mention of suicide

Seasons of Change

/ Nicole Bartell / 2 Comments

(Trigger warning: mentions of suicide)

This morning, the thermometer said 67 degrees. That was a call I could not ignore. I made my coffee, threw on a long-sleeved tee (not quite cold enough for a sweater yet, unfortunately), and made my way outside to my Adirondack rocker. The squirrels seemed even busier than usual, scurrying in the trees. I imagined them frantically preparing for this sudden change of weather. The birds were singing, my chimes were ringing in the breeze, and I sat and rocked thinking about the change of seasons.

Change used to terrify me. In January of 2011, I was looking back at a year that had shifted my life drastically. I had lost a group of people I had considered “family” for over ten years, and everything I thought I knew and believed was torn down to the foundation of Jesus. I did not yet see that as the perfect place to be. I just felt insecure, unsteady, and lost. That January was the first year I asked Dad for a word to represent what was ahead. His answer: “Change.” I was not happy with that response. I didn’t like change to begin with, but I truly felt I had just gone through enough to last me a lifetime. I begged Him for another word, but “Change” was the one on repeat.

That year, my mom’s house burned down, causing her to move away from me for almost two years. Now I can see that I felt abandoned by her again but at the time, I just felt lost. I started counseling that summer, and a whole flood of emotions I had been burying for decades overwhelmed me, and my counselor moved away before I could even begin to process all I was feeling. Feeling abandoned by a second person, I shut down rather than pursue getting more help. I felt tossed around by life, and I made an agreement that I did NOT like change.

As I pondered all that this morning, I thought about all the seasons that have come since. That year, as difficult as it was, brought the very first steps I ever took toward recovery. I wouldn’t actually pursue “recovery” for another seven years, but I took that first step. Every journey begins with one step. The years after 2011 brought even more change:

  • My sister-in-law taking her life in 2013 led me to go on antidepressants because I didn’t want to do the same thing to my son.
  • A severe car accident in 2014 irrevocably changed my son’s life, health, and personality as well as the dynamics of our family.

  • I started Celebrate Recovery in 2018, thinking I was going to get help with a pornography addiction I had struggled with since I was twelve only to find it was just a coping mechanism to avoid all the pain I had suppressed for most of my life.
  • I found a new family at CR, one that taught me that I was enough just as I am, that I didn’t have to perform to be accepted or loved.
  • I lost my mom in 2021 from a massive stroke.
  • I participated in starting a CR in our home church only to have the internal pressure to perform perfectly, along with the cracks it revealed in my marriage, cause us to close a year and a half later. I felt like a failure.
  • My precious aunt, whom I had cared for after my mom died, died only three years later.
  • My only child moved out on his own, shifting my role again. Who was I supposed to be now?
  • Before I could even begin to process that question, I was shot, and my whole life turned upside down.

Seeing it all written down here, I realize why I was so resistant to change in the past. Change meant I was out of control. I felt insecure when things happened that I wasn’t expecting or situations that altered the trajectory of my life. I had spent my entire life, from a very young age, just trying to feel safe in a world that offered less and less of it. Then, when I was shot, I realized I will never be truly safe in this life. That was probably the most unsettling realization of all. If there is no safety, what is the point? I went through a month or so where I just really wanted to go home … to go be with Jesus, where I would be safe forever. But it wasn’t time for that, so what should I do now that I know there is no true safety in this world? I find it in the only place there is to find it. I find safety in knowing who I am and WHOSE I am because that can never be taken away.

Hindsight allows me to see that those drastic seasons of change in my life, as difficult and painful as they were, also brought greater and greater freedom, love, assurance, and hope I could not have imagined at the time. Now, I renounce that agreement I made about hating change and remind myself of what it has brought into my life. I can see the faithfulness of my Dad who promised that He would work everything out for my good in His time. I am recording these things in my Book of Remembrance so that I have it at my fingertips. I don’t have to struggle to remember when the next wind of change blows and I feel tossed. I can pick up my book and look through my personal “stones” of remembrance that remind me that Dad is the same as He has always been. He is unchanging. And He is the same God who was there for me in the past, is still with me in the present, and will be there in the future.

“The LORD is my light and my salvation – whom should I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life – whom should I dread? When evildoers came against me to devour my flesh, my foes and my enemies stumbled and fell. Though an army deploys against me, my heart will not be afraid; though a war breaks out against me, I will still be confident. I have asked one thing from the LORD; it is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of the LORD and seeking Him in His temple. For He will conceal me in His shelter in the day of adversity; He will hide me under the cover of His tent; He will set me high on a rock. Then my head will be high above my enemies around me; I will offer sacrifices in His tent with shouts of joy. I will sing and make music to the LORD. LORD, hear my voice when I call; be gracious to me and answer me. My heart says this about You: “Seek His face.” LORD, I will seek Your face. Do not hide Your face from me; do not turn Your servant away in anger. You have been my helper; do not leave me or abandon me, God of my salvation. Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD cares for me. Because of my adversaries, show me Your way, LORD, and lead me on a level path. Do not give me over to the will of my foes, for false witnesses rise up against me, breathing violence. I am certain that I will see the LORD’s goodness in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart be courageous. Wait for the LORD.” (Psalm 27 CSB)

Heed the Warning!

