Journey Into The Divided Heart: Facing the Defense Mechanisms That Hinder True Emotional Healing

By Steve Fair

Perhaps you've been to counseling for years or maybe you've never sought outside help. Either way, you know there are fears, insecurities, emotional blockages that have kept you from living truly free. You're tired of it and want more.Congratulations! You hold in your hands a guide to help you on your path to true freedom, a path that can lead you safely into true emotional wholeness. You experience unresolved pain and multiple layers of self-protection called defense mechanisms, that lead to addictions, anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties (yes-even with God) with which we all struggle. This book will give you the tools you need from botha clinical and spiritual perspective to become truly free. The resulting peace, love, joy, reconciled marriages and relationships, and sense of positive Christ centered identity, is the fruit of your journey and will come as you lay these protections down that have become your prison.This book is a must read for anyone looking for true lasting change, as well as a role-defining text for counselors and pastors who are looking to integrate cutting-edge clinical counseling with an unwavering faith-based, non-religious approach to working with the brokenhearted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HigherLife Publishing
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951492144

Book preview

Introduction

It was 1998, and I had been out of college long enough to have worked at my local church counseling center for a couple years, and at our local community health center, the leading substance-abuse center in our area, which served some of the toughest cases in our community.

Now I was working at a Christian counseling center job (a job I enjoyed very much), and there I found myself questioning God, asking Him how real, lasting, heart-level change happens. And these questions were leading me down a path of self-examination: I examined everything I had learned and experienced up to that point in my life.

I was on a journey to discover the answer to my questions! My consistent thought became, there just has to be more…

I enjoyed great days in both my counseling office and my pastoral staff ministry. I worked with kids, teens, adults, marriages, and the full array of really tough mental health issues along with some simpler ministry church cases that involved only normal life stressors. I enjoyed them all immensely. Instead of receiving a paycheck, I would have paid my employers to do my job because I was doing what I loved—talking to people! God had given me a heart like His that enjoys loving all God’s children.

Loving them through listening, encouraging, and directing wasn’t enough though. I believed only the hope of a greater love, His love, would take them to true healing, and that is what I wanted for them!

It seemed to me way deep down inside that something was missing in counseling and ministry. It seemed my coworkers and I were doing good work; we cared for our clients and gave them our best, but God was not healing them in a miraculous and supernatural way! We were making a difference in people’s lives at some level, but the same thought kept returning, There just has to be more… which created a drive within me to seek the more, to learn why God was not healing completely through our work.

I had already come through some personal struggles with fear and insecurity myself and could still see these issues pop up inside me at times, especially when I was being stretched by entering into new situations. Why was I anxious and insecure? I was raised in the church and had the absolute best Christian family. I was progressing on many levels in my own personal growth. But I knew I still had work to do when these issues surfaced in my marriage, my job, and in times of conflict or stress. Where were these issues still coming from and how could I fully heal? I was on the right track and growing, but the thought remained, There just has to be more…

I knew there was a better, more complete way to heal emotionally, and I knew God would show me if I asked. Somehow I knew He had placed the desire within me to search Him for the answers. He wanted me to recognize the discontent with my own progress and that of my clients and call out to Him. So call out to Him I did.

Looking back now, it is clear to me that this period was the start of a journey that led me further into my own heart – meaning my own soul with all its emotions, thoughts, desires. This journey would teach me critical truths that would help lead many others to their breakthroughs too.

God directed my every step. He quite miraculously led me to places where I learned about what we now call inner healing. I found out that others in the clinical and Christian counseling realm were learning and teaching new healing models. I studied, learned, and practiced these inner-healing tools, and wow, I finally saw the power of the living God touching and miraculously changing human hearts.

For the first time in a while, I felt alive, especially when we invited Jesus to come into deep places of people’s trauma. I saw what one encounter with Jesus could do in an instant to heal the heart, remove shame and fear, and extinguish the lasting effects of horrific trauma!

