My Defensive Team

My hubby played college football back in the day. I've never been an athlete but I fielded a pretty strong defensive line back in my day.
I recruited so many defense mechanisms when I was a child in order to survive the guilt and shame: suppressing my feelings, numbing the pain, denial, repression, putting walls around me, isolating. I guess I needed to do those things at the time in order to survive the abuse. But it's been so hard as an adult  to overcome my "defects of character" that the defense
mechanisms have turned into.

I know I can't overcome them by myself. They're too firmly ingrained in my psyche. But God can. In Celebrate Recovery (a wonderful step program for Christians that is found in many churches today), the 5th step says "Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects".

I pray daily that God will remove my "defects of character" and transform me into the woman He created me to be. I never got there, but I will, with God's help. Surely, steadily, and slower than I would like, He is changing me within. I praise God because He has never given up on me. "Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus", Phillipians 1:6. NIV