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Given the India diversion in blog postings, I will need to recap the story of my re-education that I was sharing.
1) I thought people and circumstances outside of myself were the reason for my feelings in a direct cause and effect dynamic. In order for me to feel better, I needed them to change. In other words, I was trying to “fix” my feelings instead of learning from them, and I was doing this by pressuring the other person to change.
2) I divided feelings into good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate. If the person “causing” my feelings were at fault, then my negative feelings were justified, and they should stop doing what they were doing so as to relieve my bad feelings. If the person “causing” my feelings were not at fault, then my feelings were illegitimate (wrong), and I had to talk myself out of those feelings.
NO WORRIES, I'M HERE TO FIX YOU!
3) If I can manage okay with the other person’s irritating behavior, then I should say nothing and just endure. If I could not handle it, I should tell them how their behavior was affecting me and ask them to stop. Again, my feelings were being controlled by the other person, which put me in bondage to them emotionally, and required them to change to maintain a good relationship with me.
4) Kimberly insisted that I had a right to my feelings, all my feelings, and that all my feelings were legitimate and true… not a true reflection of the guilt of others, but a true reflection of my own perspective and experience of life. My “bad” emotions were telling me something valuable about myself, not about the other person. If I listened to this emotional message empathically instead of with shame (accepting rather than rejecting the feeling), I could discover important things about my own woundedness.
5) Kimberly encouraged me not to hide my unhappy feelings from those I love, because sharing them is an avenue into deeper relationship. But if I shared my feelings as a means of getting her to change, it would push us farther apart and ground our relationship more on legalism, encouraging her to believe that my love is conditionally based on how she behaves.
6) I thought genuine care always led to accommodating behavior. If the other person cared about me, they would change what they were doing. If they didn’t change, it proved they didn’t care. Since these two were inextricably connected in my mind, when the person did not change, it proved they didn’t care. I didn’t realize my real need was for her to care about my feelings, not for her to take responsibility for my feelings by changing. As I thought, “My need + your love = your accommodation (and vice versa). How could you possibly say you care if you make no effort to ‘improve’?”
Each step of learning came with a great deal of pain for both Kimberly and me. Kimberly kept insisting that she was not responsible for my feelings, that regardless of how I felt towards her, this was not an indication of her guilt or responsibility. She felt deeply hurt when I blamed and shamed her, even if it were simply a sideways glance, pause, or lifted eyebrow to suggest that she was failing to meet my expectations. I kept believing that if she did not change, she did not care, and that hurt me deeply. This whole perspective of hers blasted my mind with questions. Are all expectations in a relationship unhealthy? Is accommodation or compromise a bad idea? Can a person truly care and still not change something that is hurtful to another? Are my emotions really completely independent of your behavior towards me? It still did not make sense.
THE MORE I THINK, THE MORE CONFUSED I GET.
I have many Indians that are dear friends to me and whom I love, so I was sad to go to Kolkata (Calcutta) for only 5 days and under such tensions. It would be wonderful to spend a month or two there. Of course, when I speak of my own sense of failure in India, my friends there should remember that “success” and “failure” are relative terms, and in my youthful idealism I had highly unreasonable expectations, so I was setting myself up for inevitable “failure.”
In the end, my impossible expectations and sense of failure turned to a blessing for me, because it forced me to see that my sense of worth was tied to success, and healing could only come by freeing myself from that crippling deceit. Folks reassured me that I was indeed successful, but when they tried so hard to prove my successfulness, it only made me think that success must be a crucial support to my worth. For my own well-being I could not listen to such words, because I had to establish my worth apart from what I did or did not accomplish.
On this trip my renovated perspective on grace had largely freed me from this emotional success trap, so I was able to take pleasure in the good things God had done through me in India. Whether or not this passed the bar of “success” really did not matter to me any more. As I walked the streets again and all the old feelings flooded back in, I realized that, however misguided I had been, I was also very sincere and genuine while living there, and I saw evidence that this had been used by God in the lives of many.
Some children from the new branch school
Friday was a very special day for me because I went to visit the school which David Nallathambi, Hemlota Das and I had started together in Taldi. I believe they have some 350 indigent students who would otherwise be uneducated and trapped in the generational cycle of poverty. This year they started a branch school in a nearby village to facilitate the education of 5 and 6 year old children who were walking 2 miles through the mud to come to school. Young men in Taldi held a special program for me of singing and sharing, each one rising to relate how dramatically our presence in Taldi had transformed their lives. It was a huge blessing for me.