Within I will share what these tools are and how they have grown and evolved since the late ‘90s and early 2000s with the help of my coauthor, Father Andrew Miller from HeartSync Ministries. Inner-healing prayer is at the heart of how to heal the divided heart for sure. But there was more…

I had been seeing increasingly more difficult cases, like adults with psychosis, for instance. But as this season of my counseling ministry progressed, I noticed that as I was further equipped with these inner-healing tools, God brought me those with even deeper-seated issues that had more and more of a spiritual twist. For example, I started to see even young kids who were hearing voices and having tormenting demonic-type nightmares. While I had previously seen many people with obsessive-compulsive issues, now I started to see more cases that included deeply religious preoccupations and deep, dark depression that was more than just clinical.

I also started to see many clients with true dissociative disorders. People with distinct, multiple personalities (now clinically labeled as Dissociative Identity Disorder) started coming to my office. A significant number of them had endured ritualistic abuse from their perfectionistic, religious homes. Some of these dissociated people came straight from the satanic occult too. People with the toughest of difficulties, though, were being set free with inner healing prayer by Jesus through me. Needless to say, I was excited. In fact, I was elated.

I was finally seeing people truly change.

My clients knew they were truly changing, and my coworkers saw God moving supernaturally in my clients to heal them more quickly and completely. I was finally learning what the more was.

There was a spiritual element (not just religious) to true healing that had to go deep; it had to encounter the power of the living God, and it had to deal with the double-mindedness (James 1:8) in the person’s broken heart to be really healed and whole. I noticed that some people did not keep their freedom. Most of them still struggled with true relationships and attachments even after having much inner-healing breakthrough. It may sound strange, but some people became almost addicted to the feel good of inner healing and seemed not to grow past this stage. They may have healed their hearts inside, but they never seemed to function better or learn how to make more responsible decisions by thinking differently.

As my journey continued, I learned that the broken heart is not fully whole until it learns that it does not have to be its own protector anymore. A healed heart is a heart that no longer needs to be on guard duty all the time. Instead, a healed heart has a sense of permanent safety, security, belonging, purpose, and love that comes from having a protector of his or her emotional heart. A protector who is much more powerful than the self.

How does this work? I wondered.

What God showed me will be covered in the following pages and has everything to do with the title of the book, Journey into the Divided Heart. The biblical concept of the divided heart comes from the Old Testament book of Hosea. It’s a concept that will help us answer the question, What’s missing inside me that is causing me to feel as if I am not whole?

The answer is that you are not living life from the God-given fullness of being truly you! Being your true self has everything to do with healing the dividedness of your heart.

My divided heart teaching started to challenge people to see the double-mindedness they have, and that true healing was complete, not after some counseling on emotions or even after some inner-healing sessions, but only when we leave behind our old immature ways of thinking and see the resulting full connectedness with ourselves, others, and with God.

The Bible says that when we are double-minded we are unstable in all we do (James 1:8). This state of being unstable was the opposite of the healing I knew God had for us, and so having single-mindedness and an undivided heart was what led to such tremendous breakthroughs when put with all the other tools God was teaching us. This divided heart teaching, though, meant that we still had responsibility and had to make daily choices, especially in regards to how guarded or open we would be with others. This responsibility was actually empowering to most people, as they learned that their free-will decision making was made easier once their root traumas were addressed.

With the help of my church and many community members, and armed with great experience, cutting-edge clinical training, and inner-healing and deliverance testimonies, I started my own counseling center in 2000. I named it Renewal Christian Counseling Center after Romans 12:2. I didn’t have a lot of financial resources, but I did have a strong desire to serve others and keep learning what God was teaching me in response to my There has to be more…question. Without any advertising, the center grew from a few clients to seeing almost five hundred families a week at five locations. Today we have a staff of over forty-five.

My vision then, which was to take back the mental health field for God’s kingdom, to offer counseling and ministry His way with His power, remains the same today. Here licensed psychiatrists and counselors work together directed by the Holy Spirit in all we do to help people truly heal emotionally. From the beginning until now, our goal has been to bring people to nothing less than complete undividedness of heart and to bring wholeness and emotional freedom to their lives!

