Overcoming Painful Emotions: A Guide: The African Woman's Blueprint for Overcoming Painful Emotions and Maximizing God-given Potential through Christ's Love

Overcoming Painful

Emotions: A Guide

Overcoming Painful Emotions:

A Guide

The African woman’s blueprint

for overcoming painful emotions

and maximizing God-given potential

through Christ’s love

DEBOLA ONI

OVERCOMING PAINFUL EMOTIONS: A GUIDE

© Debola Oni March 2014

First e-Edition April 2015.

All scripture quotations in this book are taken from the

New King James Version (NKJV) unless otherwise indicated.

All rights reserved.

e-ISBN: 9781783017355

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher or a license permitting restricted copying.

Published by Dayspring Discipleship & Helps Ministry (DDHM), www.dayspringhelps.org,

+234 8078604883, +234 8039090064.

E-book created by Ibukun Olowu Omojola // Wings Media

+2347067789436 // ibukunolowu@fastmail.fm

African Sister

African sister, spiritual sister,

Ebony, chocolate, coffee and ivory,

Rich dark colours of Mother Earth,

Daughter of Eve, created by God,

In the Garden of Eden,

On the side of the Euphrates River.

Of a different kind of spirit,

As Caleb, who dared to overcome,

African sister, my sister,

Deep as the River Niger,

Out of your innermost core flows,

A divine essence, a joie de vivre,

Beloved daughter of God.

Oh, how your Maker loves you,

Wants you to raise your head up high,

Immutable, undaunted, like those irokos

In the tropical rain forest,

Whose roots go deep like your heritage?

African sister, my spiritual sister,

Christ died for us; you and me.

He spoke to us at the well in Samaria,

He told the adulteress to sin no more,

He healed the woman with the issue of blood,

Mary, and our sisters, sat at His feet,

Where they found redemption, salvation,

African sister, deliverance too,

He’s our husband; He’s our Father.

African sister, my sister,

What a heritage you have in Christ,

Turn away from your past,

From bondage, sin, death and defeat,

Into His marvellous light,

Freedom from poverty and disease,

My dark, beautiful and gifted African sister.

This book is lovingly dedicated to all my African sisters of the same Father.

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One: Understanding Painful Emotions

1. What Are Emotions?

2. The Three Streams of Painful Emotions

3. Hiding from Painful Emotions

Poem: Notin Pass God

4. Effects of Painful Emotions

Poem: Letting Go

5. Prayer Life and Other Issues

6. The Jezebel Spirit

7. African Superstition, Syncretism and Faith

Poem: Faith Is Not

Part Two: Overcoming Painful Emotions

8. How to Overcome Painful Emotions

9. Overcoming Fear

10. Overcoming Shame

11. Overcoming Anger

12. Wrong Thinking Patterns

13. Pop-ups and Distractions

14. Digging Appropriate Wells

Poem: Without You

Part Three: Unleashing Potential

15. Unleashing Potential

Poem: Raison d’Étre

16. Seasons in a Woman’s Life

17. It Is Never Too Late

Poem: Wings

18. Peace Like a River

Poem: The Answer

Parting Shots

Workbook

How to Use this Workbook Section

Table: Some Women in the Bible and Their Emotions

Author’s Note

PREFACE

The African woman is strong; she is a survivor. She has no social welfare to depend on. She rarely has the opportunity for counselling in times of grief or bereavement, or comes across sympathetic divorce judges. Most of the time, she cannot afford the luxury of romance because she dissipates most of her energy in merely surviving. She needs to be ruled by her head rather than her heart because hers is a hostile environment.

The African woman is a paradox. She may be physically strong and largely independent, yet a slave to public opinion. She has strong emotions but is mostly ignorant about their existence and how to manage them. An amazon, she is conditioned to worry about what a highly judgmental society has to say about her.

The sad thing is that she doesn’t trust her feeling, doesn’t even believe that they exist for the most part. Although the African woman may not have anorexia nervosa or bulimia, she is susceptible to hypertension, diabetes or other heart diseases due to her unidentified, painful emotions. She appears stoic on the outside and has perfected her coping skills such that what would send her counterparts into psychiatric hospital does not seem to move her. In her book, what must be done must be done.

The society she lives in is patriarchal, steeped in witchcraft, idolatry, polygamy and occultism. Colonialism placed her continent firmly between three civilizations. Her tradition tells her that she is inferior, her patriarchal society confirms that fact and the church tells her, ‘All men are equal, but some are more equal than others,’ with apologies to George Orwell. The church which is meant to liberate her so that she reaches her true potential in Christ has become a gilded cage, interpreting the issue of submission in such a way as to perpetuate traditional practice.

Some of the church’s interpretation of submission is almost as bad as when the slave traders justified their trade in humans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by quoting Ephesians 6:1, ‘Bondservants be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart as to Christ.’ Selwyn Hughes, in his book, Seven Steps to Overcoming Depression, explains, ‘Females in some societies have been taught to be dependent and passive. Also, some females have lacked a basis on which to establish their identity. Many churches, for example, have presented the principles of submission as expressed in Ephesians 5:22 in such a way that women have regarded their role as one of servility rather than submissiveness. No woman can be truly submitted until she first has a clear sense of her identity and becomes assertive in the best sense of the word.’

