How to Address the Biggest Problem You Don’t Know You Have

Often the biggest problems in our lives aren’t the ones we know about. They aren’t the problems we’re dealing with. In fact, often what we think are the problems in our lives are really just symptoms. So often the real problem is something we’ve become so comfortable with that we think it’s normal.

Janet and I have a dear friend who had a laser eye procedure this week. She told us the doctor used a laser to burn away the membrane behind her eye that was causing her cloudy vision. Kudos to technology!

When I asked her if the procedure was successful, she sent me this email:

Very successful! I had no idea how much I was missing when I looked at things. My vision is so clear that on the way home I told my son if he would stop the car I could count the leaves on a tree. Colors are so bright. I was like a kid in a toy store telling my son all the things I was seeing as he drove home. All glory to God! Thank You Jesus!

That got me thinking. She had grown accustomed to cloudy vision. Yes, she knew her vision needed some help, but it wasn’t until after being healed that she realized how bad her vision had gotten, how much she’d been missing.

Are we like that? Have we become so comfortable with our wounding that we take the dysfunction it produces for granted? Yeah, we know we need some help in some areas, but it’s not that bad. We’ll get around to it. Some day.

Often, it has to do with how we were raised, stuff that’s been in our fundamental assumptions about the world for a long time. In inner healing lingo, we call these foundational lies. They are things we’ve believed are true for so long that now we don’t even realize we’re making that assumption. We take the lie for granted, and, like looking through a filter, it distorts how we see the rest of the world.

For a long time, I believed I was a mistake. My two brothers are ten and eleven years older than me. Before I could talk, I probably heard well-meaning, good people, talk to my parents about their “little accident.”

I believed my preferences weren’t important. I had a great dad, and growing up, he’d often play games with me if he wasn’t busy. But if he was doing work on his adding machine and I wanted some of his time, I’d ask him to play cribbage. He loved cribbage and couldn’t resist a game. He’d stop whatever he was doing, however important, and play cribbage with me. But he’d never interrupt his work for some other game that I wanted to play.

I adopted another foundational lie in high school. As a freshman, I lettered JV on the tennis team. I wasn’t that good, but I was persistent. With six singles and two doubles on each varsity and JV team, that’s 20 players total. I was #22 on the roster. On any given match day, there was a high probability two of those 20 teens would be absent. Then everyone moves up on the roster, and I’d get to play on the bottom JV doubles team. I played enough matches to letter.

After coming home from the awards banquet, I was giddy. I was never that athletic and had never had an honor like that before. I was so euphorically happy, it was like I was drunk. I was being crazy silly and laughing at my own jokes hysterically. My parents put up with it for a while, but then said, “That’s enough!” I calmed down immediately. Enter another foundational lie: “It’s wrong to be too happy.”

Now I grew up knowing I was loved. None of the lies I believed were my parent’s fault, per se. I jumped to wrong conclusions about myself and the world all on my own. But these lies, “I’m a mistake,” reinforced by “My preferences aren’t important,” and then “You don’t want to be too happy” set me up for a first marriage that was a disaster. My picker was off.

I didn’t realize I believed these lies. I certainly couldn’t articulate them. I didn’t know why I believed them. The Lord has just recently shown me these incidents in my past that tempted me to believe these lies.

Now I’ve gotten healing, and my second marriage to Janet is wonderful. It’s only having received healing that I see how wrong I was and the devastating impact these lies had on me.

So what can we do? How can we fight lies we don’t know we’re believing? Do these 3 things.

1) Ask the Holy Spirit. Regularly.

Make it a regular practice, during your daily time with the Lord, to ask him what you’ve gotten used to. Ask him to show you your blind spots. This is what David was asking God in Psalm 139:

Search me, O God, and experience my heart. Test me and experience my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. –Psalm 139:

2) Investigate Your Bad Behaviors. Connect the Dots.

If you’ve got behaviors in your life that you know are dysfunctional that you can’t seem to find your way out of, that’s a clue that somewhere, in the fiber of your being, you’re believing a foundational lie.

For example, addictions are usually never the problem. They’re a symptom. What pain are you medicating? If you don’t know, think back in your life. When did the addiction start? What happened in your life about then?

We’re constantly amazed by how many people we see at our crisis pregnancy center that don’t connect the dots between their depression and their abortion. Now relax, I’m not saying all depression is a result of abortion. It’s obviously not. But it is an extremely common result of abortion, as are addictions, relationship issues, and a host of other dysfunctions. But because the abortion was something they “chose” (although most women are actually coerced), and society lies that this was something that was good for them, they don’t connect the dots.

We see it with post-abortive men too. If your self-medicating started after a particular breakup, you could have fathered an aborted child and not even known it. But your spirit knows. Many men are left with an overwhelming sense of failure where their self-confidence used to be, and they don’t know where it came from. They don’t connect the dots.

3) Ask Your Heart.

I’ve a longer post on this subject here. Talking to your heart is a skill you can learn.

Ask your heart questions: “Heart, why are you afraid?” “Heart, why did it hurt when that person said that seemingly innocent thing?” Then shut your brain up, be still, and listen to your heart. Often, your heart answers with memories or pictures rather than words.

Once we know what the lies are, we can replace them with God’s truth. Ask the Holy Spirit what’s the opposite of that lie for you, and tape it to your bathroom mirror, computer, steering wheel, or someplace you’ll see it every day. Over time, we can choose to believe the truth God says about us instead of the lies the world (and ourselves) say about us.

How about you?

What foundational lies have you believed? How did you discover them? What truth did you replace them with? We’d love to hear your story. And please share this post on social media if it would bless someone else.