Archive for the ‘feelings’ Tag
Given a couple of negative responses to my recent posts, I apparently need to explain what I mean by grace. I think there are some common interpretations of grace that can really take us down the wrong path. One of the most common misunderstandings of grace is to equate it with freedom of action while equating law with restriction of action. freedom and restriction of action are about method and context, while grace and law are about motivation and direction. Grace does not play the high notes or the low notes on this freedom/restriction continuum, but plays the whole keyboard. That is to say, it confines or releases as directed by love.
EVERY NOTE IS A GRACE NOTE
Law motivates by fear, shame, and guilt. These are very legitimate motivations, because they point out how screwed up we really are, but if we try to remedy our fear and guilt by making better choices, we are doomed by our imperfections. The fear and shame are not intended to drive us to work harder at being good, but to awaken us to our need of the grace of God (forgiveness, love, acceptance, strength, hope, blessing, in short, the gospel).
THE FACE OF THE LAW
Here is where confusion and misgivings easily catch us. We know that fear and shame are powerful motivators, they have profoundly molded our behavior and the behavior of others towards us. If you remove law, what will keep me in check? We think fear and guilt make us good, when they really only change our actions, not our hearts. Still, if this motivation is removed, what will inspire us to go in the right direction. If there is therefore now no condemnation, won’t I just act like a spoiled brat, won’t others “take advantage” of grace? No. It is impossible to “take advantage” of grace. If you try, if you decide to fulfill every “forbidden pleasure,” it will leave you more empty, lost, broken, and even farther from the blessings of grace–not because grace resists you, for it always has open arms, but because you resist grace, which is the way of true peace, fulfillment, joy, love. The only way to take advantage, full advantage, of God’s grace is to throw yourself whole-heartedly into his embrace.
Let me quote a reply I gave a questioning friend: In my mind “doing as I please” is a serious misunderstanding of grace, and is profoundly different from doing what my soul needs. The differentiation in my mind is not that the first matches my desires and feelings and the second matches my duty, but that the first matches superficial desires and feelings often at odds with my deeper feelings (e.g. choosing sex as a replacement for love), while the second is discovering my true feelings and true needs and seeking to meet those. At this point in my understanding of God’s grace, I believe that my soul’s truest needs are never in conflict with God’s will, and if they appear to be, I misunderstand one or the other.
SAFE HANDS
This morning NPR interviewed a man with catalepsy, a cousin of narcolepsy. During REM sleep, our bodies release a certain chemical which tells all our muscles to relax (so we don’t literally act out our dreams). Unfortunately for a few folks, this chemical is released while they are awake, causing all their muscles to let go and thus paralyzing them. The release mechanism for this chemical is the person’s emotional response, and for the man on NPR (Walter?), it was especially triggered by his pleasurable emotions: excitement, happiness, love. 
You can imagine the impact this would make on relationships, especially family relationships. With his wife, think of not only sex, but kissing, holding hands, talking about the children… engaging in any emotional connection. Walter described collapsing at a grandchild’s birthday party and on phonecalls with his children. He spent the whole time at his daughter’s wedding propped up like a bag of potatoes against the wall. Not just happy events themselves, but simply looking at photos of happy events can paralyze him. There is no cure, but he takes a medication which slows the attacks, so it now comes on at a pace which he can recognize and respond to.
On the radio he spoke slowly and with no inflection in his voice, trying to speak of emotional things while blocking out the natural emotions. His speech became slower, with more pauses, he remarked that his eyelids were feeling heavy, and then the NPR interviewer told the audience that Walter had to go lie down because he was slipping into paralysis. The show host went on to describe how Walter could only function in life by avoiding happy occasions, turning himself more and more into an unemotional machine. For Walter, happiness is not a good thing nor is connecting with others emotionally. Such a heavy burden to bear through life.
My struggles in life are much smaller than his, but his experiences had an echo in my own. Those things that once gave me pleasure in the first half of my life–whether great or moderate, exciting or fulfilling–are beyond my reach now. I am always tired, so tired that doing something enjoyable feels like a burden rather than blessing. When I have emotional energy I get great pleasure in so many things–reading, writing, conversing, celebrating, creating. Those are mostly a dim memory now, and I only eke out small, brief pleasures. The more taxed I am, the less ability I have to experience the good.
For the last few weeks, my heart is starting to recover from its latest downspike. The telltale sign of my recovery is that imagining the joys of life feels good rather than painful. Merely the thought of blogging, for instance, has been lead to my heart, but imagining it these days feels more like a little red balloon… even if I still have little energy for actually doing it.
