt and hurting others but we all know that's just not true. Now I can often conflate hurt with sin meaning that every time I hurt someone it's a sin and we live in a fallen world and ever since the garden we've had to live with sins and our sins can hurt ourselves and other people and other people's sins can hurt them and ourselves but it's not just through sin that we hurt each other. In fact I'll say it this way. There are ways that we hurt each other that aren't sinful. This might take some explaining but let's just take me and my kids. I am keenly aware that I have hurt my kids. They're all in the early stages of adulthood and there have been times when I have sinned in anger or I've spoken to them unkindly or loudly in ways that

have hurt them and there's been times that I've hurt them in my selfishness where I've sinned by putting my needs above their own but there's also been times that I've hurt them in ways that I wouldn't be so quick to identify as sinful. I've been too tired to listen to a story. I've been overwhelmed by the needs of other people in ministry and less attentive to their needs. The point that I'm trying to make is that we can hurt each other in a variety of ways. Yes sometimes we sin and that sin causes pain. Sometimes we are tired or hurting ourselves and that can hurt someone else. Sometimes we hurt people intentionally and oftentimes we hurt each other intentionally and sometimes we can hurt each other and not even know that we've done it. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever been out living your life and someone has come up to you and told you that you hurt them and you can't remember how? It's happened to me and I hate it when that happens. I hate it when I've said or done something that hurt someone and I wasn't aware. Now that makes it sound like I like it when I hurt somebody and I was aware that I hurt them that's not what I mean but that unintentional way that we can hurt people just because we didn't mean to hurt someone that doesn't take away the pain. I mean is anyone ever apologized to you and said well I'm sorry that you were hurt but I didn't mean to hurt you? I don't know about you but that kind of apology has never made me feel better. The point is we've all been hurt and we've all hurt other people. It doesn't do any good to pretend or wish that it wasn't true. This pain might be momentary or it can be something that lasts for decades but it all starts with pain. It all starts with being hurt and when we are hurt we experience an emotion. Now that emotion is biological and it's instant meaning we can't control it and we can't stop it from happening. The emotion itself gives us a lot of information. So if we're sad about something it tells us that there's something wrong. There's something that has hurt us. If we're angry about something it

can show that there an injustice has happened. Our emotions by the way they're So these emotions that we have, they're biological, they're instant, and they're given to us from God, they happen in a second. Now, when an emotion happens in our bodies, there's usually two ways that we can react to it. The main number one is to lean into that emotion and act out of it. Someone hurts us in the feeling that we have or the emotion that we feel is anger. Anger might be a comfortable emotion, so we lean into it, we act out of it, we yell back or we cut them back off in traffic or we say something mean that we know will hurt them back. Or we feel sad, right? And so we turn on the most depressing music we can find or we sit alone in the dark and cry our eyes out. When we lean into an act out of an emotion, it's a good sign that that is a safe emotion for us, it's a comfortable emotion for us. That can be something that we're raised around and so we're allowed to get angry, so when we feel anger, we lean into it, or maybe we felt safe being sad, so when we feel sad, we lean into it. But allowing yourself to feel that emotion, process it, act out of it is usually a good sign, you feel pretty comfortable with that emotion. Now, there's another way that we can go is we can push it down and we can deny it and we can judge ourselves for feeling it. So instead of in reacting in anger when we get angry we push it down and we tell ourselves no, we're not going to feel angry, instead of letting the tears flow when we get sad we tell ourselves that sadness is a weekend. And I've got so much to be grateful for why should I feel sad anyway and so denying or suppressing an emotion fighting it or ignoring it is usually a good sign that that is an unsafe emotion for us. And by the way, anyone got any guesses where we learned what emotions were safe and unsafe. Yes, from the pain we carry around and that we experienced around those emotions. When a little boy is told, real men don't cry or when a child is told something like I'll give you something to cry about, they can learn that sadness is an unsafe emotion. There's a third thing that happens when we experience an emotion and it happens at a subconscious level we tell ourselves or other people tell us a story around that emotion to explain it so it's like a one to punch right. That's where we choose transition between the biological emotion and then our thoughts, humans love stories, we love for there to be meanings behind things that's why we read books and go to the movies and watch TV. We love stories for a lot of different reasons but one reason we love them is that it helps us make sense of the world around us. When we're hurt, we try to make sense of the hurt and this is where we transition into hang ups, hang ups are thoughts or belief systems we have about ourselves other people or God, or even just the world in which we live. But the key is they're not true. So hang ups are the way that we parse what's happening and happen to us, but they're not true stories. So again, here's the cycle. We experience hurt. We try to tell ourselves a story about that hurt and that becomes a hang up. It starts in our mind with an emotion, that emotion moves into our body with a feeling. And then we try to make sense of it back in our mind, we try to make sense of it. And by the way, this can be the hurt that we caused as well. It doesn't always mean that this pain or this hang up came from a pain that you experienced. It can also come from the way we hurt other people, but it's all got to do with pain.

