BP 171
Human psycho-spiritual relational pain runs incredibly deep in the soul. It is a terrible consequence of the separation from God that descended on the world after the rebellion in the Garden. In this post, I will share the thoughts of one man who was lost in the deep darkness of separation from God, other people, and his own self before he began his “spelunking” journey into the soul. I will then share his experience of self and others after he had done three years of therapy focusing on one primary, hopeful evidence of growth in his soul.
The following are the thoughts and even some quotes from Devon.
I grew up in a home with two extremely anxious parents. (I could not have put those words to my situation at the beginning of therapy.) My mother was fragile and would occasionally dissociate due to her childhood abuse trauma. My existence with my needs and anger and my own anxiety was perceived as a threat to her. I think on some unconscious level she experienced me as a bad presence, maybe even as another abuser in her life. She loved me and she hated me. I can’t blame her. I hated me, too.
Meanwhile, my father was simply emotionally young. It was like his self stopped developing when he reached age seven. He was a nice man, a high-level professional, but did not know how to connect with me.
As a result, I was very alone. My parents may have had the desire to be with me, but they didn’t have the ability or capacity to do so. They were not quite able to comfort me, to even really see me—especially when they experienced me as “bad”. Surviving is what they knew how to do.
They lived at an emotional level that was all about holding themselves together. Intimacy lived at a much higher developmental level than they ever attained. You have to have emotional supplies to truly love someone and be with them without worrying about yourself. They did not possess these emotional supplies. Any supplies they did have were directed toward not falling apart emotionally. Their personalities were duct taped together. So was mine.
Did I already say I was very alone and had to figure out life on my own? My self was young and prone to disintegration. I barely held on. I hated myself and the world and my parents. I didn’t know who I was except that I was somehow deeply bad.
Some psychologist dude said that we all have “looking glass” selves. In other words, if we’re going to have a clear sense of who we are, we must have people around us who can serve as reliable mirrors for us to look into and see ourselves. We cannot develop a self on our own without others to show us who we are. I tried to know myself on my own. I had no other options. There were no safe or predictable mirrors for me to know myself in.
I have learned that left alone to their own mirroring, children often will develop a distorted view of themselves as bad and respond with inflated narcissism, seeing themselves arrogantly as God’s gift to humankind or will go the other direction toward self-hatred. I went the latter direction.
One thing that is true is that if you don’t have safe, predictable, and loving mirrors around you (or if some trauma causes you to shut down and sever all the mirrors in your life), you have to attempt to construct a self on your own. Construction of a self by yourself simply does not work. You have to be a healthy self to bestow a healthy identity on those around you.
I felt something inside of me that I could not identify until I worked with a therapist for three years to know myself. In retrospect, I saw that it was the pain of being alone in the world even when my parents were in the same house. So near yet so far. This at-the-time unidentified sensation within me felt bad. It made me feel like I was bad. I felt like it would end me. So, I drank alcohol to take the edge of it.
We all turn to some addiction if we have a pain in us that simply won’t go away.
I had to self-medicate because the alternative was emptiness—a void that was deep, dark, unknown. I could stave off that emptiness for a while with alcohol but that numbing could not last forever. Eventually the emptiness was going to creep in and take over my body and my soul. I was afraid that to feel everything inside of me would kill me. It felt that big.
My sense of badness and the fear of ultimate emptiness drove me to therapy in my twenties. It certainly wasn’t the first time I had seen a shrink. My parents had tried to fix me many times as a child and a teenager. You see, I was the identified patient. I was the problem. Thus, my badness.
I hated psychologists and psychiatrists because their presence in my life communicated to me that I was broken, that I was bad, that my parents were right—I was the problem. So, every time I went to therapy, I hated him and I hated me. I was an angry man as I had been an angry child. No one seemed to know why I was angry and they eventually sent me away because of my anger. Alone again.
After years of therapy where I slowly stopped being angry at my therapist and actually let him into my world—the first time anyone became a mirror to me other than a mirror telling me I was an angry person with a problem—I miracle happened. It may not seem like a miracle when I tell it to you. It may not have even felt like a miracle to me, but my therapist saw it as an amazing thing.