Even in the twenty-first century, whatever her qualifications and social and economic achievements, she is considered a failure if she is unmarried at a particular age. Her success is even tainted and viewed with suspicion. She needs a man to curb her ‘excesses.’ If she does marry, her mother-in-law and other in-laws are usually a head above her and she has to venerate them for the sake of peace. She is their wife so she must pay obeisance even if she is decades older than they are. After all, they paid the bride price.

In order to remove the stigma of being single, a woman will go to lengths and compromise for the sake of getting married; she will marry just about any man. One lady whose husband disappeared days after their marriage said to a friend, ‘At least I can now bear the title Mrs.’ Even though the husband was nowhere to be found!

The African woman has an ongoing battle with self-esteem. You find the average African woman flamboyantly dressed, as if the layers of makeup and the hairdo can cover the pain and emptiness inside. Just check them out at parties, seemingly without a care in the world, and dressed to the nines, trying to outdo each other in the loudness of their colours.

African women always carry this sense of unexplained guilt and shame, which is ridiculous as they do not have the power to control other people or circumstances. But, when there is a delay in child-bearing, it is always the fault of the woman. Our women will visit gynaecologists alone for years, undergoing several tests to find out why they cannot conceive. The age-long prejudice that started in the Garden of Eden is often perpetuated. Just like Adam blamed the woman for giving him the forbidden fruit to eat, men blame the women for her inability to conceive. He doesn’t want to concede the fact that he may be responsible and mounts more emotional pressure on her even as she feels isolated in the problem. And if a man commits adultery, it’s also the woman’s fault. She was not woman enough to keep her philandering husband at home: she didn’t make the home front conducive; she drove her poor husband into the arms of the other woman. If he beats her up, who else is to blame but the woman? Is it her husband’s fault that she cannot control her tongue, lose weight, or whatever it is she needs to do? No one talks about his anger management issues. It has to be her uncontrollable tongue or her attitude that is to blame!

There was the case of a man who had series of affairs until he finally married a second wife. His first wife was heartbroken and moved out of their house. A few months later she had a heart attack and can you guess who was to blame for the heart attack? Her husband actually blamed her for not turning the other cheek and ignoring his second marriage.

I also heard about a professional colleague who was driving in the car with her husband. The news came on the radio that some legislators were misbehaving in our National Assembly. As soon as the radio broadcast was over, her husband turned to her and said that since she was a lawyer she was also responsible by proxy for the trouble in the National Assembly. She thought he was joking, but as he continued berating her, his voice raised to a crescendo, she saw that he was serious as he said, ‘Even though you are not a member of the National Assembly, you are a lawyer and therefore part of the people who have allowed Nigeria to go to the dogs.’ This is an extreme case scenario, but nevertheless true. We are to blame. Ola Rotimi, a Nigerian playwright, titled one of his plays ‘The gods are not to blame.’ Well, it seems we have found the culprits—I suppose women are to blame then! They are guilty as charged and cannot be proven innocent.

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseni quotes a proverb that says, ‘Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.’ If a man’s business is not doing well, his wife is at fault. She has brought bad luck to the man. If she has difficult children, she is to blame. She just cannot seem to get things right. As a result, the African woman carries around so much emotional garbage. She doesn’t really know what to believe as she runs from one prayer meeting to the other, because she knows that if anything goes wrong in her fragile existence, she will be to blame. Her nerves are frayed as she tries to play God in the centre of her own universe.

Little wonder that the African woman is often a complex, over-sensitive, confused and suspicious woman. Trying to keep up appearances and go from day to day drains her energy so much. She finds little peace with herself and others. Fast more, pray more, give more, try harder, are some of the palliative suggestions she gets from the church while she is dying emotionally. She has since buried the pain; she can simply not afford the luxury of facing and dealing with her emotions. Just surviving on the physical plain is enough with the shortage of everything and corrupt governments.

The African woman is expected to stoically carry out all her responsibilities in the face of emotional and economic trauma. What must be done has to be done so she must deny, suppress or repress her feelings about all that is going on around her.

The message of the cross is one of liberation and not one of condemnation. It is the accuser of the brethren that works day and night condemning us. Thankfully, the Bible says in Romans 8:1 that there is no condemnation for those who walk according to the Spirit. The message of the cross is one of grace, unconditional love and acceptance—that we are totally accepted in the Beloved (Eph. 1:6).

The African woman may have encountered Christ, but she is still confused about her identity in Him and therefore her God-given potential lies unutilized. Instead of liberty and freedom, there is now a rigid set of rules to live by, pulling her into even deeper bondage. In the unequivocal words of Watchman Nee in his book, The Spiritual Man, ‘ Truth is given to set people free not to find fault.’ The Word of God is meant to liberate us to be all Christ desires us to be rather than limit our potential. It should be interpreted to allow women to fly rather than crawl.

My friend Bunmi once said, ‘We African women all have different issues to deal with: single and wanting to get married; married with no children, problems with rejection by in-laws, problems with teenage children; all sorts of emotional, physical or spiritual abuse, and the like.’ However, these are not excuses for not being what we are supposed to be in Christ Jesus. Will we, like the unprofitable servant, bury ourselves and our talents in the mud, roll over and play dead because God in His infinite wisdom has not given us certain things or answered our prayers the way we want them?

The unprofitable servant said to his master, ‘I know you are very wicked and you reap where you have not sown.’ We may not say so in so many words but our actions and our attitudes show that we are deliberately withholding ourselves from God and putting our light under a bushel instead of shining brightly for the world to see and glorify our Father in heaven. We are a beacon and a light, when in spite of everything we can still declare like Job: ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him’ ( Job 13: 15).

How