Avoidants Unite and take courage

Today is a good day. When I was 1st diagnosed with Avoidance, I had a lot of bad days. Its important to know and admit where you have been so that you can praise God you are not there anymore, give God the glory for it, learn from the past and have a better future.

For example, I know why things happened in my life. I know because I can look back at them and see patterns and reasons for the mess. I know the traps I fell into back then, so now I can see how to avoid them. Because of my past, I can now have a better future.

We often want to run from our past. We look at our past and just want to forget it ever happened. We see the pain and want to wipe it clean like a dry erase board. We want to pretend that it never happened.

The problem with this is that if you do not recognize the mistakes of the past, and learn from them, you will likely make the very same mistakes in the future. Our past is there for a reason. Everyone has made mistakes. We are human. We mess up. Thats life. We all sin and fall short of the Glory of God.

Everyone leaves out no one.

I mess us, you mess up, your Pastor messes up, the president of the US messes up (some would say that he messes up more than most), your favorite actor or actress messes up. Even Billy Graham messes up.

Show me someone that does not make mistakes and I will show you someone that never does anything!

The point is that there is no such thing as a perfect person. I know you have all heard this before, but do you really believe it?

We live in a society where its just not cool to let your guard down and show your weakness and vulnerability. Men especially are not suppose to show weakness. Men have to be strong no matter what and have to always be cool and hold it together. (On a side note, I think this pressure to always be perfect is why men dont live as long as women)

Pastors are especially guilty of this. Many Pastors are put in high pedestals and are thought to be perfect and without sin. I think many Pastors enjoy this image and even encourage it.

We need to admit our weaknesses. When you are weak, God can be strong in you.
2 Corinthians 12:9

We need to look at our past and learn from it. The Bible is a great example of this. There are lots and lots of examples in the Bible of people that were not perfect and messed up. Even David, the man after Gods own heart (Acts 12:22) messed up. Not only did he mess up, he messed up very badly.

King David saw Bathsheba and decided that he wanted her. Bathsheba was married. Not only did David take her as his own, he had Bathsheba's husband killed so he could have her.

The point of this story, and all the others in the Bible, is that we all mess up. Even Jesus own Disciples messed up. These people learned from their mistakes, repented of them, and made their future better because of their failures.

I also love to use a more modern day (Sort of) analogy for this. Its from an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Captain Picar had a run in with The Q. Q asked Picard if he regretted anything from his past. Picard said that he regretted a fight that he got into, so Q sent him back to his past so he could change it.

Picard avoided getting into the fight. Then Q sent him back to the present. Because Picard did not get into the fight, in the present he was no longer captain. You see, that fight, even though it was a mistake, was when Picard learned courage and to stand up for himself.

As a result of him not learning this, he no longer had the courage and ability to be a captain. The lesson here is simple but profound.

Don't ignore your past. Don't run from it. Don't pretend it did not happen. Instead, embrace your past and learn from it. If you go puling on the strings of your past, you might just unravel something that God was trying to build you up into the person that he needs you to be.

God can, and did use your past mistakes, to mold you and make you into the person you are today. The disclaimer here is not to let the past rule you either. Dont get angry over the past and let things bother you about it.

We see this all over the Bible. Joseph had a lot of really bad things happen to him. But God was using these things to mold him into the person that he needed him to be and also to get him into the place he needed him to be. If Joseph had said no, and tried to get out of those nasty things that happened to him, he might have never gotten to the place beside Pharaoh and been able to feed his people and save the Egyptians from starvation.

I remember way back when I was 1st diagnosed. I was in the Air Force. That was almost 35 years ago. Up until then, I was called a loner, a hermit, and worse. Most of the kids in high school thought I was gay because I didnt play sports, didnt like girls and I didnt work on cars.

The not liking girls part was fear of the opposite sex. I did not work on cars or play sports mostly due to fear of rejection and not thinking I could do it. Since then, I have filed Bankruptcy, had cars repoed, lost a house to foreclosure, lots more jobs than I can count and more.