Young Taldi boys
Thanks to all of you who have supported this work through the years.
Much of my life’s darkness metastasized from this one seed thought: I felt inadequate because I accomplished so little for God and I feared his disappointment. If I just did a little more, I could please him at last. And so I drove myself to extreme lengths–choosing celibacy, relocating to a city of misery, sleeping little, fasting and praying weeks at a time. But I could never do enough to feel secure in his love, because I used my fruitfulness or effectiveness to measure his blessing and pleasure, and the results did not speak well of me. I subconsciously assumed that God’s love for me was based on my usefulness to him. In this way, my success was fundamental to my well-being.
I lived 40 years out of that false assumption, building up a whole network, a fully functioning system based on that foundation. It required a long process to break free. For the last ten years I have applied the salve of grace to my deep wound of worthlessness. Given time, grace works effectively for me when I can identify my specific need and saturate it with mercy. So for a decade I worked on delinking God’s love from my success, even from my behavior or choices. I was determined to rewire my thinking, conscious and unconscious, to ground all my well-being in the unconditional love of God. Though I did not focus on my heartbreak in India, I did focus on those underlying issues, so when it came to opening myself to that shrouded past, I found the weight had largely lifted.
It was not fully lifted because there are always new aspects of that one great confusion of grace which I need to identify and work through. As I planned for the trip, my wife warned me against a determination for good results, but rather to do my best and leave the outcome as it came. She knows me well, and it was good counsel. Still I felt dragged down too much by a sense of responsibility to succeed.
I have a long way to go, but I am moving in the right direction. I always thought I was responsible and therefore in control of my own success. As each string tying me to that assumption snaps, I find growing relief and peace. Results matter, matter profoundly, but I am not responsible for results, only for motives and actions. My heart is slowly embracing the unconditional love of God… even, amazingly, when my motives and actions are faulty. God is always packed tight with grace bursting to be free.
Well, I finally have a minute to sit down and share about my week in India, having returned last Sunday afternoon and started work Monday morning with 7 hours at Lynchburg College library and 4 hours of mowing grass. It’s been a long two weeks and I’m grateful to finally be able to catch my breath today. As many of you know, I served among the poor of India for 10 years and left behind a school and clinic for the poor. I returned to the U.S. because I had been suffering deep depression for four years, which finally started dragging down my spiritual life.
I felt like a great failure. Because of this blackness that surrounded my time in Kolkata, I spent the next decade avoiding any thoughts about those years. Even with my wife, I shared only a brief synopsis. It was this spirit-crushing sense of failure and the accompanying shame that drove me to a crisis discovery about myself and God, a lesson about grace that I have been sorting through since 2000.
In the last few years the administrative tensions between the Indian director and board had reached an impasse, and they asked me (as the founder) to come try to sort things out. I realized that this would open once again the floodgate of feelings that I had dammed up all these years. When I agreed to go I started thinking once again about India. My greatest suffering there sprang from my shattered sense of worth based on my perceived failures, and as I processed with Kimberly I realized those cracks in my soul had been largely healed as I applied grace to the wound. The timing, therefore, was providential. I was ready to open up to that chapter of my life, to work at integrating those experiences into myself.
My week there was difficult as I got little sleep and was weighed down with a task that seemed unsolvable: the director had legal ownership of the land on which the school was built, and the board had all the money for running the school and paying the staff (including the director). It was a power struggle waiting to happen, and for various reasons was largely my fault for setting things up as they were. I did the best I could at the time, so I don’t feel culpable. Perhaps I should rather say it was largely my responsibility. I went 14 days ago with a plan that I thought would work, and it didn’t work. I started to fast and pray as I had done so often before in India. On the last day, at the last moment, we had a breakthrough, a resolution that seems likely to work. I will continue to interact with the two parties to finalize the details, and if necessary, will return to India in December to complete the process.
Many thanks to your supporting thoughts, words, and prayers.
