Understanding the confusion in your mind is like chaos in your brain. It attacks your greatest need for security, stability, and peace of mind. You feel overwhelmed. Your thoughts are cluttered, and you find it extremely difficult to make decisions. You feel like you are walking through a fog or that you have cotton wrapped around the gears in your brain. You are unable to think clearly because of the confusion in your mind. Poor concentration in conversations, reading, or movies makes enjoyment next to impossible.
You have difficulty remembering details and appointments. You misplace things and spend precious time searching for keys, wallets, purses, and anything else you blindly lay down. Situations once reasonably simple to navigate are now shrouded in uncertainty and bewilderment because your emotions are uncontrollable as you overreact to circumstances.
Criticism and judgmental comments from friends and family add to your suffering. No one understands when you try to explain what is going on with the confusion in your mind, so you pretend to be okay and try to act normal. But such behavior drives you further into alienation as you withdraw.
Causes of Confusion in Your Mind
Understanding the confusion in your mind means extreme stress, anxiety, grief, and depression take a toll on your mind and can lead to feelings of disorientation. As you move into overload your brain shuts down like a circuit breaker in your home’s electrical box, leaving you feeling spaced out. Physical or mental exhaustion sets you up for brain fog.
Health problems can cause confusion in your mind or decreased alertness. Infections, such as urinary tract infection, respiratory infection, or sepsis have been known to affect the patient’s ability to think clearly. Asthma or COPD, which causes a decrease in the amount of oxygen, or an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood, affects the functioning of your brain. Low blood sugar for diabetics or excessive sugar in some individuals can also cause brain fog.
Brain disorders that affect cognitive functioning and memory, such as dementia, often cause people to feel disoriented. Dyslexia is a common learning disability discovered in children during the early years of school. It causes confusion in being able to repeat what has been heard. Speech is often affected in the way a phrase may be jumbled in the order of words or parts of words spoken. Written words may have letters switched or written backward. Learning new things is often slower than average.
Confusion Acted Out
Is often a result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Feeling- flashbacks or triggers”, caused by old emotional scars amplify your emotions. When more emotion is felt than what the circumstances call for, you may be experiencing PTSD. We all get confused at times, but lengthy bouts of confusion can cause you to feel trapped in a foggy tunnel with no light at the other end.
Adult survivors of childhood abuse frequently experience childhood emotions that were unable to be expressed when they were a child. At times, you may feel like you are a child in an adult body. You wonder if you are losing it. Nothing seems certain, except perhaps, doom. Confusion in your mind can make you feel powerless, apprehensive, stressed, overwhelmed, and beyond hope.
Triggers happen when present experiences tap into an immense reservoir of emotion and you are helpless to stop it. When something upsets you, you don’t just cry, you sob. Other times you feel like you’re going to die from loneliness. When something ticks you off, you don’t just get a little angry; you fly into a fit of rage that erupts like a volcano looking to kill.
Feeling flashbacks are somewhat like visual flashbacks, but you don’t see anything happening. You have feelings, but you don’t know what’s causing them or where they’re coming from, or you go to bed at night feeling normal but in the morning, you wake up severely depressed, angry or lonely. You can be going about your day when suddenly a powerful emotion comes over you. There’s no explanation for it and you begin to think that you’re going crazy.
Frequent misunderstanding by some of your friends or family only adds to your emotional pain. They criticize, “Why are you digging up old memories? It’s just making you feel worse. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. This will go on as long as you want it to. What’s done is done; put it behind you and move on”. But you just can’t!
Help for Confusion in Your Mind
One of the first steps to healing emotional scars is to allow yourself to feel your real feelings.
- Understanding the confusion in your mind means finding a safe person to talk to who will support and not judge you. Validation is vital to your recovery. Sharing your feelings and memories helps you dump the pain and leaves you feeling calm. Verbalizing the details of your anguish has a way of clearing your thinking.
- Write about your feelings in your journal. The process of writing enables your emotions to flow. It is extremely important that you process the toxic emotions you are holding inside.
- Take ownership of your thoughts. Be aware of what you are thinking about. Don’t allow just anything to drop into your mind and linger there to bother you.
- Immediately dismiss negative, harmful thoughts and replace them with wholesome thinking. Clearing your mind has a way of revealing your options. Scripture admonishes us to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV).
- Stop beating yourself up with old messages playing in your mind. You need to be gentle with yourself and meditate on what God says about you. Meditate on the Scriptures of God’s love for you. They will calm your fears, comfort you, and build your confidence. Knowing your Heavenly Father cares will give you the strength to press onward and face your difficulties head-on.
- Feed your mind positive material. Avoid music, TV, movies, and people who cause anxiety or stressful feelings. Fix your thoughts on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise Philippians 4:8 (NLT).
- Read through the Psalms and identify with the feelings of the Psalmist. Pour out your emotions to your Heavenly Father in written prayers.
- Get sufficient rest and exercise. Take a quiet walk for thirty minutes each day to allow your mind to relax.
- Read a favorite child’s book for enjoyment and distraction. Children’s books require less concentration and usually have a positive encouraging message.
- Understanding the confusion in your mind means getting together with supportive friends once or twice a week to enjoy fellowship. Entertainment and sharing common interests give your mind a break from your healing journey.
- Understanding the confusion in your mind means taking time to pamper yourself with your favorite activities.
- Choose your responses. When you face difficult challenges, you can choose to react to them in panic and despair, or you can ask yourself, “what you can learn from this experience.” Choose to see problems as a test and ask God to help you pass it. Ask Him to bring good out of the difficulties and use them to make you stronger and more like Him.
As your healing progresses you will have less confusion in your mind, and your ability to concentrate will improve. You will see your opportunities more clearly and your thoughts will be more controlled. Making decisions will be less overwhelming as your confidence develops. Your emotions will mature, and you will be able to respond to difficult situations with adult feelings.
One day you will reflect on how much your healing journey has changed you. Chances are, you will have come to a fork in the road where you made a choice to follow the path less traveled. You had enough trust in your Heavenly Father, and the self-confidence needed to take the risk. It has taken you to exciting new adventures you previously thought you would never have the courage to pursue and no longer do you struggle with thoughts like “what if, or if only” Therefore you have taken your healing journey in hand and are done with confusion in your mind. Read more from my series Healing Emotional Words https://healingourbrokenness.ca/product/those-painful-emotions/
Grace Gayle: at Healing Our Brokenness Ministries
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