I dont see any of this to seek pity or say woe is me. There was a time when I did. There was a time, when I let my past dictate my future. I had a poor past, so I decided that because of it, I was never going to be used of God or be any value to my family, myself, or the world.

Then I made the decision to not let that happen. Yes, it is a conscience decision to do this. Now I am a Pastor and a dad. I also run a non-profit ministry called Needs Met. God let me go through all these things so I could learn what it was like. I can empathize with those that are going through these things because I went through them.

I also have Avoidance so that I can know what others that have Avoidance are going through and try to help them. The point to all this is not Not Give Up. The more struggles you are going through, the more God can use you. Satan would not bother throwing all these things at you if God did not have a great purpose for your life.

The more Satan is working to destroy you, the more that you have great value in the Kingdom of God and he has great plans for you!











This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Why cant Avpd be just gotten over?

It has been a while since I have written in here. I remember when I was first diagnosed with Avpd and began to search on the internet. I did find a few sites and blogs, but most all of them were old and had not been updated or written in for a while.

I will do my best to not let that happen here.

Monday was a bad day. Well, the day itself was of course not bad. A rant on myself that I have seen so many other places. People say that the day is good or bad, or that this or that is bad. Intimate objects and days do not have a life of their own. They cannot be bad or good. They just are.

Days are what we make of them. They are neither good or bad. If we have what we call a bad day, its because we have made it that way. My wife tells me similar things. We get in an argument and she says that the day in wrecked.

Huh? The day wrecked. I did not know that the day had its drivers license!

Dont tell her I said that.

Days are what we make of them. To say that Mondays are bad is foolish. Mondays are no different than any other day. Other than its the start of the work week. So the day itself has no value for either good or bad.

In the example above, I told my wife to get over it. We had an argument. Ya, so what? That does not have to effect the rest of our day just like a bad childhood does not need to cause the rest of your life to be bad. The reality is that its not always that easy that we can just Get Over it.

I wish it was that simple. Monday was a fine day, but the Avpd in me made me think it bad.

I was depressed, but it was more than this. It was if the plug had been pulled in my life that held in my faith and it had gone down the proverbial toilet. God it seemed was just not there. Its not that I questioned his existence. Thats foolish.

Its just not logical that this world and us could be a random occurrence. Believing in that takes way more faith that to believe that an intelligent being created it all. So that was not the issue at all.

The issue was that I questioned that he was involved. Events in this world seem to be quite random. Good happens to bad people and bad happens to good people. It all seems to be quite random. Maybe God just has better things to do than be involved in our daily lives. Or maybe its that free will ties his hands and he cant.

Well, that was my mind set on Monday. I cried out to God and yes, even shook my first at him.

Then the next day, I find myself full of faith again. It seems that I cannot not spout scripture and be positive about God and life.

I wish I could be this way all the time. I blame it on the Avpd in me. But I hate to use this as an excuse to be this way. I should be able to just Get Over it, Right?

Then why cant I?







This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Life for me is all about patterns and routine. I have learned what works and what does not work. I have had to learn these things. I think for an Avoidant, its critical to learn these things. Way more so than it is for a Normal person. It seems a bit, or maybe a lot, like RainMan. If you remember that movie, Rainman was a Savant. A Savant is a type of Autism.

To an Autistic person, life is a constant routine. Routine represents safety and comfort. Anything that is outside of this routine is danger and the unknown. If you recall in the movie, anytime something happened that was not a part of RainMan's normal daily routine, Rainman became extremely agitated and difficult.

It was only the routines in his life that provided him any sense of comfort and safety. Avoidants are not all that different. In order to survive life, people, and this world, we must develop ways to cope with our surroundings. These cooing mechanisms are critical to develop and maintain.

Even normals develop these, but in the life of an Avoidant, they are critical!

Over the course of my life, I have learned some of these patterns and ways of coping with things. For example, yesterday, was one of my not-so-good days. In the past, such a day would have taken me completely out. Now, I know what to look for and how to cope when these days happen.

