BP77
It often happens in the late teens and into the late twenties. Sometimes sooner. Sometimes later. People discover that they have hidden rooms in their houses. Not in the houses made of concrete, 2 x 4s, and sheetrock. No, in the houses of the heart.
I like to think of the soul (psyche) as a house.
Some houses are very straightforward. What you see is what you get: A living room, kitchen, dining room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a tastefully finished basement, and an attic that is largely empty except for a few Christmas decoration boxes and old clothes.
This style of house represents a person’s soul who grew up in a safe, predictable, loving family—certainly not with perfect people, but with solid people, many if not most of them lovers of God. These individuals did not experience trauma or abuse inside or outside the family environment.
Then there are the houses that have many mystery rooms. There might be three or four extra closets (sometimes thirty) or a sub-basement beneath the first basement or an attic room full of trunks and old armoires. None of these rooms are open. The doors are all shut. Their existence is sometimes not even known by the owner of the house.
Some of these houses may even have thick brick walls behind which is a room bigger than a football field. Such was true of Maggie. She had a field of colorful flowers behind her wall that she would often go to during times of unbearable fear.
These houses with the many hidden rooms represent the coping skills of individuals who grew up with trauma and/or tragic abuse. Anxiety, terror, loneliness, profound loneliness, a sense of being inherently unlovable, and rage built the hidden rooms and also reside in them.
But these rooms are more than repositories for emotions. There are also memories in these secret places that are too terrible to recover. Often, there are parts of the self in these mysterious spaces that contain the emotions and the memories. A little boy may be locked inside who believes his sins are appalling and cannot be forgiven, or a little girl who has been convinced that she is too bad to be fully seen by others. Sometimes, it is simply too terrifying to come out and be seen.
Split off parts of the child live in these rooms–alone, scared, and ill-equipped to function in the outside world. This problematic youngster must be sequestered in the hidden rooms where he or she cannot interfere with daily functioning through eruptions of crippling anxiety, destructive rage, tears that sometimes seem to be triggered by absolutely nothing, and memories that bring with them great fear.
Let’s look at some of the specific things that inhabit these panic rooms where the child went in and never came out.
Ivy was sexually abused over a period of years by her own mother. Her anger slowly grew within her during these repeated boundary violations but could not be expressed because her mother would either become abusively angry or would threaten to kill herself. Consequently, Ivy added rooms to her soul house where she could deposit the terror and rage she could never express.
Kari grew up in a house with an unstable mother who would react unpredictably and irrationally. Sometimes, for even unknown infractions of her mother’s ever-changing rules, Kari was locked in the basement for hours at a time. The little girl hated the basement because she was terrified of the dark. Her mother knew about Kari’s fear of the basement. That’s exactly why she (sadistically) threw her down into the darkness.
Ironically, Kari would often hide in her bedroom closet to escape her crazy mother. Kari grew up with many hidden closets in her soul house where she would hide her emotions, needs, and true self.
Ben had two disabled parents. His father was disabled by a heart condition and so was unavailable to him physically and emotionally while his mother was disabled by a fear of abandonment that rendered her hypersensitive to perceived rejection—even from her children. Ben had a hidden room where he locked up everything about his personality that might trigger his mother’s abandonment fears which often led her to attack him verbally or to lock him out of the house.
Maddie had to share a physical house with a mother who was psychotic. This mentally ill woman selected Maddie as her designated scapegoat onto which she could project all her badness. Maddie’s mother carried around generations of evil that had been perpetrated in the extended family as well as the subsequent shame that accompanied it so she had a lot of badness to pour into her young daughter’s soul. Maddie’s mother not only physically abused her; she also told her repeatedly that God would condemn her to hell for her sinful heart. Her father was not psychotic but was often critical of his vulnerable daughter.
To survive her mother’s projected evil and vitriol, Maddie did not simply add a few closets and attic rooms to her soul house. She went even further than that and created a whole castle she could escape to during times of particularly intense abuse. Whenever reality became dangerous or overstimulating for her, Maddie transported herself to her safe castle even more quickly that Scottie would transport Mr. Spock from Vulcan to the transporter room of the Enterprise.
The only people permitted to enter Maddie’s castle were characters she created or two or three individuals from the real world who were safe and caring.
We could go on to look at the early lives of Daunte, Anne, Jordan, Haley, Brittany, Cindy, Austin–all of whom experienced significant trauma or abuse in their homes or outside their homes. What exactly impacted these people when they were young?
Parental personality disorders such as narcissism, borderline, and OCPD; chronic blaming, schizophrenia, major depression, sexual abuse committed by a parent or a relative, extreme emotional or physical absence, suffocation with a pillow, traumatic death of a parent, childhood disease, even something as exotic and insidious as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) where the parent makes up or causes an illness in the child in order to receive attention and sympathy from the community.
Every one of these children had to add rooms to the house of their soul to survive. They all had to send away parts of themselves that could not remain in the world of reality.
Few of them were aware of the accommodations (hidden rooms) they were constructing to survive their environment. None of them knew that in adulthood these unhealthy accommodations would begin to leak like barrels of toxic waste thrown into a lake and impact their everyday lives.