/ Nicole Bartell / Leave a comment

One of the earliest things I learned in recovery was the need to FEEL my feelings. I had spent so many years, pushing them down, denying them, even being told that my feelings will lie to me and I shouldn’t listen to them (anyone else get that message from the church?). My first sponsor explained it to me, as she had learned from one of her many mentors, that my feelings are like the instrument panel on my car’s dashboard. If one of them is on, it means there is something wrong, and I need to explore to find out what the problem may be. Perhaps it is something simple. My bright yellow triangle with an exclamation point is currently lit on my Highlander. I’m not particularly worried because I know it is telling me that it is time for an oil change. It prepared me for it the last couple of weeks by reminding me that maintenance would be required soon. It is reliable and constant….every 5000 miles (because I ALWAYS reach that before five months!). But if that light came on suddenly with no preemptive warning, it could mean any number of things are wrong with my car from something as simple as my air filter needing to be replaced to something REALLY serious….thousands of dollars worth of serious. As she explained it to me, to ignore that light and not show curiosity as to the source of what caused it to come on is what we call “denial”. I am, in essence, pretending the light doesn’t matter. And I had learned for many years to do the same with my emotions. I shut them down. I ignored them. I medicated them. Anything to pretend they weren’t there. And most of the time, I was successful…for awhile. Until the dark reaches of the night when insomnia set in, and I found myself all alone with the whispers of my psyche reminding me there was PAIN!!!! “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” Is it any wonder that there are so many who give up the fight in the middle of the night, when it is difficult to quiet the voices with noise or busyness or friends. The nights are long and seemingly endless. That is where most of my suicidal thoughts hit me the hardest when I was deep in depression.

When I was working through my first step study in Celebrate Recovery, I was digging deep into my past and answering the questions about my hurts, my beliefs about myself and about God, my parents, and the “family secret”. My sponsor encouraged me to be as honest as I could, that I would get out of the step study what I was willing to put into it. And she told me about the instrument panel thing. My emotions, she told me, are not lying to me, they are actually telling me the truth about what I believe. Now, I may believe a lie (or a number of them), but my emotions are honest about what I feel about that belief. For me, that was the sense of unworthiness, not being good enough, having to be perfect in order to deserve love and acceptance. I believed that I was a waste of space, and that I couldn’t do anything right. And I hated myself above anything and everyone else. I literally thought I deserved to die. I believed I was unlovable. Because of that anguishing belief, I truly FELT there was no way God could REALLY love me. And that belief was truly soul crushing. I had felt the weight of my father’s emotional abuse, my mother’s neglect and inability to connect with me or protect me. I had experienced bullying and rejection so severe that it just reinforced all those early beliefs, that everyone (including me) would have been better off if I had never been born. That was the “truth” that my emotions were telling me, and that I had wanted to escape from as long as I could remember. Emptiness. Worthlessness.

A funny thing happened as I started actually taking the time to look at these emotions and the beliefs that drove them. I started to bring them to Jesus and let Him look at them. And for the first time, I started asking Him if they were true and really listened to the answer. He assured me that they were not only lies from the pit of hell, but that even if no one else wanted me: HE DID!!! There were so many precious things that He communicated to me during this time that I have shared with only a few, but the main thing I came away from that very first step study with was that I was truly LOVED by God. Not only was I loved, but I was wanted. I was precious to Him. He began to show me all the ways He had shown up in my life, in large and small ways, long before I ever knew Him. There were terrible things that were done to me, but He still came in hidden ways that I had not been able to see under the weight of the lies and the blinders my pain had put on me. People He put in my life to be a salve against the cruelties of others. People who were the hands and feet of Jesus long before I acknowledged who He was. As I came to realize and accept this truth in place of the lies, the miraculous happened. I suddenly found myself FREE of depression. I had been depressed at some level or another my entire aware life. But all of that was GONE! I was free of the heavy, heavy weight that had crippled me for so many years. Bob Hamp says that the opposite of depression is not happiness but rather expression. When we DEPRESS what we feel, we are actually turning all those emotions inward as weapons against ourself. Anger at what was done to me was transformed into self loathing. I believed I was the problem. There was something intrinsically wrong with ME. Everything was my fault, and the one person I couldn’t escape was myself. So I suppressed. I dissociated. I denied. But expressing, getting out the feelings, speaking or writing them down, allowed them to come into the light. And The Light, Jesus, was able to shine truth on them.

Just like ignoring that warning light on our dashboard could lead to bigger problems and end up costing us more money than if we just went to get the first thing fixed, so acknowledging our feelings, owning them, bringing them out into the light with a safe person (or people…it just should never be done alone! We need others who see more clearly than we do to be our guides in this) actually begins to fix the core problem that has been spiraling out into other issues that break us down. Our feelings are actually our friends who tell us what is really going on inside, if we are willing to put forth a little courage and see what is going on under the hood.