I met Father Andrew Miller later in my journey in 2015, at his HeartSync conference in Hamilton Ontario. His scriptural teaching on the divided heart paired with brain science along with his succinct prayers that engage the core parts of the divided heart blessed me with another wow moment. This was more than inner healing. Like my divided heart model, Father Andrew treated the body, soul, and spirit of a person and used clinical and scriptural insights to lead people to what he calls synchronization. His concept of HeartSyncing became the go-to prayer model for me. Father Miller shares his concept of synching in chapters 3 and 30. I look forward to you reading his two chapters and learning more about his HeartSync ministry.

Testimonies of healed marriages, hearts set free from trauma, depression, addictions, and anxiety/fear spread fast, and soon we were full to overflowing at Renewal Christian Counseling Center. And we didn’t even have a phone number listed in the yellow pages (remember those days) or a website to visit. The more is still being explored and my agency, and we will never stop being learners, but what we have learned so far is that the more comes when all facets of the person is included during their healing process.

We must include the clinical model, inner healing, teaching on spiritual warfare and the Holy Spirit, sharing about brain science and trauma release like Father Andrew Miller’s HeartSync, and also teachings on the personal responsibility that each of us have to choose between either our own self-centered defense mechanisms or a God as our protector model of living!

All of you needs to be in full agreement about how to emotionally protect yourself. All of your heart needs to be in full agreement about who will be in charge of protecting yourself, either you or God! You will understand what I mean shortly as you walk through the story of Hosea in the Bible and study this concept of the divided heart.

The divided heart can decide to let go of its own control but still hold onto it at the same time. Until this question of control is fully resolved, the healed heart continues in its unhealthy cycles leading back to its places of bondage and now creates more traumas. You will see that this journey is about more than getting out of depression, getting out of anxiety, getting set free from your addictions, and reconciling the intimacy in your marriage—though you will find these things with God’s help on this journey! It is about the decision to let go of your self-protection, to get healed, stay healed, and become whole!

We are on a journey in hot pursuit of whole-heartedness, a journey that will take us through a study of defense mechanisms which will expose our dividedness of heart. Soon it will become clear how we use these defense mechanisms to maintain our own personal control and protect ourselves emotionally verses Jesus being in control and the true protector of our lives. Then it will become clear how these self-defenses can harm us more than the original traumas that caused the emotional harm in the first place.

You will learn and journal your way through fifteen of the top defenses used today and ultimately find that life can be lived more fully by yielding to your Father in heaven, by letting go of your self-defenses, and allowing Him to be your protector.

After discovering and learning about your own defense mechanisms, you will learn nine powerful yet practical interventions you can use yourself, with your pastor, and/or in counseling with your therapist to lead you to freedom and true wholeness. These interventions will not just give you relief from depression, anxiety, anger, addictions, and broken relationships; they will lead you to lasting and true change. This is the real heart, the core, the more I was seeking on my quest, and I want to pass it on to you, as I have to many others!

So, here you are. Maybe you’re noticing you have the same thought I had, There must be something more… Does it feel like that to you at times in your life? It’s easy to think that the problems in your life are really due to your job, your kids, or your marriage/singleness (which is always a favorite place to project our blame). The truth is, though, that there are some divided places inside of you that still have lots of trauma that needs healed. The truth is that some parts of you that are MIA (missing in action) are still hiding and protecting themselves in ways that make it hard to receive the miracles and the healing God is trying to give to you.

I have taken this journey with many hundreds of persons. I’ve watched them experience the breakthroughs you will read about in the pages to come, as each defense mechanism chapter now has a testimony from someone who has been walking out this journey to heal their heart. Looking back now, I can see that those who really have had true lasting positive results all have at least one thing in common—they are willing to look at what the Bible calls their divided heart.

Please read slowly, as this book is not meant to be a quick read that can be digested all at once. Take your time. Use these pages to journal and pray your way through your journey as you read. I hope you enjoy the testimonies included within of others who share their victories and are walking this journey out with you and me.

Please take the time to look up the scripture references that are included when you can (they will always be in parentheses) because these scriptures show that these concepts are not mine but are from the true Counselor. They are given to us by our Father God through the Holy Spirit.

I am honored that Father Andrew Miller is featured in this second version of Divided Heart. He is extremely skilled in developing the idea of what the divided heart is and how to help it heal from brokenness. The work of others like Jim Wilder’s (see reference #9, Friesen, James G.) levels of the brain model will be used to help you look at your attachments too. This is important because the undivided and healed heart will naturally attach and experience intimacy like never before by becoming a more engaged part of its family and community.