Some of these individuals who had houses with many extra closets and hidden rooms survived quite well (at least on the outside) for many years. Then, at age twenty or twenty-five, the barrels began to leak, and symptoms appeared, sometimes suddenly. Often, marriage and having children triggered memories and opened doors to the panic rooms that had been sealed shut so long ago.
There are just a few points I want to make today about these hidden rooms.
First, be sensitive to others around you who are struggling—even in their walk with Jesus or in their relationships with other people. These individuals might be coping with childhood abuse, trauma, abandonment, profound isolation, shaming annihilation, and the deeply rooted belief that they are unlovable.
They might be hypersensitive to criticism, quick to defend themselves even at perceived slights or threats, using chemicals to cope, difficult to access, funny and entertaining on the outside but deeply depressed and suicidal on the inside, afraid to let anyone enter their hidden rooms or the castle.
Set good boundaries between you and these individuals but simultaneously allow them to depend on you as you seek to win their trust. Invite them to internalize your consistent presence and care even as they alternatively move too close to you and then too far away. It will take these individuals a while to understand what is merger and what is detachment—to calibrate healthy intimacy. Give them some time and space to figure it out with you.
Secondly, if you know or suspect that you have a house with extra closets, sub-basements, hidden rooms in the attic, or walls that protect a private room that maybe even you cannot fully access, move toward someone you trust. For some of you, that will be a professional counselor. For others, it may be a trained pastor or mentor who understands panic rooms of the soul and how to access them.
Do not be alone with these hidden places in your soul. Also, do not expect your spouse to fully understand these coping rooms or to help heal you. These private spaces in the heart are present due to high levels of pain and aloneness and cannot be fixed by your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend. It usually will be too big of an ask and can place huge stress on your relationship.
Thirdly, as you begin the work of allowing someone into your soul who can help seek out your hidden rooms and listen for the deep cry of your heart, you may experience the most difficult season of your life. Finding panic rooms and opening their doors is exhausting work because it requires the development of great trust. But then to enter these private places and work through what dwells therein is even more exhausting.
Searching your soul can feel like a full-time job, and more. Some people fear that they will be overwhelmed by emotions and need to be hospitalized. Others are convinced that they will not like who they will become at the end of the journey. Still others will struggle to believe that they can ever trust anyone sufficiently to share the contents of their hidden rooms.
For those of you who do choose to go spelunking inside the cave system beneath the basement, be prepared to experience Parallel Processing. PP is my phrase to refer to the experience of living two lives at the same time.
As you do the journey to locate and open the hidden spaces within your heart, you will be living life in the outside world even as you begin to live life increasingly in the inside world. As you commit 95% of your emotional and spiritual energy to clean the inside of the cup, as Jesus called it, you will need energy to keep living in the outside world of reality where you may need to go to work, raise kids, love your spouse, move toward God, etc.
This journey of internal growth may be the most difficult thing you will ever do in your lifetime. After all, living one reality is difficult enough. Processing two worlds as they parallel and overlap will sometimes feel like more than you can handle. Thus the reason to always have trusted people with you on the journey, preferably people who understand spelunking in the human heart.
Parallel processing—understand it in advance so you will know why the journey of the recovery of the soul can be so exhausting and so daunting that your first instinct is to run from it. The emotions you feel, the memories you may recover, and the trust you need to grow will seem way beyond your ability much of the time.
But consider this final and most important thought.
Jesus came to pursue you—even into the hidden rooms and the dark basements whose contents threaten to implode your whole self.
For all of you who desire to grow on the inside whether you have hidden rooms in your soul or not (I’m almost certain we all have a few), I encourage you to memorize Psalm 139. It is such amazing news for the human soul that wrestles with hiddenness.
O Lord, you have searched me and have known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it all together. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me; it is high; I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them ~ Psalm 139.
What words of comfort! God searches you and knows you—even the hidden rooms of your soul. He is acquainted with all your ways (even the coping mechanisms of childhood that often hide you from everyone else). Wherever you went as a child to cope—to heaven or to hell—He will be with you. He will pursue you and search for you and find you.
The truth, then, is that you are not alone—even in the deepest, pitch-black panic rooms in your soul. You can never go anywhere where God is not already there waiting. So, allow Him in; with the help of a trusted counselor, remove every obstacle to the knowledge (relationship with) of God and other humans.
You are a designed being who was made to be seen and known by God and others. Do not settle for the lie that you are an alien, different than every other human on the planet, and that there is no hope for such an exotic, eccentric creature as you. If you were designed, you are knowable. Sometimes the walls we construct and the rooms we hide in are so isolated and seemingly impenetrable that it can feel like no one will ever get in. Read Psalm 139 again.
And again.
Soak in His presence.
Remember, the psycho-spiritual-relational default position of humanity is hiding, separation, withdrawal, alienation—even if you haven’t experienced trauma and abuse. So, Seek Jesus with all your heart to help you. He is the only one who ultimately reconciles you to the Father and removes the dividing wall between you and other people.
Cry out to Him, and He will begin to open every door to every room in your heart. You were never meant to be alone, so don’t settle for isolation on the level of your soul.
He is knocking on the door or your heart even as you read these words.
He is the One who enters every panic room and brings joy and peace.
Joy to the world delivered by Immanuel, the God who is with us.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me ~ Psalm 23:1-4