My sister Mardi emailed me this a few years ago:
On NPR I heard a really sweet story of a Dad and his little boy. The little boy had had a serious illness, had nearly died and had a long hospitalization and lots of surgery and treatments. Through it all he had clung to his Teddy Bear, Toby. Even after he had gotten better, he carried Toby with him everywhere. Then when he was 7 the family was on vacation and when they got home, Toby was missing. They told him and he said “I don’t know how I can go on without Toby” and then he said “I feel like I’ve lost my soul”!
Well, his Dad promptly got on the next plane back to Anaheim and went straight to the hotel. The hotel people looked and looked and asked the staff and found that the bear had been found by a cleaning person, but it was in a trashcan and so they had thrown it out. Undeterred, the father asked where the trash was put. They showed him the large (size of a semi truck) dumpster in the back. Good news, the truck had not yet come to pick it up, it was scheduled to pick it up the next day….bad news, it was completely sealed with no way of getting into it. But, as they were talking about it, the truck drove up! The father convinced half a dozen of the hotel employees to go with him and help him look for Toby. He said that they were all parents and understood why he needed their help. He also offered $100 to the person who found the bear. So they all get in a van and follow the garbage truck to the recycling facility. (at this point I am crying in the car as I am listening to the story unfold) Now, this facility is not just a city dump; it is a huge building with many bays where the trucks pull up and cranes lift off the dumpsters. Inside is an area the size of an airplane hanger with all sorts of equipment and vehicles and people working. The people at the facility are not going to let them go in there. But after a lot of talking they agree to shut down the equipment and let them look for Toby….but only for 15 minutes.
Well, when they empty out the dumpster on the floor, he said it was a huge mountain of garbage, bigger than he could have imagined. It was all runny with a lake of brown garbage liquid with all these plastic bags sitting and floating in the brown goo. The hotel people jump in and start tearing open bags looking for the bear. The father is overwhelmed by the enormity of the task but begins tearing open bags too. Then a number of the employees of the facility put on their gloves and begin wading through the muck tearing open bags too! (I’m bawling in the car). There are now about 18 people looking through the mountain. But as the father looks at the size of the pile and the number of bags, he realizes in despair that it will be really impossible to look through it all. And in his heart he just says “Toby, we’re not going to be able to find you unless you somehow show yourself”. He said that he is not a particularly spiritual guy, he’s an accountant and auditor…. a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of a guy. But as that thought went through his mind, he tore open a bag, and there was Toby, dry and clean. Everyone, of course was jubilant. The father immediately calls home to tell his little boy that he had found Toby. He said his little boy was happy, but seemed kind of matter-of-fact and the father realized that for the little boy it seemed that his father had just gone and gotten his bear back. The child had no idea of the super-human effort that had been accomplished for him.
I have hinted at the positive direction that Kimberly and I are headed, but some might wonder if it is really worth all the pain and struggle. Believe me, we asked ourselves the same question many times, and for the first year or two of marriage I regularly wondered in the middle of a conflict if we had made a mistake in getting married. But we couldn’t help ourselves. Neither of us felt there was much benefit in a shallow relationship, and the only alternative we knew was to keep going deeper in honest understanding, acceptance, and respect for ourselves and one another.
As we worked through the foundational issues in our conflicting worldviews, some pretty amazing things happened within each of us and in our relationship.
UM... UH... SO ABOUT MY ISSUES.
Nothing has ever affected me so powerfully as being accepted for who I really am right now in all my brokenness (not for what I do, who I project I am, or who I one day will be). It did not come easy for either of us, but I cannot remember a single major conflict in the last two years and Kimberly has difficulty even remembering the hard times. Of course we were on the fast track, often talking 3, 4, even 5 hours a day trying to understand our fear, pain and depression, and each of us had already spent many years working through our own issues.
I could say that it was the best thing to happen to me since I heard the good news of Christ, but that would make it sound like a different thing than the gospel, and Berly is just my clearest experience of the gospel. I discovered God’s grace through her in ways I had never known it before. I want to encourage you with snapshots of my personal healing and growth as a result of our relationship (the changes in Berly are her own story to tell).
You Did WHAT?!
