The times are ripe for an epidemic of worry.  When our security and lifestyle is threatened by forces we can’t even influence, much less control, it is a natural human response to fret.  Natural and common as it is, worry isn’t productive.  Nothing ever changes because of worrying because there is no real action associated with worrying that could impact the outcome of the issue at hand.  It is much like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.

Worry is a form of mental distress caused by concern for some possible or anticipated event.  It is often thought of as an emotion or even a personality trait, since we all know someone for whom worrying is their favorite sport.  Actually, worrying is not an emotion at all.  Worry is a form of mental obsession that is unhealthy and unproductive.  Left unchecked, worry leads us to replay possible disastrous outcomes over and over again in our minds until we embrace a distorted reality.

Most worry is over far-fetched events that have little likelihood of actually occurring. Worry is so pointless because it focuses all our energy and emotion on what might happen. Worry is seldom for the real issues that beset us in the here and now; those real issues usually receive real action.  In fact, concern for a legitimate problem motivates us to take meaningful action, which is why we visit a doctor about a pain or see a mechanic about a noise under the hood.  Worry, though, rarely leads to constructive action.  In fact, real problems that need attention may get worse as the worrier sits immobilized and obsessing.

What are some warning signs that worry might be out of balance in your life?  If you are not sleeping, or if you’re not productive because your mind is preoccupied with a particular issue, things may have tipped out of balance.  If you simply aren’t taking care of business because you are distracted with worry, or if you obsess on two or more issues for two or more days in a row, you may be out of balance.  All of this can contribute to an unhealthy level of stress that in turn can lead to anxiety issues and even panic disorders.  And stress, as you likely already know, can take a toll on your physical health.

Worry is a symptom of fear, and for the follower of Jesus fear is the opposite of faith.  When we operate in fear and worry over possible outcomes we can’t control we act as though God’s Word is not to be trusted and His promises are not to be believed.  Jesus in Matthew 6 instructed the multitudes to forego worrying and trust God to provide.  That wisdom is no less valid in these troubled times.  Jesus is happy to relieve you of the burden of worry and replace it with the peace that comes from trusting God to work the situation out for the best in a way only He can orchestrate.  I encourage you to begin your day alone with God and take Him your list of worries.  Ask for guidance and direction for the legitimate problems in your life, and for peace without mental obsession over the issues that only might occur.  Pour your heart out to Him.  He wants that intimacy with you, and He wants you to be at peace, free of fear and trusting Him to care for you.

Steve Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services in Charlevoix.  counseling by appointment, 231.675.4682

What to do with Worry

In a recent column I sought to make the community aware of a new phenomenon among young people tormented by bullies: suicide, or, as it is becoming known, “bullycide”.

Increasingly across America, anguished adolescents suffering at the hands of relentless bullies are deciding death is an honorable alternative to another day at school. But it isn’t enough to sound the alarm without offering something meaningful to help combat bullying in our own community, and that’s the focus here.

Let’s define the problem we’re dealing with, then consider what we must do. Bullying is intentional, malicious aggression by one or more persons directed against another person who is unable to mount a defense. Bullies are cowards, for they never push against anyone they think might push back. But bullies don’t look like cowards to our kids.

Bullied kids are required by us adults to get on the bus for a harassing ride into a hostile environment where they expect to be hurt, humiliated, degraded, or excluded. Their options are limited. They’re expected to endure, and to do it alone. They are too small to fight back, and it takes them about an hour after the humiliation is over to come up with a clever comeback. They are excluded from every group they try to join. Their day is miserable. And with the advent of cyber-bullying, the online and text-based torment goes on through the night.

So what has to change? Although the bullying we’re concerned about is kid-on-kid, it is we adults who have to change. There are three key changes we adults have to make if we expect to bully-proof the culture in which our kids are growing up.