Pain is the starting point. It works out like this. So let's say that I'm driving along on the freeway. Now I drive a early 2000s Honda Fit. If you don't know what that is, Google it. It's a car about this big. It's nice because when I get home, I can just pick it up and put it in my pocket. I don't have to find a parking spot. It's a very small car. It's sometimes I'll be driving around in that car. And other cars will pass me because it's not the fastest car in the world. It's an older car. I love my car, but it's not a speedster. And so let's say I'm driving down the road and a big pickup truck cuts me off. And not only does it cut me off, but before he does, he's tailgating me for a few miles. And then finally gets over really quickly and speeds up to pass me and gives me a dirty look as he passes. passes and then cuts me off and then keeps going. I'm going to tell myself a story about I'm going to see all that happen and I'm going to get angry. Now that anger, if I leave it alone, if I just sit with it for about 90 seconds, that anger will go away. It'll just pass on its own. But I don't let it go. I don't just sit with it. I don't realize, huh, I'm angry because that happened. No, no, no. I have to tell myself a story. Of course, a guy who drives a truck like that would cut somebody off in traffic, and of course he would tailgate first, and that look he gave me, that that is something about him.

He thinks he's so important, right? And the story goes on and on and on. And now I can sit there and be so upset and so angry. He's miles down the road, and I have this story going on in my body about what a jerk that guy was. And so we can tell ourselves these stories. And you know, the other part of this is, remember, none of that's true necessarily. Maybe he's a jerk. Maybe he was on his way to the hospital because his wife is giving birth, and he needed to get around me. Maybe who knows what happened, but I have made the decision. And now I believe that that's true. Here's another example. Let's say there's a child who is raised by a parent who has out of control anger issues. The parent flies off the handle at the smallest infraction. The child experiences fear not only because of the anger, but because their parent is unpredictable, and in that child's ability to understand at a child-like level, they understand that their parent is out of control, and that's scary for a child. This kid has a couple of choices of what they can do, the story they can tell about themselves and the story they can believe about themselves. It can either be the parent's fault or it can be the child's fault. Nobody has to tell that child it's their fault their parent acts that way. The child's going to make some decisions based on what he or she is seeing. Now it's actually safer for that child to believe it's their fault, the child's fault than it is for them to believe that it's their parent's fault. And this makes sense, doesn't it? Because for a child, it's actually scarier to believe their parent is out of control than it is to believe that something is wrong with them that causes their parent to act this way. Nobody has to say to them it's your fault, your mom or your dad acts this way.

Now they might and that can intensify the message that's being told, but nobody has to do that. It's going to happen at a subconscious level. The child doesn't even know they're making this distinction. It just happens automatically. Now when things like this happen, they can become lifelong hang ups and that child can grow to believe that it's always their fault when somebody has a negative emotion. They can start to believe that they're responsible for other people's emotions and it's up to them to soothe everyone and to put their emotions on the back burner to make sure that everyone else is doing okay. They're not aware they feel this way. They're not doing it on a conscious level and in fact, if somebody were to challenge them on this, they probably wouldn't even agree that they were doing in the first place. For them, it's just how life is. I mean, doesn't everybody feel this way? Doesn't everyone walk around feeling like they're responsible for everyone's emotions? It's not until they meet someone who doesn't feel that way that they'll begin to feel like something is different. So that child becomes an adult who now feels that they're responsible for the feelings and emotions of everyone around them and this feeling creates stress and discomfort inside of them and in order to relieve the internal stress, they begin acting out whether that's by controlling everyone and making sure they don't have bad emotions. When there are conflicts, they intervene and they triangulate. When someone's sad, they comfort but they own it as their responsibility to take the sadness from their friends so that the friend feels better. They tell themselves they're doing this for everyone else but the truth is they're actually doing it for themselves. They say they're peacemakers or peace keepers and they might even quote some scripture to help themselves believe that what they're doing is wrong. But the thing is that this hang up, that they're responsible for the feelings and emotions of everyone around them has a couple of unintended consequences.