Let me start with my anger. I had been taught in youth that anger was either good (“righteous indignation”) or bad (“the wrath of man”). The difference lay in whether or not the one who exasperated me was truly wrong or guilty. If he was, then my anger was justified, if he was not, then my anger was aberrant. When I got mad, it was someone’s fault–me for illegitimate vexation or him for illegitimate behavior. The most important thing was to discover who was at fault and have them repent. The matter was thus fixed and the relational conflict resolved. If I thought he was at fault, and he refused to admit it, then I would forgive him. To avoid condemnation, I worked hard at justifying my temper and blaming the other person. I was good and he was bad. Being “right” became very important… it was the only way I could save myself from the shame of sinful anger.
Kimberly was afraid of my anger, and given my perspective, when she shared her discomfort, I only heard this as judgment of my anger and reacted defensively. But she did not have my take on anger: She was not blaming me, wanting me to agree with her, or asking me to change. She just wanted to share her feelings with me (which I could only hear as a demand for change). Because she respected me, wanted to understand and accept me, she kept affirming my feelings, even though they scared her, and I gradually came to trust that she really did accept me when I was cross, that she thought my anger was always “legitimate” because it was revealing to me my heart, not the guilt of the other person. As she accepted my defensive feelings in this way, she wanted to understand me better, so when she asked about my aggravation, it was not to correct me, “fix” my rage, or gain ammunition for shaming me out of it. She had compassion for me and my experience of anger.
In this harbor of safety where I slowly grew less defensive about my temper, with less need to use it to protect myself, learning to have compassion for myself, I started to discover what lay beneath my frown. From what was my temper guarding me? To hear these deeper throbs of my heart, I had to embrace my feelings with compassion . If I had to protect myself, it meant that I was afraid. With Kimberly’s help, I learned to have compassion for the fear behind my anger instead of shaming myself for it. Only with this gentleness could I feel safe enough to explore my anxieties. Berly always justified my fears, affirming that they always had a very good reason, I just had to uncover it. Discovering the roots of my fear (which often was a long process) led me to find the substructure, the actual beliefs on which I lived my life, and often they conflicted in some way with my stated theology.
Again, Kimberly’s grace and acceptance gave me the support I needed not to shame myself for these faulty beliefs, but to see myself as the victim of these legalistic lies and to be led by grace into believing grace for myself, to discover that God’s grace was the healing for my fears. My fears were not the enemy. They were doors into grace: “‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved,” in the words of John Newton. I had always thought this was a one time event brought about by the amazing grace of the gospel… as though I didn’t need the gospel of grace all through every day. I think working through my fears is a life long process of growth in grace, applying the gospel to each wound as I need it, believing each day more fully that God loves me completely, always, and without any strings attached.
I finally have enough emotional space in my life to continue my conversation about the conflicting needs in my marriage. I will first restate my perspective on emotions so you can understand my explanations (whether or not you agree).
(ONE WAY TO MAKE TRUTH A LIE)
No one likes unpleasant feelings, and so we all try to escape them. I think that is actually their purpose–like bodily pain that alerts us to physical harm, emotional pain alerts us to psychological harm, though it is the source of the pain rather than the pain itself that needs to be addressed. In other words, our unpleasant emotions are valuable and beneficial in protecting us. But since they hurt, we want to avoid the feelings themselves, and when Christians teach that such feelings are wrong, we believe we ought to avoid them: fear is a lack of faith, sadness is a lack of joy, despair is a lack of hope, anger is a lack of love, and so on. Not only do you feel bad, but you are wrong for feeling bad. As a result many of us have tried to directly control our emotions as a moral obligation, “get over” our weak and “sinful” feelings, talk ourselves into feeling better by controlling our conscious thoughts with “truth.” My own perspective is that when truth is wrongly applied it is simply another form of untruth.
Talking down our feelings may work with superficial and circumstantial emotions (ones which do not connect to deeper underlying issues). But if they are revealing more profound issues, I believe this approach waylays our attempts at growing more mature and healthy, like using aspirin to fight migraines that come from a brain tumor. I think we undermine our growth whenever we disrespect our own feelings (through denial, dismissal, shaming, etc.). As long as our coping mechanisms successfully distance us from our true, unhappy feelings, we are unlikely to recognize and work through our big issues.Coping mechanisms can be more addictive and blinding than pain killers when they are habitually used as the answer to our pain.