First, we adults must fundamentally change the way we regard bullying. Bullying is institutionalized cruelty. It is harmful, but we go on one generation after another dismissing the damage it does. What seems like teasing to one child feels like torment to another. The damage to a child’s sense of themselves becomes a permanent wound in their spirit they carry through adulthood. We must become unwilling to tolerate an environment in which are children are knowingly harmed as though it were inevitable. We must get past the attitude that “boys will be boys” (which applies equally to girls) as though children are entitled to be cruel to one another, or that anyone should be expected to endure bullying as a rite of passage to adulthood. When we adopt the “boys will be boys” position, we wrongly assert that young people are incapable of being civil or sensitive, that they are at their core just brutes and therefore incapable of treating another person with respect or understanding how their actions impact another. Before we do anything else we adults must adopt and enforce a zero tolerance standard for any behavior that degrades the basic human dignity of another person.

Second, we adults have to change the expectations we have of our children. Children will rise to our standards for appropriate behavior if only we will express them as an expectation. When we adults, who are charged with raising children to become responsible grownups, are silent about our expectations our kids define their own. We need to teach our kids that when they encounter another person who is weaker, slower, less attractive, or somehow flawed they should relate to that person with compassion, not contempt. And they need to see us model that behavior. Kids should be told in no uncertain terms that they will not pick on other people, and will experience serious consequences if they do.

Third, we have to change the environment in which our kids spend their day. It’s true kids will be kids, and we will always have bullying incidents. The real issue is how adults respond. Do both bullies and victims have confidence adults will deal forcefully with a bullying incident? Are zero tolerance bullying policies established and enforced? Are known bullies confronted and counseled? Are victims supported and protected?

If your child is a bully your responsibility is to educate them in civil behavior and enforce high expectations for their conduct. If your child is a victim, you need to defend them while they grow to the point that they can defend themselves. Your child has no other advocate, no other champion. Whether it is speaking to the parents of a child who is bullying yours, holding the schools accountable for providing a safe place for your child to spend their day, or taking civil and criminal action against cyber-bullying, if you don’t defend your child no one else will.

Remember, it is the child who feels alone and desperate who is most likely to become the next bullycide statistic.

Stephen Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services in Charlevoix. By appointment at 231.675.4682

Adults Have To Act Now To Stop Bullying & Bullycide

So why recount for you an event that happened so far away to a total stranger one year ago?

The reason is that Carl Walker Hoover, died not of suicide but of bullycide. After weeks of taunts about his sexual orientation, this frail, pre-pubescent boy could no longer stand the humiliation. Depressed and afraid, dying seemed more attractive to Carl than enduring another day at school.

Before you shrug this off as a tragic but isolated event, I should point out to you that in the week leading up to the one year anniversary of Carl’s bullycide three other children chose to take the suicide escape route.

Shortly after an eight year old boy in Houston jumped from a building, 13 year old Jon Carmichael of Joshua, Texas hanged himself in a barn after enduring weeks of harassment over his small stature.
And then there was Phoebe Prince, who moved from Ireland to Massachusetts only to become the target of a group of self-described “mean girls” and boys. These classmates, about 15 in all, systematically tormented her. After weeks of taunts, threats, assaults, name-calling, exclusion, and cyber-bullying she hanged herself. Her tormenters have been charged with criminal offenses, including statutory rape.

Nearly every adult I know recalls being bullied in the years leading up to high school, the time when bullying is most prevalent. Each was bullied in one of three traditional ways.

First there is physical bullying, in which a larger kid intimidates, threatens, and does violent physical harm to another child that is usually smaller and unable to defend themselves. In the 1998 bullycide case of 13 year old Jared High of Pasco, Washington a bully who outweighed the 77 lb. special education student by nearly 100 lbs. beat him so badly in the school gymnasium that he called his dad at work to say goodbye and shot himself in the head.

The second common form of bullying is name calling. Whoever told you “sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you” had it all wrong. Insults, taunts, and false allegations, especially when spread day and night over the internet, twitter, facebook, and texting strikes right at the heart of a young person struggling with adolescence. This is what overwhelmed Carl Walker Hoover.

The third common form of bullying is by exclusion. Being an accepted member of a group is of disproportional importance to an adolescent, and to be intentionally targeted for exclusion and systematically ostracized is more than some young hearts can bear.