You will learn about boundaries, explore the difference between boundaries and walls, and even learn about spiritual warfare, seeking to understand how the spiritual realm is often the missing link to completely heal from your depression, anger, anxiety, and addictions.

I pray for hope to rise in your heart as you read, for a hunger to find what your heart is truly looking for, and for the courage to pursue it without fainting.

God Bless!

Chapter 1

Gomer’s Divided Heart—Like Ours!

One of the most dramatic pictures painted for us in the whole of Scripture is that of the prophet Hosea. Hosea was told by God to go marry a prostitute, a woman who would betray him with her unfaithfulness over and over again (Hosea 1:2). Can you imagine? What if you were told by God to do the same? Hosea was being asked to pursue a wife, to enter into an intimate relationship with her, to have kids with her, and in the process have his heart broken time and time again without pulling away to emotionally protect himself! Would you be willing to take on such a task? Hosea was. And he did just that.

Hosea married a woman named Gomer (how would you like to wake up every morning to a Gomer?) who as God foretold became a two-timing partner, and was described in God’s words to have a divided heart (Hosea 10:2). This state of being divided in our hearts or wanting and pursuing two things at the same time, is illustrated for us with Gomer as she marries Hosea but chases her other lovers simultaneously. God gives a picture to Israel through Hosea to show them that He saw their involvement with other gods as adultery toward Himself too. The book of Hosea is the context and backdrop for this book on healing titled Journey into the Divided Heart. What God is showing us through the story of Hosea and Gomer has everything to do with our current-day issues, our personal relationships with each other, our relationships with God, and with the struggles we are all facing in this journey we call life.

The story of Gomer’s divided heart is God’s picture to us, His people, given to illuminate the core dynamics behind our dysfunction, and to lead us toward the healing path you are about to embark on in the following pages. Before jumping into the specifics of our path to complete freedom and healing, let’s go through this story together and see what we can learn about our current day struggles—the struggles we go to counseling to address, and the struggles we bring to our pastors and friends for help and ministry. There are huge implications in this scriptural story for why we as a people are so depressed, anxious, angry, addicted, and struggling with relationship issues, and why we are seeing these issues as a culture in unprecedented numbers today!

The story of Hosea and the divided heart starts with the sad history that God’s people had strayed from their close relationship of protection, true love, trust, and faithfulness that they had started with Him long ago. This intimate covenant relationship dated back to the days of God walking intimately with Adam and Eve in the Garden, and it was further defined through Abraham who was told that he and his descendants would be God’s people (I will be their God [Gen 17:7-8]). God had promised that they would prosper and flourish, and that they would multiply numerically to be like the sand on the seashore (Gen. 22:17). They were promised that they would have their own land, the place that is now called Israel (Gen. 15:18). God didn’t promise that there wouldn’t be hardship but that they would have what we now know through Jesus to be life and life to its fullest (John 10:10).

Israel had married Jehovah God, so to speak, and accepted firstly that they were the chosen object of His affection by no doing of their own. They were loved and pursued by Him wholeheartedly, just because they were! They could not earn this amazing and perfect love, but were given it freely! This unending relationship of love between an all-powerful God and a people group called Israel brought to Israel all of what we individually are looking for today! This covenant relationship brought them a sense of security and safety, hope and contentment, prosperity in everything they did, and protection from their enemies who surrounded them geographically. This was what they called shalom peace. This peace was complete peace, an emotional peace, which is quite the opposite of the anxiety and depression that many experience today. Though they had this all while in covenant with God they would eventually betray Him. They would cheat on Him by serving other gods.

This life of being in and under true relationship with the God the Israelites knew as being a part of God’s kingdom (or His governmental family system), is actually said to be literally heaven on earth! That’s right—this phrase didn’t come from a pop song on the radio, but comes from a biblical concept and a prayer from Jesus that says (God’s) kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10, emphasis mine). Beginning from that original set of promises by their Father God that said I will be their God (Gen. 17:8) and they will be my people (Jer. 32:38), God became the source of their most basic needs on every level. God knew their needs better than they knew themselves, and when Israel was walking in relationship with Him, all of what was His was theirs!