Neither Kimberly nor I would have faced our painful feelings if we could have successfully avoided them. I have numerous coping mechanisms: redoubled effort, procrastination, comparing myself to others, busyness, self-castigation & repentance, fixing, passing blame, detailed planning, control… and I could go on. Unfortunately, all these combined could not protect me from those unwanted feelings. I needed help. I needed to find a spouse that would shore up my inadequate defensive arsenal, someone who would be so sweet and supportive and gracious that I could find peace and security at last. I was sure I had found this in Kimberly.Kimberly had spent her life hiding her true feelings from others because she quickly learned the world did not like her unhappy feelings. She badly needed someone to accept her fully as she was, and she found that in me, or so she thought. I had very little discomfort with her depression and felt honored that she would share with me these vulnerable parts of herself. She discovered that she could trust me to accept all of who she is.
But as we grew closer and more fully knew each other, as we grew in trust and shared more vulnerably, our conflicting coping strategies poked out. 
To protect myself against this assault, my coping mechanisms kicked in, and when she smacked against my defenses, she put up a wall. I would feel blamed and shame her in defense. She would withdraw into self-protective silence or try to explain her words in ways that simply hurt me further. The tension escalated, and all we knew to do was to keep talking it out… for hours… for days… for months and years.
We were committed to the relationship and to honestly working through our issues, we respected and loved one another adamantly, so our only way forward was to try to understand the painful dynamics. I explained myself over and over to Kimberly and she asked questions and tried to understand. She told me about herself, repeating the same confusing messages week after week while I struggled to make sense of it. Our way was slow, painful, scary, confusing, but we found ourselves on a journey of deep self discovery and healing wounds. We were constantly dumbstruck by this unexpected dynamic–that understanding and sharing our pain with someone who loved and accepted us was so amazingly transformational and life-giving.
From one of my all time favorite books, written by a non-christian with deep insight: Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, a married Harvard student who discovered her fetus (Adam) had Down’s Syndrome.
With Adam, I had more fears than usual to plague me during those long, long nights. The problem was that it was impossible not to fall in love with him. It is a frightening thing to love someone you know the world rejects. It makes you so terribly vulnerable. You know you will be hurt by every slight, every prejudice, every pain that will befall your beloved throughout his life. In the wee small hours, as I rocked and nursed and sang to my wee small boy, I couldn’t help but worry. Will Rogers once said that he knew worrying was effective, because almost nothing he worried about ever happened. That’s a cute statement, and I’m glad Will’s life worked this way. But mine hasn’t–at least not where Adam is concerned. Almost everything I worried about during the nights after his birth, almost every difficult thing I feared would come my way as a result of being his mother, has actually happened.
Thank God.
…….
What my fears all boiled down to, as I sat with my tiny son in the days after his birth, was an underlying terror that he would destroy my own facade, the flawlessness and invulnerability I projected onto the big screen, the Great and Terrible Martha of Oz. You see, I knew all along that there wasn’t one label people might apply to Adam–stupid, ugly, strange, clumsy, slow, inept–that could not, at one time or another, be justifiably applied to me. I had spent my life running from this catastrophe and like so many other things, it caught up with me while I was expecting Adam.
In this regard, as in so many others, my worst fears have come to pass. But as they do I am learning that there is an even bigger secret, a secret I had been keeping from myself. It has been hard for me to grasp, but gradually, painfully, with the slow, small steps of a retarded child, I am coming to understand it. This has been the second phase of my education, the one that followed all those years of school. In it, I have had to unlearn virtually everything Harvard taught me about what is precious and what is garbage. I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul.
Now I think that the vast majority of us “normal” people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, onmiscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered. The irony is that we do this to be loved, all the time remaining terrified of anyone who seems to be as perfect as we wish to be. We go around like Queen Elizabeth, bless her heart, clutching our dowdy little accessories, avoiding the slightest hint of impropriety, never showing our real feelings or touching anyone else except through glove leather. But we were dazed and confused when the openly depressed, bulimic, adulterous, rejected Princess Di was the one people really adored.
Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught me a lot about the truth. He has taught me to look at things in themselves, not the value a brutal and often senseless world assign to them. As Adam’s mother I have been able to see quite clearly that he is no less beautiful for being called ugly, no less wise for appearing dull, no less precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us.
FEED ME SEYMOUR!
All of us are concerned that when we give others enough freedom, they will take advantage of us. They will think only of themselves, and we will get left with too few resources–whether money, time, attention, benefits, or what have you. It is a realistic concern–watch any playground with children (… or adults), but our desire for boundaries against the incursions of others seems to smack against the command to love, to be unselfish. We have often tried to sort through this tension by making a distinction between “need” and “want.” What we need is legitimate to fight for, but what we want should often go unfulfilled for the sake of another.