If you want to understand bullying by exclusion, rent the movie “Mean Girls”. It was just the sort of orchestrated cruelty depicted in this movie that overwhelmed Phoebe Prince.

For the last five years I’ve worked directly with students and schools to confront bullying and I want you to know bullying is alive and well in our community. I’ve worked with kids who feign sickness to avoid the bully on the school bus. I’ve worked with kids who will avoid going to the bathroom all the school day for fear of who’s waiting in there. I’ve worked with kids who’ve experienced depression, anxiety, nightmares, bed-wetting, spontaneous crying, lost appetite, and acid reflux, all in response to being bullied.
There are those in Charlevoix who believe the troubles that beset the rest of society can’t happen here, that we are somehow immune or special.

But bullying is a reality for our kids. They can list the bullies by name, and the victims who are the favorite targets. It’s baffling that in a society in which we seem keen on dealing with hate crimes, we allow the hate crime of bullying to become the daily norm for our children.

Parents describe to me a mindset here that dismisses bullying as a rite of passage in the middle school years, and routinely brushes off reports of bullying with a “boys will be boys” shrug. Victims tell me that telling an adult often leads nowhere. For young people across America, suicide is becoming a legitimate, even honorable, alternative to being bullied. We must confront this hate crime for the sake of our kids, and not let bulllycide happen here.

Stephen Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services in Charlevoix. By appointment at 231.675.4682

The Distinction between Suicide and Bullycide

The impact of divorce on the husband and wife is significant in itself, but when there are kids involved the damage is compounded. Last year 38,727 Michigan kids woke up one morning to find their family fractured. Closer to home, in 2007 Charlevoix County recorded 215 marriages but 109 divorces, and most of those dissolutions involved children.

Those cold statistics don’t begin to tell the full story of the effect of divorce on children. I worked two years as an Americorp member at my local elementary school mentoring and counseling children who were struggling in different ways, and my caseload was made up almost entirely of kids from broken homes. These were kids whose homes were split in two by parents who gave up, not just on one another but on the family that had been the source of their children’s stability and security. Those kids came to school reflecting the underlying fear of every child of divorce: who’s going to take care of me? And they came to school each day dragging the big bag of guilt known to every child of divorce: was the divorce, and the ruination of my family home, my fault?

There are some myths husbands and wives drag out when they are considering breaking up the family, myths about the impact of divorce on their children. I’ve had parents insist that children of divorce do just as well in school as children from stable homes, and that many of their kid’s friends are from divorced families and those kids seemed to be adjusting just fine. Those views seem to help them rationalize the damage they are about to do, but they just aren’t true. Kids experiencing divorce come to school anxious and stressed, and they act out in class and on the playground. These kids are more likely to experiment with drugs and sex, and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. Do they adjust? Sure, just not very well, not too quickly and not without a lot of pain.

Divorce may look like the easy way out of a marriage under stress, but if you are married with children there are seven good reasons not to divorce.

No. 1: God hates divorce. The Bible says it just like that in Malachi 2:16. When man and woman are joined in matrimony the new union that is created has standing with God, and His directive is that what God has joined together man shall not separate. (Mark 10:19)

No. 2: Divorce permanently damages your kids. The emotional scars will shape their outlook, behaviors, and choices for their entire lives. And if you’re the one who moves out of the home, in the mind of your child you will always be the one who abandoned them, never to be fully trusted.

No. 3: Divorce leaves you damaged in body, soul, and spirit. Your nerves and emotions will be stressed to their limit, and that stress will overflow into your physical well being. Your relationship with God will suffer as you insist on having what you want while ignoring what He wants.

No. 4: Divorce damages your reputation. Social circles thrive on gossip, and you will forever be defined by this event. Whether victim or villain, you will always be maligned, particularly if the divorce grew out of an affair.

No. 5: If you are a Christian, you damage your credibility as a person of faith trying to live a godly life. Your witness for Christ will be forever suspect.

No. 6: Divorce doesn’t actually solve anything, it only complicates the logistics of your day. If you have children, the person you divorce will still be very much in your life, just not in your bed.