Then, as happens in all too many marriages today, Israel wandered, and forsook the vows that had been the foundation of all that was good in their lives. Israel betrayed their first love and broke the vows they had made to God by following after the gods of the nations around them. The parameters their Father God had set up to protect them were for their own good, yet these rules were broken by the Israelites who took on the beliefs and the cultic theologies of their neighbor nations. They lost their identity, and forgetting who they were created to be, they began worshiping foreign gods like Baal, a fertility god of the Canaanites. Now they were looking toward idols made of stone and wood for provision, prosperity, comfort, and peace!

Through Israel’s infidelity with these other gods, Jehovah did not forsake or forget His people, nor did He follow suit and turn His back on His covenant relationship, as we would do when we are hurt and betrayed. He would remain faithful! He would continue to love them wholeheartedly, while also releasing them to the consequences of their own decisions and honoring their free-will decisions to leave Him for their other gods! This is just what we see Hosea doing with Gomer—and even then buying her back.

As in any committed relationship, when vows and promises are broken, there are feelings of hurt and anger, and God Himself admits to feeling this way. You can feel God’s pain when He says about His people, His bride Israel, she went after her other lovers, but me she forgot declares the Lord (Hosea 2:13).

As in any committed relationship, when vows and promises are broken, there are feelings of hurt and anger, and God Himself admits to feeling this way.

After all, we are made in His image, and we have been created in His likeness, even in the ways our hearts feel pain. In this time of heartache and pain for God, though, what would He do and how would He respond? God’s answer was not to leave and put up walls to guard Himself from additional potential pain! He could have easily just destroyed them. If you or I were God we may have done just that! God’s answer, though, was to love and to chase His beloved, but to do so without violating their God given right to choose other gods!

God is the true initiator of relationships, the pursuer of those He loves! Yes, even while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). God’s solution to broken relationships and division is to GIVE, and to GIVE at great cost! His solution is to redeem (to buyback and compensate for) what was lost and reconcile (to restore back to friendly relationship). This is what we see Hosea doing with Gomer… It’s all in this story of her divided heart, and hers is the story that we as God’s children are living today too!

God is the master communicator, and He has many diverse and profound ways to communicate with us, especially when we are cut off from direct communication to Him because of our own disobedience—as was with Israel. God chose a vessel in a man named Hosea to deliver a message, but this message was not to be given in words. God chose to use a living demonstration, a reality show of sorts, with real players having real emotional ups and downs, to communicate His message. This was God’s chosen line of communication then and it often is today. Your circumstances might be telling you that the path your life is on is like theirs was! Israel was not just being told a story; they were confronted with the real-life story of Hosea and would benefit from it only if they applied it to their lives. The redemption story of God communicating to His people, who had left and betrayed Him, starts in Hosea 1:2-3.

When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord. So, he married Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son (Hosea 1:2-3).

God’s message to the people of Israel was quite clear: You have betrayed me! You have broken your vows and are guilty of unfaithfulness. He says, You have departed from me!

Israel was following other gods. And so the story goes with Hosea… Gomer would betray him. He marries her; they have kids together, and she leaves him. God describes her as He describes Israel here in Hosea 2:7:

She will chase after her lovers but not catch them, she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now. (Hosea 2:7)

She had a divided heart, and though she went back in forth in her mind and in her loyalties, she wasn’t ever really happy. This kind of reminds me of an older pop song many sing along to, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for… Gomer was looking for something she could not find in either Hosea or her other lovers. What was she looking for? Whatever it was, it would never satisfy her. She could never find what she was looking for.

Maybe you are like her, and don’t really know what you are looking for, and you never seem to find true contentment and fulfillment. Keep reading…

We all would have understood if Hosea had responded to such a wounding by rejecting her altogether, or even in retaliation against her, but he did not. The Lord shows him how to respond. He says to chase her, so Hosea goes after her! He doesn’t fight or flight, as we do. He gives acceptance and love in return for her betrayal!

The Lord said to me, "Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man