I think our distinction between need and want slowly worked itself into a spectrum represented at one end by absolute necessity (what we need to survive) and at the other end by mild wishes. We tend to assign “needs” an objective value (actual need) and “wants” a subjective value (just a feeling) and to downplay our desires. No matter how intense your feelings, I will judge them as only a “want” if they do not pass the objective test for “needs.” My attitude will be “get a grip!”
With this approach I determine how much to give or support someone by making an objective comparison between their need and my own need. When someone asks for money, I immediately consider whether they “need” this or just “want” it. I compare their level of need to my own, and if their need is greater, I feel obligated to help out. If I don’t give, I feel under a great deal of pressure to justify my decision (they don’t deserve it, they are not my responsibility, it would be bad for them, etc.). But this rarely works to fully relieve my conscience, so I feel guilty of selfishness. I tend to assume the equation: their (genuine) need + my ability = my obligation.
THIS IS NOT A NEED!
Given this perspective, I must constantly evaluate whether my desire is a “need” or a “want.” But I find that nearly impossible to determine except for the extremes (physical survival and slight desire). When I take this route, I find myself using “objective” evaluation of my need to constantly critique my subjective feelings, my wants. The more it is tied to my feelings, the more likely I am to be dismissive so that my self-care is constantly under attack. The more conscientious I am, the more I tend to minimize my own desires, downgrading them from needs to wants, interpreting self-care as selfishness (a lack of adequate concern for others). But shushing our feelings is a pretty sure way of losing touch with our true heart. God gave us emotions for a reason, so it seems to me ignoring them is going to get us into trouble (I know it has done a great deal of damage to me personally).
I think the “objective” distinction between needs and wants as I presented it here can be a dangerous interpretation of selfishness. Leaving aside superficial desires that cost me little to miss, I’d like to propose an alternative distinction: true wants/needs versus false ones. The stronger my desire, the more likely it is to have its roots in an important need, and it is vital for myself and my relationships–for health and growth–to satisfy that need. Regardless of how trivial my desire looks from an “objective” view, my emotions are cluing me in to an important need.
The major problem I find with this perspective is that I often misconstrue my true needs. I mistake applause for love, success for worth. I mistake conformity for community, popularity for acceptance… and the list goes on. My main problem is not selfishness that results in satisfying my desires, but confusion that results in “satisfying” my false desires and neglecting my true ones. If I am hungry for applause, it is a genuine and important hunger that is calling out, but the true need is not approval, so no amount of praise will satisfy my hunger (as no amount of dry leaves will satisfy my empty belly). I may think the solution is to “humble” myself and stop seeking applause (to basically deny that I have a need). I tried that all my life and my genuine hunger remained. What finally worked for me was identifying my true need (that was tricky) and finding a means to satisfy it with God’s help.
I would like to suggest that it is never a good moral decision to sacrifice my true needs/desires. I am ultimately responsible for my own health and growth, to receive the grace of God for my needs. God, not I, is responsible to provide the grace for everyone’s individual needs. I may or may not be a channel of his grace to others, but it would be morally wrong for me to choose to forgo meeting my own true needs so as to meet another’s needs. That is not selflessness, it is self abuse, and it confounds God’s role with mine. I suggested earlier that physical survival was an obvious case of objective need, but is it truly? I believe I can sacrifice my life for another without injuring myself, but I may never choose to sacrifice my soul. I believe we are best alerted to our deepest objective needs by our emotions rather than our logic, and through reflection in the context of true community we discover their true nature.
CAN I PLEASE JUST HAVE THE BONE?
It seems to me that if we do not find in God the ultimate answer to our needs, we become dangerously dependent on others. If I think my wife is the sole channel of God’s grace for any substantial need and she fails me, then my only recourse is to force her compliance. I might cajole, argue, bargain, threaten… there are a hundred ways to get her to “fall in line,” but this manipulation undermines her sincere love.
Genuine love must grow in an atmosphere of freedom, not control. That is frightening because freedom allows my friend to choose to be unloving and uncaring, refusing to help with my needs. If I make no demands, but offer unconditional love, he may take advantage of me, take all I have to offer and give little in return. And if my needs go unmet, I cannot survive. So when I sense a disparity between how much I give and how much I get, I react to protect myself. If I protect myself by giving less, I feel bad for my selfishness, for my lack of generosity, and I feel a distance growing in my heart towards him. So instead I subtly (or plainly) push him to give more.
