Why Am I Struggling So Much?
Do you ever wake up and not want to get up? Do you ever lose your motivation and drive? Stay awake at night too late just vegging or zoning out? Snap at your spouse and everyone around you?
Written by Sarah McGuire
Do you ever wake up and not want to get up? Do you ever lose your motivation and drive? Stay awake at night too late just vegging or zoning out? Snap at your spouse and everyone around you? We go about our day to day lives, caring for our kids, spouses, and selves handling what needs to be handled, doing the tasks that need to be done, mediating the scuffles that arise, and a host of other things. You used to have motivation to do all the things, to tackle the challenges, to meet the needs, to love others well in a peaceful way. Now you feel sad, angry, grumpy, tense, or unmotivated.
So, what is going on? What has changed? Why are you struggling?
As a parent of a child with special needs and disabilities, you aren’t alone. The more parents I talk with the more I see this as a common, almost universal struggle. It may not be all the time, and it can be more pronounced in certain seasons of life and circumstances. And, I’m seeing it strongly right now in the general population with the Coronavirus stay-at-home order. Why?
One of the main reasons is grief. Grief is not only experienced when there is death, but with any type of momentous loss. This includes the loss of what was expected or anticipated in the future but will now not happen. This might be the hopes and dreams you had for your child and for how your family would look, activities they would do together, social interaction with family friends. But, the child will never accomplish those things, the family can’t do those activities, and the friends deserted you when you had a child with special needs. It might be a vacation you had planned or a graduation ceremony and senior year events with friends that won’t take place. It could be a lost job or every bit of “extra” income going to pay for therapies and treatment instead of a night at the movies or a vacation.
Grief has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
These stages aren’t linear, so just because you dealt with anger yesterday that doesn’t mean you’re done with it for good. No, you can go through the stages repeatedly and can bounce back and forth between different stages. You may stay in one stage for a while or you may experience all of them in one day. A participant in one of our group Hope & Healing Workshops once commented that they felt like they were in the tumble dry cycle of a clothes dryer and that can sum it up perfectly.
What do you do about it?
Acknowledge it. Name it. Simply identifying it and naming it can help so much.
Express it. That will look differently for different people and personality types. It may be writing in a journal, talking with a friend, having a good cry, writing a lament, expressing it to God, etc.
Shelve it. While this isn’t a good long-term plan, it is sometimes necessary in the short-term. Sometimes in order to deal with what needs to be done right now in this moment, hour or day, we can’t take the time to deal with it because it would stop us from handling the current situation. But, still name it, “Oh, that’s grief. I’ll need to deal with and express this later for my emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health, but I need to set it aside for now so that I can complete _____ task.”
Express it some more. Grief comes in waves and just because you acknowledged it and expressed it once doesn’t mean the process of grieving is complete. It will usually take repeated expressions of it before you are ready to move on, especially with more significant losses.
Don’t let yourself get stuck there. If you only ever focus on the loss, you won’t be able to move into the future and build new dreams. This doesn’t mean you deny the reality of what you lost, but it does mean you say something like, “Yes, I lost ____ and that is significant, hurts terribly, and I will continue to grieve it sometimes. Yet, I have ______ and while it will be different than what I wanted, expected, and hoped for, life can still be beautiful, good, and purposeful.”
Written by Sarah McGuire
Sarah McGuire is the Mom of two boys and co-founder of Hope Anew, a nonprofit that guides parents to Christ-centered hope and healing. You can follow Hope Anew on Facebook here. You can also check out Hope Anew’s Online Community here!
Due to COVID-19, all membership fees to the Hope Anew Online Community have been waived!
Why, God, Did You Fail Me?
I had grand dreams of the ministry work we would do and the global impact that we would be a part of through our ministry with Wycliffe. The reality of life was a far cry from that. I rarely left the house, couldn’t build friendships, and caring for our sons was so all-consuming…Written by Sarah McGuire
My one-year old son had been sick since he was three weeks old: screaming, writhing, projectile vomiting every time he ate, anal fissures, bashing his head into hard surfaces, rashes, not sleeping for more than twenty minutes at a time, and more. My husband, myself, and our now three year old son had moved across the country the year before with our work as missionaries with Wycliffe Bible Translators. In our assigned location of Arlington, Texas, we had no friends, family or church connections upon our arrival and our youngest son’s health issues kept me mostly homebound.
I had grand dreams of the ministry work we would do and the global impact that we would be a part of through our ministry with Wycliffe. The reality of life was a far cry from that. I rarely left the house, couldn’t build friendships, and caring for our sons was so all-consuming taking 20-22 hours out of the 24 in a day, leaving only two to four hours for sleep. I was barely functioning, let alone reaching out to the rest of the world with the Scriptures.
As the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months and the months into a year and more, I started questioning God, His involvement in my life, His care of me and my family, His care for this world and the fight of good versus evil within it. In short, I had a crisis of faith and I learned six paradigm shifting lessons over the next several years as I worked through these and other questions.
Suffering can lead to a crisis of faith, even if you are (or thought you were) fully submitted to God’s will and to serving Him.
Even ministry leaders will struggle in their faith and will question God.
You can be faithful and obedient to God and life may not go well for you. I was serving God obediently and faithfully. Why was He failing me?
God’s goodness and care doesn’t stem from our perspective or what He does or does not do for us in this life. God is God and He is good, regardless.
God not “fixing” a situation does not mean He doesn’t see us, has abandoned us, or isn’t good. Fixing it is just not His plan, at least not for now.
|\In the process of questioning and wrestling with God, we will get to know Him better – for Himself, as He truly is, not as we have been taught about Him, but Him.
My faith was shaken to its foundations and I questioned and wrestled with God for several years as I worked to rebuild it. And in the rebuilding, I found a God who loves me, even when I doubt or don’t achieve. I found a God who is bigger and more mysterious than I knew. I found a God who wants me to be more like Him and who wants to purify my heart, motives and beliefs, even though that process may cause me pain (which also pains Him) and may have caused some distance in our relationship for a time (which also pains Him). I found a God who is the definition of unfailing love. He is love and I am His, regardless of life circumstances.
Written by Sarah McGuire