Like most men, I want a fix. When I am agitated or discouraged, I want help to escape, and I expect this to come not from empathy but from fixing the problem that is causing those feelings. If I am afraid of losing money, help me protect my money, and my fear disappears. If someone is irritating me, get them to stop, and my irritation will fall away. I didn’t wait to ask myself with compassion, “Why am I afraid, what is going on in my heart?” That was obvious… the situation was causing my bad feelings.
When my wife shared her feelings with me, I offered solutions instead of empathy, just like I wanted for myself. But in trying to offer solutions, I was making her feel worse. When I said, “There is no reason to be afraid because_______” I was trying to relieve her fear, but she heard me say that her feelings were illegitimate. It took me forever to change my approach, and I still struggle with it. It seems to me that if I empathize with her feelings, I am giving her more reasons to feel sad or fearful or bad, and I want to rescue her from those feelings. But as I tried to understand her perspective more, I gradually realized that I too needed empathy for my feelings rather than solutions to “fix” them. I needed it as much as she did, because empathy invites me to be compassionate to myself, and with this active self-support, I discover the wound that underlies my feelings. But I didn’t want discovery, I wanted relief.
DIDN'T I SAY I COULD FIX IT?
I am a very good fixer, and when I fix situations so that my unhappy feelings are lifted, I feel better, but I learn nothing about myself through those negative emotions. As a result they came back just as strongly when the situation returns. Instead of emotional renovation, I was constantly working on repairs… the same fixes over and over.
Here was the sticking point for me in receiving Kimberly’s compassion. I could not imagine genuine care that did not result in her help or accommodation. If she truly empathized with my situation, she would surely act–help with the dishes, refill the gas tank, spend more time with me. If she didn’t give tangible assistance as able, she was simply uncaring no matter what her words said. If she did not help meet my needs, it proved she didn’t really care. And her lack of care stoked my fear that I was not worthy of care. My only option was to pressure her into acting to resolve my feelings and renew my sense of worth, and I usually did this by shaming her for not doing more. Kimberly reacted to this, as you might expect.
Over a great deal of time sharing and thinking I slowly realized that what I really wanted and needed was her love and genuine concern, and I was closing her down to that by blaming her and demanding that she change. When folks pushed in front of me or cut me off in traffic or ignored me, I thought I needed them to change, but my real underlying need was simply to have someone care about my feelings. That made all the difference. If my wife bangs the cupboards because she slips or thinks I’m downstairs or finds the door sticking, I feel no agitation. Knowing the whole context makes me realize that her behavior does not result from a lack of consideration for me. I may be irritated at the situation, but not at the person.
But what if the person knowingly kept doing those things that troubled me? I simply refused to believe they cared if they didn’t change. My need + your love = your accommodation (and vice versa). How could you possibly say you care if you make no effort to “improve”? I felt bad and it was their fault, they were responsible for my feelings. But if others control my feelings, I’m in trouble because I am then their emotional slave (or we are mutual slaves, which is the essence of co-dependence). Kimberly finally broke through this block in my thinking, but the process was very painful for both of us.
These reflections are just my thoughts, things that have helped me. Please forgive me if I sound dogmatic. I don’t mean to be. If these thoughts don’t help you, then by all means dismiss them; or if you disagree, argue with me in a comment (though remember my tale is not done).
It seems we all try to control others in various ways, and we are usually blind to what we are doing. We think, and even say, that we only want the best for them, not realizing that if they are pressured or forced to make better choices, those new behaviors will not nourish their heart, but shrivel it, because they are not freely choosing out of a loving relationship with God and others.
Sometimes, especially with children, control is necessary for their own safety and health, so that they can live long enough without significant damage to grow into understanding. But if this is the default teaching method, the greatest life lessons the child will learn are that her feelings don’t matter, that she must live from obligation (another word for bondage or lack of freedom), that what she does is more important than who she is.
Let me give a simple and common illustration from my own upbringing. My mom and dad naturally wanted to keep in close touch with their children when they “left the nest.” I was the youngest and last to leave, so their feelings were especially acute towards me. I was on my own for the first time and enjoying my freedom, and I didn’t keep in touch as much as they would like with letters and phone calls. Not only did they miss me, but I expect it made each wonder subconsciously, “Does he really love me?”
I Need You to Change!