This approach did not go over well with Kimberly. She felt the pressure of my expectations and recognized the conditionality of my love. When she chose not to do as I wished, I felt unloved and became resentful, critical, and demanding. This in turn made her feel unloved. I tried to pressure her to comply, to prove her care by meeting my expectations. She insisted on a more honest path to resolving our conflict, one that made room for both of our needs and for genuine rather than forced expressions of love.
I thought love was proved by what it gave—if folks didn’t give, they didn’t care—and this was intolerable to me because it inflated my fears of unworthiness. I gave to others with the expectation that they would reciprocate and so prove my lovability. My mind tightly bound together loving motivation and helping behavior, and I desperately needed Kimberly to prove my worth by setting aside her feelings to meet my needs. Through long conversations and consistent responses, Berly expressed her care for my needs without yielding to my pressure to change her behavior (and so abandon her own needs in favor of mine). It took years for me to believe she loved me in spite of not coming to my rescue. I slowly realized that someone can love without helping and help without loving, that sometimes the truest and hardest love is one that does not give when giving would beguile the loved one into a false security.
I wanted to stop feeling my insecurity and Kimberly wanted me to embrace it, understand it, work through it. If she helped me to avoid those feelings, it would undermine our relationship. For her part, she was afraid of my resentment, and wanted to act in a way that would hold it at bay, but she knew living out of that fear would keep her from sharing herself honestly and vulnerably with me. Things might go smoothly between us, but we would be sacrificing substance for façade. Slowly we both stepped into our fears and broke through to a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another, a deeper trust, and a deeper freedom to accept who we are. We encourage and help each other to find a way to meet our needs, but do not take the responsibility for this on ourselves. Of course, sometimes our needs conflict, but that is another story altogether.
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.
When Kimberly said, “You are responsible for your own feelings,” I could only think, “If I am responsible, then I have control over my own feelings, and I should not be irritated. I lack self-control, I am not ‘walking in the Spirit,’ I am bad.” You can imagine that the continuing conversation did not go well as I tried to defend myself from the accusation that if I were aggravated, it was my own fault.
Mind you, that was not what she was saying. In fact, she might have used the words, “You need to take ownership of your own feelings,” but that sounded the same to me. She rightly perceived that I was angry and blaming her and expecting her to quit. No one likes to be blamed or manipulated with angry tones of voice, so she reacted in self defense, but a very gentle self defense. She was not returning blame for blame, but that is what I heard.
“Look, I was not irritated in the least until you started slamming the cabinet doors. You started slamming, I got irritated. If you had made less noise, there would have been no irritation. Cause and effect. If you don’t want me irritated at you, don’t bang the doors.” It simply made no sense to me to see it any other way. I had reasonable expectations, and if they were reasonable, she should meet them.
“I’m not telling you that you can’t get irritated, you have every right to get irritated. I’m just not responsible for your irritation.” A long silence on my part as my brain cells tried to break the code: “I only have the right to get irritated if she is doing something obviously irritating, and if she is, she should quit. How on earth can you separate the two… if I am right in getting irate, then it is her responsibility to change. If I am wrong in getting irate, then it is my responsibility to change by repenting of my frustration.”
In my perspective, if there were tension in a relationship not caused by miscommunication, then someone was right and someone was wrong (or both were partly wrong). The way to resolve the tension was to determine who was at fault for what, have them apologize, and the other would forgive them. Over and done. That was always the way it worked in my family. Frustration is either legitimate or illegitimate, if legitimate, the offender repents, if illegitimate the frustrated one repents (“I’m sorry I snapped, I was tired… it was a hard day… I have a headache”).
My wife’s approach made no sense at all—first she irritated me, and then she blamed me for being irritated (as I thought). You can imagine how many rounds of conversation we went through as I tried to figure out what she meant, desperately avoiding her conclusions because they would only squeeze into my paradigm through the slot of shame—whenever I have unhappy emotional reactions, I am at fault and must stop feeling as I do. But she kept insisting I had the right to feel my feelings. Does she mean I can feel these things, but should not express my feelings? She wanted me to express my feelings to her… just not blame her. But if she had done nothing wrong, then wasn’t it my fault for feeling frustrated? I was lost, driving in a loop with no exit ramps.
Janathan Grace Reflections 