No. 7: For nearly everyone except the very wealthy, divorce is financially devastating. You will forfeit all the wealth and assets you’ve accumulated in the years you’ve been working together, and you will be years rebuilding. Moreover, if you are among the millions of couples who require the pay checks of two working adults to barely operate one household, how will you stretch that income to operate two?

All things considered, divorce is not the easy way out. Don’t be so quick to throw away your wealth, reputation, health, and children just to get away from the spouse you once loved and could love again. I promise you, you’ll spend a lot less on a counselor to save your marriage than you will on lawyer fees to end it. And your kids will thank you for it.

7 Reasons Not To Divorce

“So, how about it?”, I asked the battling husband and wife as they each looked down and away.  “Are you going to commit to saving this marriage, or are you going to just call it quits?”

It was a scene repeated too often in the counseling office.

A husband and wife, who are also often a mom and dad, sitting uncomfortably, waiting for the counselor to take charge of their dysfunctional lives and lead them out of the marital wilderness.

They’ve come for a last shot at “counseling”, as though it were a pill or a procedure one could undergo that would, in just under an hour, undo the damage may have been going on for years and that now threatens their marriage.

At that moment of put up or shut up, these angry, wounded people are thinking only of themselves.  One or both of them is focused exclusively on their contempt for the person they once loved, and thinking only of life apart from them.

At this point they are not thinking clearly of what lies ahead.

They aren’t considering how financially devastating their divorce will be.

They haven’t done the simple arithmetic to explain how two people working full time to barely afford one house will now pay for two.

They haven’t anticipated what will happen to their social relationships, and the damage it will do to their  family and friends.

Sitting in my office, they have no notion of the physical, emotional, and spiritual price they will each pay in the stressful weeks ahead.

In their selfishness they have not even given a thought to what their divorce will do to their children.  They have already rationalized away the fear and disruption their kids will experience, noting that many of their friends’s parents have divorced and all those kids seem to have survived it all right.

The sad reality is that a large percentage of struggling couples who come to a counselor don’t come to get well but rather to drive the final nail in the coffin.

And people who are about to pay thousands in lawyer fees and court costs to end their union balk at paying anything for counseling that might save it.

I was bemoaning all of this with my friend Amy Spegele, who has her own perspective on failed marriages.

Amy runs the DivorceCare program at Community Reformed Church, and the companion program DivorceCare for Kids.  In the six years she has counseled divorced couples and their children she has grown all too familiar with the personal pain and the high cost of splitting families.

Amy also runs a program called Choosing Wisely, a Christian program that in five weeks explores all the realities of divorce.  The no-cost program is for couples whose marriage is skating on the slippery slope, but who have not yet completely given up one one another or on the union that provides an umbrella of security for their children.

In the Choosing Wisely program the couple sits with Amy once each week for five weeks.  At the end they have gained a realistic perspective of divorce, and are prepared to make an informed decision based on something other than their inflamed emotions.

And because the reality of divorce is so sad and so difficult, their new reality-based perspective often leads them to give the marriage another go.  In fact, about 75% of the couples who work with Amy choose to reconcile and resurrect their marriage.

For that minority who decide to end their marriage, the split is more civil and less destructive.  Knowing how to end a marriage graciously makes for what Amy calls a “healthier” divorce, a parting with less collateral damage to family, friends, and children.

Aside from coming face-to-face with the sobering reality of what divorce really costs, couples who work with Amy come to realize that one partner can never change the other.  All they can do is change the way they view that partner and respond to them.

And in the tradition of bringing Biblical teaching into the equation, Amy spends one week on the topic of forgiveness and another on the process of reconciliation.

Amy teaches her couples that if they make the decision to stick it out, they are likely to need coaching and encouragement to change the way they deal with one another.  That’s where counseling comes in.

As a counselor, what a treat it would be to work with one of Amy’s couples who have chosen to save their marriage.

Steve Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services, counseling by appointment at 231.675-4682.  Amy Spegele can be reached at 231.675-1925.

Broken Marriage