Under the force of these emotions, they believed I was remiss in connecting with them. I was to blame for their bad feelings, feelings which I could so easily allay. It would cost me very little (so they thought) to keep in touch, and they pressured me in this direction. When I phoned them, their first statement was usually, “Well, we haven’t heard from you in a long time,” by which they intended to push me to show my love by calling more often. To the extent I bowed to this expectation, I was reacting from a “should” and not from compassion. In fact, the more pressure I felt, the less I was able to respond from genuine love. To my parents it felt like love when I deferred to their wishes and called more often, but somewhere deep inside they must have known that “loving” acts resulting from pressure do not mainly spring from love.
If they had shared their genuine feelings without making me responsible to fix them, it would have drawn out a natural love… I would have wanted to phone them instead of “having” to phone them. If they said, “We really miss you and miss hearing from you,” and genuinely did not hold me responsible for their feelings, but were only sharing their feelings, it would have made a world of difference. Of course, then they could not trust that the outcome would be to their liking since they granted full and genuine freedom.
Sharing your feelings with me without the assumption that I should fix them is a huge invitation into your heart and opens me up to welcome you and share my heart. But telling me about your feelings in order to get me to conform will make me resistant and closed. I will hear the message that I am bad unless I change and I will react to protect myself. If I do yield because of the pressure, because I believe I am responsible for your feelings, it will damage us both, and hurt the relationship. It may feel good, but it will encourage a legalistic view that love is conditional, dependent on my behavior.
I learned from an attractive friend of mine that insecurity does not only come to the daughter who is shamed for her looks, but also to the daughter who is praised for her looks in a way that makes her think her worth depends on it—she may seem proud, but is really filled with fear. The issue is not whether someone is valued, but why they are valued, and if they are primarily valued for conforming to our expectations (being a “good” child), they will always fear “misbehaving” lest they lose their parent’s love which appears to them very conditional and therefore precarious. The same is true in friendships and marriages.
If I am loving towards my wife when she does as I wish, and withhold love (act cool, snipe, act the martyr) when she does not, she will respond out of fear of losing my love. As long as she conforms, she will feel good about our relationship, but it instills a deeper insecurity. That isn’t to say I should never get frustrated or irritated or discouraged. That isn’t to say I should never express those feelings to her. Feeling all my feelings and expressing my feelings are key to good relationships.
But when I share my feelings as a means of getting her to do what I want or need, she feels unsafe with me, and she closes up her heart to protect herself. From my family’s perspective, why would I share an aggravation or disappointment unless it was to get her to change? If I didn’t need her to change, I would say nothing and just deal with it in my own heart and mind, I would silently accommodate. It is when I felt I needed her to change that I would share my displeasure, in order to get her to change and so free me from my unhappy feelings. It was her turn to accommodate. Let us just say it was a very bumpy ride for several years.
We all know we have some influence over our emotions, and there are various reasons we may find it beneficial in particular situations to manipulate our emotions: if emotions are impairing our functioning on some crucial matter, if we cannot control our expression of emotion and that expression is damaging others, if we don’t have enough space (time, safety, etc.) to process our feelings just now. In such cases we are not ignoring our feelings or pushing them away, but we are asking them to wait for a bit until we can address them.
If as a rule we listen and support our feelings and what they are telling us, then the exceptions I suggested above won’t undermine our spirits. If as a rule we try to control our emotions instead of listening to them empathically, it is as healthy as trying to control your spouse—the more “successful” you are at this effort, the more damage is done. It took me a very long time to begin to deal with my emotions based on the principles of grace instead of the principles of law.
I can manipulate my emotions by suppressing them or by aggravating them and neither approach is healthy. It is one thing to listen graciously and patiently to my anger until it has told me all it needs to say; it is quite another to pump up my anger. When I use various means to exacerbate my feelings, I am being just as untrue to my genuine emotions as when I refuse to hear them.
I find that the best question to ask myself regarding my feelings and my response to them is “why?” Why do I feel so angry? Why do I feel the need to stimulate them further? I used to ask myself these questions in condemnation, just as my irate mother used to ask us: “What is WRONG with you?!” This was not asked in a comforting way to find and relieve our suffering. The natural follow up to such a question was, “Just stop it!” And that really was my attitude towards my own feelings.
OUT!
