Soothing

Since I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue this week, I've spent a lot of time researching ways to regulate stress, relax, and calm myself.  Mostly, I'm finding a lot of the same information...and that's annoying.  Not that I am the smartiest smarty pants on the planet, but most stress management is common sense.  As I've been mulling over strategies to help my mind heal my body, I thought of another word...SOOTHING.

Soothing, at least for me, carries a different connotation than relaxing or calming.  It means that something is red and raw and needs to have the sting removed.  Thinking of the concept of soothing brought to mind a recent encounter I had with a sunburn. 

A few weeks ago, I sustained one of the worst sunburns I've had in a LONG LONG time.  My sons and I went to the lake with a friend.  It was a great afternoon, but it ended with the exhausting twinge of a sunburn.  When I got home, the skin around my shoulders and upper back was so red it was nearly purple.  The entire area screamed with pain.  This wasn't one of those sunburns that allows you to move on with your life, rather it required my full attention and care to keep the agony at bay.

The thing with sunburns is that they keep cooking even after you've come in from the sun.  I'm not entirely certain of the biology, but from experience I know that my sunburns only gets worse after a few hours of being inside.  Thus, my first task was trying to stop the burning. 

Truthfully, I threw everything I had at this sunburn.  I had a very busy weekend coming up and I needed this thing under control as soon as possible.  I applied aloe, aloe with lidocaine, Noxema, and even tea compresses to my wounded skin.  Even with all of that effort, it still took two days for heat to stop radiating from my body. 

I think this is where I am right now in my journey toward emotional healing.  None of these stress management techniques or self care tips are going to be beneficial until I can soothe the raw, burning, wound in my soul.  There is this deep, desperate, rage in my heart.  If I am honest I can name a handful of reasons for this longstanding anger...but generally I have very little understanding of how or why I have reached this intense level of fury. 

Whenever I am under stress (which, because of my season of life and personality, is often several times a day), the stressor feels like someone taking a cheese grater to a sunburn.  Annoyances, injustices, financial burdens, relational issues, and fretful busy-ness fly into my heart and run their fingernails against my scorched emotions. The impetus for strain doesn't need to be anything major...it's really a barrage of small incidents building on top of one another that gets to me...like 1,000 paper cuts on an already damaged soul.  Until I can soothe the searing storm at my core, no matter what causes the tension, the gut reaction is going to be far more intense than is warranted. 

I don't really know how to soothe deep rooted anger.  As a Christian, what I SHOULD say is that I am relying God to heal my wounded soul.  I wish that I could say that prayer and Bible reading have been beneficial with regard to my inner rage.  The reality is that, often, the words of the Bible only serve to make me angrier and more filled with venom.  Lists and passages highlighting my innate imperfection only serve to heap on guilt and frustration.  When I go to the word for a cool compress for my inflamed heart, I am met with sharp clawed words of admonition and rebuke that I can't even hope to answer to.

I'm left with very little resources on the topic of soothing.  I even Googled it and basically got referred to stress management.  Un-helpful.  I want to be soothed...I need to be soothed...but the remedy remains shrouded in mystery for me.