Overcoming Your Inner Bully

“It's a humbling process of saying, okay, Lord, I need to recognize that in order to replace these thoughts, I have to also be willing to play a different soundtrack.”

What’s the soundtrack playing in your mind? Are you rehearsing all the ways you messed up, fell short, or “should have” done better? What if you could quiet that inner bully and finally believe the truth about yourself?

Below is a snippet of a conversation with Carol Feil (61), a writer, speaker, and self-described cheerleader of women. Carol sheds light on the importance of paying attention to our thought life, encouraging women to recognize, root out, and replace the lies with this truth: you are seen, known, and deeply loved by God.

She also offers words of wisdom on not letting your feelings have the final say, knowing God’s character, trusting God when you don’t understand, and a whole lot more. If you prefer listening, you can listen to or watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

What or who is this “inner bully” that you talk about?

For me, the recognition of the inner bully came at a time when I just was having some anxiety about a couple different circumstances. And one day I think it occurred to me, by God's grace, that there was a soundtrack playing in my mind. I was kind of repeating a situation and kind of reliving it and replaying it. And I thought, do I have to? Like, why is that there? Did I ask this thought to play? I did not invite this thought in.

And then realizing that I had that in several categories where these thoughts would come up. And they're exhausting. Maybe you've got a meeting coming up that's a little stressful for you and this concept of what that conversation might look like, or relationally, or looking in the mirror, or analyzing our own work and things that we do throughout the day.

Social media where I do love to hang out is a pretty big world of comparison. And so starting to recognize those comparative thoughts, where we say things to ourselves like, ‘I should have.’ ‘I should have worn this outfit today.’ ‘I should have said this to that person’ or ‘I should have said this in response.’ There are so many ways that that comes out. And we find out that we're our biggest critic.

And knowing that I wasn't the only one who thought that way, I thought, well, let's try to shed some light on this and just bring some hope to the idea that those thoughts that try to do battle with us, first we have to recognize they're there in order to do anything about it.

But finding ways to not camp on the negative and to not continually repeat things that beat us down internally. And really the best way to deal with that is to know that you've got to root it out. You can't just yank off the top. As somebody who gardens and weeds, anytime a weed breaks off at the surface, I'm like, oh man, it's coming back.

So rooting it out, being very aware and maybe doing a little self-analyzation to figure out where those thoughts come from, where did they start, and going back. And sometimes that requires a little bit of prayer between you and the Lord, but the hope of all of this for me comes into the replacing it. So we're going to recognize it, we're going to root it out, but what are we going to replace it with? We're going to replace it with the truth of God's Word. And He never leaves us or forsakes us.

You can go through all of these scriptures that are just promises, like Philippians 1:6: ‘He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.’ That doesn't mean we're perfected here or that those things are all worked out in this life, but that God is always working in the refining process with us.

And I don't want to oversimplify things by saying it's just a soundtrack because there are some things that we all deal with that take a little more time and thoughtfulness and prayer and sometimes help from somebody else with some great wisdom to root those thoughts out and to get them replaced. But God's Word is certainly an anecdote for just reframing where our mind sits.

What has that process been like for you?

To be honest, I'm still doing the work. Like, I think the great hurrah is to say, I know what that is now. I maybe don’t know where all of it comes from because there's layers. You know, we carry things through life that we accept as truths and good things, and then we come across somebody who shares some wisdom with us from God's Word that we hadn't looked at before, and I'm like, oh, that applies to this. So it is a continual process. Hallelujah.

But to be able to notice it first and then look for what is available to me to change this. Am I listening to the wrong thing? What is it I'm meditating on? What am I binging on Netflix? What's the music that I'm constantly absorbing? Am I being conscious of where I allow the Lord to speak into the innermost places in my being?

We always have something speaking into us. We are an information generation and there's not a lot of quiet. And so I'm noticing that I need to allow more quiet so that I can hear what the Lord's saying. But I also need to choose better when I'm letting something in. And am I willing to be conscious of those things that do impact me?

It's a humbling process of saying, okay, Lord, I need to recognize that in order to replace these thoughts, I have to also be willing to play a different soundtrack. And so I have a role to play in that. It's not like the Lord just magically comes and snatches those away. And people do have testimonies where the Lord has just done an incredible work in their life. My experience has been that I learned things today that would have been helpful two days ago. Retrospect is one of my favorite words.

But being attuned to the Lord, being in the Word, and just allowing space to hear His voice and to allow the conviction, if necessary, to sit with that. We don't like that word so much. We like the grace, the love, the joy, the patience, the long-suffering, but we don't love the conviction part of it. And conviction is part of growth. He's a good father. He's a good, good father. But He also can't be less than he is, right? So along with being a good father, He has lots of attributes that I can't pick and choose which ones I want to embrace.

What role do feelings play in overcoming this inner bully?

That's a tricky one because we are very attuned to our feelings. And the difference from head to heart can be really long sometimes. And I think it's an understanding that our feelings can be fickle. What I feel one day might have more to do with the fact that I haven't eaten a good meal or had good rest. And so there is an ebb and flow to how I feel about things. And so we want to be sure that we're balancing our feelings with the truth of scripture and wanting to feel God's presence.

His word says He will never leave me or forsake me. It doesn't say I always feel like He’s never leaving me or forsaking me. It says He will never leave me or forsake me. And so being very aware of our emotions in our culture, we've got to find that balance as well. Where am I giving more credibility to what I feel over what I believe?

And His word does not contradict itself, even when it seemingly does. When you dig in deeper you find out that He is who He says He is and who He has always been. And some of that includes Redeemer, Savior, Judge. He is so many things that we want at certain times and other times we’re just kind of like, that one's not my favorite, not my favorite attribute. We don't like to admit that, but we really do that on some level.

But to just be honest with ourselves and say, Lord, that part of you is hard for me. Because I mean, isn't the Psalmist David so refreshing? He teaches us that we can pour out our hearts before the Lord. And that includes being upset and saying ‘My enemies are surrounding me, Lord, where are you, I feel abandoned in this place.’ But where does he end? He comes full circle to say, ‘But you, oh Lord,’ and however he ends it it is always back to ‘But you are God, you are Lord’ and there’s a submission to that.

Other wise words worth echoing:

- “The Lord sees us when we're the bud. He sees us when we're the full bloom and he still sees us and loves us when we're the wilting flower that's done its process and it's time to rest before the next cycle of growth.”

- “Who people think I am on the outside has nothing to do with what the Lord has put inside of me.”

- “Even when we don't feel seen, known or loved, we can be confident that God says in His word that what He starts, He finishes. He's a completer. He's a redeemer. He's a fixer in ways that we can't understand, but he is going about fixing the hard stuff. And we don't always get to see it play out in ways that we think would be helpful for how we live, but just trusting that He is that good, good Father.”

- “The great thing about the God that we serve, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is that He is so different than the gods of the world. He doesn't squirm at the mess. He doesn't require us to clean up. Why? Because He does the cleaning up through the work of His son. We don't need to be all polished. He does the polishing.”

- “It's very easy to make God too small. I don't want a God I can fit in a box. I want a God that is so much bigger than my circumstances that when I can't see a way through, I can believe that He sees it from beginning to end.”

-”I don't want a God that's small enough that I can hold on to. If He’s small enough that I can understand Him, perhaps that means that he could be swayed. And I don't want a God who is swayed by human finite anything. I want a God that's infinite, all knowing, all loving, everywhere present. I want a God that I'm still going to have a lot of questions when I meet Him face-to-face.”

Listen to or watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Thank you for being here,

Katharine

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