When I was in India, I kept throwing my unwanted emotions out the back door, only to realize too late that it was not the back door, but the closet door, and the shelves collapsed under the weight of my ignored emotions, driving me into deep depression. Trust me, when you ignore or shame your emotions, it does not fix them or get rid of them, it just forces them to keep working behind the scenes where they sicken and weaken your spirit.
Give me half!
Kimberly and I read this together Sunday and found the subject quite relevant:
As Jesus is teaching, someone in the crowd calls out, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” He wants Jesus to correct a personal injustice he has suffered. He thinks that if Jesus changes his brother, and he gets his share of the loot, he will be happy. He locates the cause of his suffering outside of himself.
Jesus doesn’t bite the hook. “Who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” If Jesus really cared about people, would he not jump at the chance to make things right between people? Most of us would! We love to get in there and decide who is wrong, who is right, and think we are fixing things. Jesus teaches us to see more deeply than that…. If Jesus had stepped in and made his brother split the inheritance, nothing would have changed. The man would still be stuck in his own spiritual poverty.
Our responses to others reveal more about ourselves than the other person…. Just when we think we are so loving, forgiving, non-violent, so full of God’s purposes, someone or something comes along and trips us up. Tha anger, the fear, the jealousy, the judgmentalism flare up in us again. And once more we find ourselves thinking it is this other person or this circumstance that needs to be changed. If we can receive persons and experiences into our spiritual lives and discover what they are teaching us about ourselves, we will find that the real answer is not in the change that happens around us but within us. When we are engaged in that kind of transformative spiritual life, when true, deep love, when true peacefulness, when true forgiveness and compassion are being formed in us, then we are people who foster change in others and the world.
We don’t know what happened to the person in the crowd that day, what he did with Jesus’ teaching. He was at an important juncture in his life. He could remain the prisoner of expectations and demands related to his brother and to life around him. Or he could look at himself, come to greater self-awareness, and turn toward a life of true security, freedom, and joy.
Kimberly is worried that some folks may think I am reporting on current discussions, that we are in some kind of tiff. I’m actually reporting a synopsis of hundreds of conversations over the last seven years. We are mostly on the same page now, but it took years of hard work to get here, and has been worth every effort.
When I was struggling with a deep sense of inadequacy and shame as a pastor in Arlington, a friend recommended a counseling couple. As I sat with them in their living room, they explained that my poor self-worth came from believing lies, especially lies about God. That may have been true, but it only made my sense of humiliation worse. Not only did I feel shame, but I was wrong for feeling shame. It is hard to hear, “You are deceived,” and feel positive about yourself, and “The God you worship is a false god,” is not particularly comforting either.
If this couple had identified with and shown empathy for my struggles, it would have made a huge difference. They could have said, “We have all been tricked into believing lies foisted on us by family, church, and culture. We are the victims of these deceptions.” This may have really been their thought, but I could not get past the shame of living a lie. When I asked Kimberly, “Doesn’t my anger or sadness or fear point to something that should not be in my heart, some skewed perspective for which I am guilty?” the question itself seems to invite a shaming answer.
“Well, did you know these beliefs were false?” she asked. “Did you deliberately avoid the truth? When you were at last shown the way did you run from it?”
“No,” I said, “I set my feet to it, not perfectly, but as best I could in spite of the fear and pain.”
“Yes, something is in your heart that should not be there, just like Somali pirates should not be on oil tankers, but you are no more guilty of it than the ship’s captain. You did not create this darkness, but are rather victimized by it. Don’t shame yourself for these lies which deceived you, but have compassion on yourself for the harm you still suffer because of them.”
Such soothing words of grace! If I keep shaming myself for my struggles, it will push me away from God’s grace. I’m afraid that if I openly admit what a mess I am, God will agree and put me on the bench till I get my act together. Instead he embraces me and says, “I’ve been waiting for you to discover your wounds and show them to me so that I can begin to heal them.”
Emotions often reveal the unhealthiness of my heart. If I rebuke and punish myself for this junk, I become more lost in the mazes of my shame and more afraid of the truth. I’ve discovered that when I show myself compassion, like a child who is sick, the truth loses its monster mask and I am much more able to open my heart to it. The truth comes to me as a companion and help rather than a testy and impatient headmaster.
Janathan Grace Reflections 