I loved this comment by Beyond Blue reader Margaret, because I so related. I get my fears and troubles to God alright–they go via FedEx. It’s RELEASING them that’s the tough part. And I also love what she says about the different of acknowledging something (the trauma of my part) and accepting it and moving on. Great stuff, Margaret. Thanks!

For me, the difficulty lies not in taing my fears and troubles to our Father in prayer, it’s in leaving them there and RELEASING them; I always tend to “hang around” and try to “fix” them myself!
Even the little tricks my therapists have shared with me to conceptualize the letting go don’t seem to keep me from “grabbing” them” when I leave His throne. I’ve tried tying each fear to the string of a helium balloon ad letting them go while I pray, writing them on slips of paper that I then ball up and deposit in a trash bag or burning them in a fire. But none of those exercises has “gotten me over the hump”; the fears are back within minutes of completing the exercise.

It’s only in sleep–and sometimes not even there!–that I’m able to escape them. And even when I DO achieve dreamless, carefree sleep free of nightmares, they’re back almost instantly upon awakening, at times with even MORE intensity! SOMEWHERE (I can’t locate exactly where!) there’s a verse that states that God gives sleep to His beloved, so the fact that I’m frequently UNABLE TO “GET THERE” becomes yet another “proof that I don’t really matter or am not truly one of His “beloved.”
Vicious cycle, I know! but not one I’ve as yet learned to break no matter HOW hard I attempt to do so! Intellectually I understand that my troubled relationship with my earthly father is at the bottom of this, but intellectual knowledge and true acceptance don’t walk hand in hand through MY psyche!