In Addition to being an Avoidant, I have a bad diet. I eat no veggies at all and little to no fruits. Though I do love Strawberries. I have no idea if its the Avoidant, or the poor diet, or a combo of both that is the issue with this.

I probably need to back up just a bit. I searched for a long long time to try to find something that would help me with the Avoidant in me.

I segment my life in various pieces. Not unlike our calendar. We have BC (Before Christ) and AD (After Death). Non-Christian revisionists are trying to take God out of the picture by going with BCE (Before common Era) and CE (Common Era).

The divider in our history is Jesus.

In my life, I have the similar time periods. There is my life before my wife, then after my wife. Then there are other segments as well like "Before Pills" and "After Pills". My life before the pills was terrible. There would be days when I could not even get our of bed. Especially Mondays.

There was days when I was so depressed, that I wanted to chuck it all.

I tried many various pills. I even went to see a Chinese doctor once that told me the problem was due to my eating too much spicy food ( I love hot stuff). I tried many other things many of which I cannot even remember. One day, my wife suggested these vitamins. I do not know if she suggested these because of my diet or what.

I decided to give them a try. My wife calls them my Happy pills. Weather the diet, or the Avoidant, or both, they do the trick for me. They do not eliminate the Avoidant issues, of course, but I say that they Take the Edge off. Yesterday, I did not take them.

I found myself in a depression all day long. I should have jumped up and taken them as soon as I recognized this. But I did not. The main success that I have found is to recognize this pattern. When depression happens, I know that tomorrow is a new day. The next day, I take my pills and everything is different.

I have learned not to make any big decisions while in these depressed states. Every single time, without fail, the very next day, all is better. For example, yesterday, I wanted to end the Church, end Wednesdays Movie nights and just go back to a normal life.

I have made this mistake before. I just re-started ministry. A few weeks back, everything looked black. The Church was not getting anyone coming to it, the Avoidant services were not getting anyone responding, and it all just seemed futile. I had sunk into a depression. So I sent out an email saying that I was quitting ministry.

I had failed to recognize the pattern in my life and made a hasty decision. I hope that everyone will forgive me for giving in to depression.

These patterns in my life are that the following day would always be better. Even Jesus knew this. Not to say that Jesus suffered from being an Avoidant, but Jesus knew that we would suffer from this and other things. Lamentations 3 says that His mercy's will be new every morning.

So anytime I suffer from Depression, or anything else like this, I know to just wait till tomorrow. Because tomorrow is a new day and things will look better in that new day.













This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Should a Pastor just be a Christian Chearleader?

I had to back off for a while from both the On-line Church and the Avoidant group. I found that I was just getting to busy. So my family life suffered and I was not spending any time working on our family finances.

I have seen so many well-meaning people in ministry let their families down while they ministered to others needs. While it sounds all holy to spend all ones time meeting others needs and working on the Church, if this comes at the costs of your, or my, family then its sin.

The proper alignment for priorities is;
God
Family Life
Financial Support of your family (Work or business)
Ministry

I have re-aligned my priorities, so I am back now. Every since I started with the Church and in working with Avoidants, I have struggled with how honest to be. Its hard to be in ministry. Often I feel like as a Pastor, I are supposed to blow smoke and ignore reality. I feel like its our job to be Pastoral cheerleaders. Just ignore what is going on in our lives and in the lives of others and just keep telling ourselves and everyone else that all is fine and dandy.

I see this example in so many other Churches and Pastors. I guess I fell into the same trap And perhaps to a point, it is what we need to do. People on the outside need hope and coming to Church is what they do in order to get told that things will be ok.

Perhaps that is the difference. Its ok to tell is how it is as long as you end with hope that God is in control and all will be fine. Well, from here out, I am going to try hard to do just that. I will try to tell the truth of how things are going and where I am at. And if that openness and honesty gets me in trouble with the Christian world, then so be it.