To make the story short, I was backing out of the parking lot at my apartment one day when a neighbor of mine who lived alone in a small psychological world and who I kind of liked was driving past. She honked at me to avoid an accident. I turned around and through the passenger window of my car saw her angry face. When she saw me, I could tell she felt embarrassed that it was me she was so angry with.
If I had still been my old self who was afraid of any disapproval and who automatically experienced himself as bad when someone was angry with me, I would have tried to hide from this woman. I would have ducked so she wouldn’t see me. I would have hated her for “telling” me (honking at me) that I had done something bad and hated me for once again being bad. I was always so bad. I would have said with fiery anger, What the heck is wrong with you? I would have been referring to her and me.
I would have moved away from her by hiding (due to my shame and badness) and I also would have moved against her inside my heart swearing at her and seeing her as the bad one. Someone had to be judged. Someone always had to be the guilty one, the shameful one.
But on this day, I did something totally new and different: I leaned out the window, smiling, and waved at her. I moved toward her. I allowed myself to be seen by her. I was a bit miffed but I did not make her or myself bad.
What was so miraculous about this one incident, so small in the larger scope of my day? I did not feel bad! I did not have to make her bad! There was no judgment, no projection of my badness onto her. I got past the lump in my throat and responded differently. Let me tweak that just a bit: I had space inside to respond differently. Something had opened up in me that had never been there before. I was able to be out in the open! I could have hidden in my car, but I allowed her to see me.
Space! I have never had space inside to respond differently than I had since I was five years old.
You get it, right? I have lived my whole life not wanting people to see me because they have power to make me feel bad! People have annoyed me all my life. I have often hated them, actually constantly hated them. But on this day, I held out an olive branch. I had space to not feel bad and to like someone who had honked at me or possibly even to love her.
Later that day, my therapist reminded me once again that I had been living in a very small psychological world just like that woman. I had been living for twenty years to fight off the shameful badness that was always a thought away in my brain and one feeling away in my soul and one incident away when living in the world—the badness that kept me imprisoned in my small world.
So, maybe now you can see that the parking lot interaction was a small miracle. I was opening up. I could be seen because I was not bad and had to hide my shameful self from the world. If I was responding to that woman with a smile and a wave, it was evidence that I was loving myself—at least for a few moments until one day it might become a way of life for me.
One last thought—I have always avoided Jesus because I hated Him for seeing me as bad and sinful just as my religious parents have seen me as bad. I am now beginning to think that I will be able to smile and wave at Him too because I may have a glimmer, an inkling, a very small taste of what grace really is.
Oh, and I am beginning not to see my parents as hating me and as bad people that I therefore hate. I am beginning to see them as wounded people who didn’t know what to do with me due to their own huge discomfort of anger. In a word, I have a growing space to see both them and God differently—and, of course, myself.
I have a long road to walk still, but I now see that there is a different way of seeing me, them, and Jesus. I have hope.
My closing thought is about the relevance of Jesus to Devon and to the world we live in.
Never underestimate the power of care, listening, and love. I was the therapist for this young man who needed someone to mirror him not as a shameful person who should run and hide and lock himself in the coffin of his own selfishness as C.S. Lewis wrote; and not as the powerless victim of Satan’s voice of accusations and lies that condemned him day and night. He simply needed someone safe and consistent to be present with him who would communicate compassionate presence over a period of years until he internalized the truth of it: you are loved. Right where you are at–by me, someone with skin on, and by the God who created you for life and joy.
You are loved, mess and all. Anger and all. Hatred and all.
So, come out of the tomb, the small suffocating hell where many people spend their entire lives, hating themselves, hating others, hating God. Come to the river of delights (Psalm 36:8) and the mirror of light.
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” ~ Matthew 11:28
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” ~ Romans 8:1,2
“I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only do I see it, but by it I see everything else” ~ C.S. Lewis