First, it's overwhelming. It's hard enough to manage your own emotions, let alone the emotions of everyone around you and second, it takes agency away from the people in this person's life. In some ways, it actually sets this person who has this feeling of it. Now, they don't feel like this. In fact, they often feel overlooked or mistreated or inconsequential to the people around them. But if I'm able to make you feel something, or if I'm responsible for what you think and feel, that gives me an extraordinary amount of power. It also creates behavior that this person is able to claim is loving. They claim it's for everyone else, but like I said, it's actually for them. I tend to do this. I tend to feel like everyone's emotions are my responsibility. And so when my wife and kids are feeling upset, I try to mitigate their feelings. I can say it's because I want them to feel better, but often it's because I want to feel better. I feel dysregulated and I need to feel better. The only way I can do that is by making them feel better. But I'm not actually soothing them so that they're sued. I'm soothing them so I'm sued. I'm trying to control their emotions so that I can feel better. This might not be a comfortable thing to hear, challenges to our hang ups never are, but there's a high amount of freedom to be found.

See, when I became aware that I was trying to manage my family's feelings, not for them, but for me, it set me free to stop. I could tell myself I'm not in control of their emotions and it's okay if I'm not okay. And in fact, it's okay if they're not okay. I could begin to explore why I felt the way I did and it allowed me to go to Jesus for the comfort I was seeking. The thing is, is that when we begin to tell ourselves a story or create a story for us or somebody else does it, many of our hang ups begin as the things that were told by someone else. Now, this could be a parent, a sibling, a coach, a teacher, or even a pastor or a friend, the list goes on and on. But like the stories we tell ourselves, they feel true. And if somebody knows me, who's outside of me, if somebody knows me this well and they say this is true about me, it must be true, right? Well, not so fast. The thing is that sometimes these messages, they're meant to hurt us. But sometimes people can say things to us or about us that are meant to protect us, but they can become hang ups. When my middle daughter was a toddler, she didn't like being held by other people. She would give people dirty looks when they tried to take her from me or my wife. And it sometimes made me feel uncomfortable that she didn't want to go to even members of our family

or strangers in particular. And so I would say something like, oh, she's just shy. Now a mentor overheard me and pulled me aside one time and he said, hey, be careful with that. She's little now, but if she hears you say that enough, she might internalize it and then she'll actually become shy. He did this in a really loving way and it really helped me see something I was doing unintentionally to Chloe. But it helped me realize that sometimes we can say things about someone in an effort to protect them or other people, but then that can become an internal dialogue. We can internalize the things that we're told or that we hear often about ourselves and they can become our identity. And so these hang-ups operate under the surface. We're not aware of them. They are in our own thoughts often. We can't measure how they impact our lives. We can't see them or acknowledge them. And so we tend to think that everyone has the same hang-ups that we do. If you tend to try to be in control of all situations, you probably think everybody wants to be in control. And if you meet somebody who doesn't desire that, you can easily judge them as lazy or as a follower who has no drive. If like me, you feel like you're responsible for everyone's feelings and you long for peace

and comfort around you, you'll be surprised when somebody says they're fine letting people feel their feelings are even worse, they like conflict. If you feel fundamentally unlovable, if you meet someone who knows their worth, you might label them as proud or self-centered. If you label yourself as a victim, everyone around you will start to look like a villain. And our hang-ups work, stick with me here. Some of you will know what I'm talking about. In the '90s, there were these things called magic eye posters. Now around here, they were in the malls everywhere. And you'd walk by these kiosks and it would be an image that was just a jumbled mess. You couldn't make sense of it. It looked like static on a TV. But the person at the kiosk would tell you if you relaxed your eyes and looked at just the right point that you would be able to see a hidden image in there. It would often be like a heart or a castle or a pirate ship. I don't know how they chose what images to put in there. But once you saw that magic eye poster, you couldn't walk by it again and see the stack anymore. It's like that saying, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And our hang ups work the same way. They operate at a level that's so deep that most of us go our lives without even noticing them. Once we see them, it's impossible not to see them. All of a sudden, we notice them at the worst times

and we see that they've been with us all the time. Now, this is the first video. And what I wanted to do in this video is to just set up where hang ups come from. In the next video, I'm gonna talk about what we can do about them and how we can find freedom from our hang ups. And I might get that in one video. We might end up doing three videos. I don't want them all to be super long. We'll just kind of have to see how it goes. But what I hope you'll see from this video is that our hang ups come from a place of pain. We try to make sense of that pain around us by telling ourselves or other people tell us a story and then we can hold on to those hang ups and they can become our identity. The problem is, is that they don't just stay there. They often, or always, I would like to say, come out in our habits. And so we're gonna talk about that in our next time together and I hope you'll join me then.