So here is my first attempt at more honesty.
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All my life I have felt like an outsider. I have felt disowned and rejected by the world. Becoming a Pastor has not helped this. In fact, its only made it worse. I have found that a lot of the Christian world, the Pastorial and Church world is just plain mean.

Passions, if you want to call it that, run very very deep. I tend to think that its not passion when it leads to anger, fear and yes, even violence. It has turned from being something of God to something of that dark place. But this is what I find so very often. Especially from Pastoral Church leadership. I am not sure if its all intentional or just bad leadership.

But for whatever reason, this is what I have found. So many Pastors that seem all nice when it comes to their Church membership, and to those that raise their hands to get saved, but to outsiders and especially other Pastors, they can be down right mean.

Churches that I have dealt with are very competitive and jealous. They run their Churches more like businesses, and very fiercely defend themselves against anyone that would want to come into their Church, or maybe share in their marketing strategies.

Now, in saying this, I know there are exceptions out there. I know there are good Churches and good Pastors out there that love to share, love to help others, love helping young Churches, and think little to nothing of their own financial health. But these Churches and Pastors seem to be few and far in-between.

I am hoping and praying for each and every Avoidant out there as well as myself. Its been tuff. But hang in there. God is blessing my family and will bless you if you are working according to his purposes. Stay tuned for more later

Pastor Phillip
NeedsMetChurch.com




This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Interview with someone that has learned how to live with an Avoidant

I want to start promoting this now. My wife is going to be on the show/group on Feb 19th. (The date is subject to change but I see no reason why it should) I will be interviewing her. She is my wife of 11 years. She will have some great insights on how to successfully live with someone with AvPD issues.

If you know anyone that is trying to live to someone that has Avoidance issues, or if you as an AvPD, just want to know how the other side thinks, please make sure to join us on Feb 19th at 7:00pm MT.





This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Tomorrow nights Avoidant group - We can learn from and understand each other

Tomorrow is the Avoidant Group. We will be talking about Normals, which is what I call people that do not have Avoidant Personality. Though in reality, there is no such thing as "Normal" . We are all unique individuals with unique personalities. So each one of us are unique and wonderful people. People with Avoidance are....just more unique than others.

I have been writing in this blog for a long time. Its only been recently that I decided to take the next step. The next step is to start a group where we can all learn from each other. One of the main goals for the group is that Normals and those with Avoidance issues can come together and learn.

Since I have been writing in this blog and running the group, I have talked to people all over the world. There are lots of people everywhere that are trying to deal with Avoidance. There are even more out there that are Normals that are trying to be in a relationship with someone that has Avoidance.

There is a lot of work to be done here. There is a lot of fear of the other side. Those with Avoidance issues do not understand Normals and Normals do not understand those with Avoidance issues. The result is that both sides mistrust the other and dont want to deal.

Well, one of my missions here is to try to mend these 2 sides. We have to learn to understand each other. For both our sakes. We all need each other. Believe it or not. Avoidants needs Normals and Normals need Avoidants. But we have to understand each other. Its not going to be easy, but I believe we can do it.

Join me tomorrow night at 7:00 MT and lets start learning.


http://www.blogtalkradio.com/needsmet/2014/01/23/avoidant-personality-group-depression-social-anxiety-etc







This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.

Definition of an Avoidant

I am working on a place for Avoidants. I home of sorts. A place where we are find some safety, some help and healing. This is also where the entry to the classes will be.

There is not much on the web site as yet. I have been working on a definition for What is an Avoidant.

If you have any thoughts, please let me know.




This is my log of my issues with living to Avoidant Personality Disorder. My hope is that in writing this, it will help myself and perhaps others that are also struggling with this disorder and others like it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tyKSgW-IeaK851gvIjjthije0kOwg3tZxVqKXSC1xXg/viewform I am trying to get more information on this disorder so that we can find commonalities. Perhaps if we can learn more about this, we can figure out how to combat it and get better lives for us all.