| << | Contents | >> |
Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 34>I didn’t want to conclude that I was right and someone else was wrong. I wanted everyone to be right. My heart looked for a seemingly more humble “solution,” one in which no one was at fault.
Before I continue, I need to write a few words to clarify how our internal Parent fits into the Emotion Commotion Chart: Any emotion that is expressed as a way of taking care of ourselves or others is a Parent emotion. Any emotion that lacks this quality is a Child emotion.
For example, with a Fun Emotion and Desire like joy, if it is a form of approval over the fact that we have acted responsibly, it is a Parent emotion. If it is joy over the simple delights of life, it is a Child emotion. In the same way, a judgmental Anger over a question of right and wrong is a Parent emotion. A temper tantrum, on the other hand, is a Child emotion.
You can see from what I have just written that I am not treating Parent and Child as separate physical parts of our brain. They are just convenient ways of grouping how our emotions express themselves. A Parent emotion and a Child emotion might originate in the same physical nerve cells. The difference is in the role the emotion plays, not its origin. Parent emotions have the quality of care or punishment. Child emotions are a matter of self-expression.
So why bother with labels like Parent and Child? I believe they are helpful because our inner life often resembles the interaction between parents and children. We sometimes find ourselves rebelling against some rule we know is right, only to harshly criticize ourselves for our actions some time later. It can be helpful to recognize that we are internally acting out a classic parent-child scenario. Doing so allows us to ask ourselves whether our approach is accomplishing anything and whether it might not be better to step back and consider some new way to resolve the conflict.
Our emotional stance needs to be a reflection of the love of God. He doesn’t excuse sin, but at the same time, He doesn’t harshly criticize us. He longs to come to our side to teach and empower us so that our internal Parent becomes an expression of His heart and our internal Child becomes a reflection of godly trust, submission, and joy.
My emotional stance toward myself is the area in which I have most struggled in my walk with God. I have often fallen to subtle sins that have disguised themselves as righteousness. For example, I have lost patience with myself when my progress has been slow, or I have become obsessively fearful in the presence of possible failure. As a result, I have unwisely bullied myself rather than finding God’s mercy and grace in the middle of my imperfection.
For years, I heard that the fatherhood of God was the answer to this problem, but just experiencing God’s fatherhood never seemed to fix me. In my mistaken thinking, His love almost <page 35>seemed to support my impatience with my failures; I expected more from myself with Him involved in my life. I reasoned that there must be something defective in me that kept me from finding answers in spite of His amazing grace.
Until my relationship with Him transformed my internal Parent, I couldn’t make sense of His presence in my life. It was only when my internal guidance system became an expression of His guidance system that my experience of the daily grind changed. I left behind my fearful, angry, absent, or over-controlling internal Parent that misinterpreted God’s goodness, and my heart found the wisdom for emotional health.
It makes sense that this would be the case. Jesus told us that we should be like our Father in heaven:
But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; …Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. (emphasis added)
To the extent that our hearts fall short of the kindness, mercy, patience, and righteousness of our Father in heaven, whether it is toward others or toward ourselves, we will in some ways be dysfunctional.[15]
I was a long way from those sorts of insights as an eleven-year old sixth grader who had just given up cutting. I didn’t have a relationship with my Heavenly Father, so I looked for other ways to escape from my abusive internal Parent.
Shortly after deciding to stop punishing myself, I started my sixth grade little league season. A friend, who I will call Stan, was on the team, and his father was the coach. During that little league season, Stan became one of the top players in the league while I struggled, and Stan, like many boys, liked to brag about his accomplishments. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but for me, his comments stirred the self-reproach that I was now refusing to express through cutting.
Along with this, the fact that Stan’s father was the coach highlighted my father’s absence. My father didn’t even attend my games. This painfully reminded that I had to do everything on my own, and my feelings of vulnerability intensified.
<page 36> I refused to react with anger against myself or others, however, and this led to one great lifelong benefit: I developed an enduring distaste for arrogance. God opposes the proud, and before I knew this, I wasn’t all that happy with them either. I felt what it was like to come out on the losing side of the game of one-upmanship, so I tried not to inflict that feeling on others.
I remember one event several years after this time, when I was in the eighth or ninth grade. A young man was getting into the habit of putting me down in front of my friends. After enduring this for a while, I got alone with him and said, “You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” He said he did. I said, “What can you do better than me?”
He had no answer. I was a fairly good-looking athlete who was in advanced Science and Math classes. Those are powerful weapons in the merciless world of Junior High School peer pressure. I tried to avoid using them in ways that I thought would threaten others, but on this occasion I made an exception.
He didn’t give me any trouble after that, and I dropped the subject. I was able to go back to my preferred approach of trying to get along with people.
There was, however, a down side to my dislike of arrogance; I didn’t distinguish between conflict over personal gain and conflict over moral issues. I wanted everyone to be nice to one another, and I was willing to avoid valid issues of responsibility to achieve that goal. I wasn’t looking for the God of the Bible – a God who judged sin. I wanted a “kinder gentler god.”
I found the perfect reinforcement for my sentiments in the town in which I lived, Woodstock, NY. It was a center of the 1960’s counterculture Revolution. I remember one day in the summer of 1969, I heard that young people were traveling to the now famous Woodstock Festival. I was too young to go (and it wasn’t actually in Woodstock), but it very much embodied the flavor of the town. For three days, a half million people got together, partied, and enjoyed themselves. There were few, if any, instances of violent crime. The festival reflected the 1960’s version of love, support, and fun.
That approach to life seemed like the perfect antidote to my self-hatred. Phrases like “Make love, not war” and “Do your own thing” brought soothing relief from my mistaken “you have to be perfect” drive. In the face of my father’s “work yourself to death” ethic, Woodstock told me that I was loved for who I was rather than what I accomplished. The communal ideal of sharing, friendship, and enjoying nature had an appeal that seemed superior to my parents’ money-driven world. I turned to a new view of life in hopes of finding something better.
In the process, my heart subconsciously adopted a false god that I now call the false god of permissive-love. He could be worshipped with hundreds of different worldviews: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic, etc., but under the surface he was the same caring guy. He loved people and wanted them to get along. How could he worry about little details like theology and worship style when more important issues like human happiness were at stake?[16]
There was too much to be affirmed in human nature to confine it to my parents’ American pragmatism. The false god of permissive-love told me I could be who I was rather than who society told me to be.
<page 37> I should also mention the religious atmosphere of Woodstock. Years after my childhood, I returned there in the 1980s and walked into a health food store. At a table near the entrance, a woman was reading tarot cards. I thought to myself, “This is so typical of Woodstock to have a medium working in a health food store.”
I had recently read Frank Peretti’s excellent books This Present Darkness[17] and Piercing the Darkness,[18] and the imagery from those books came to my mind. I pictured bird and reptile-like demons perched on the food shelves, peering down at me, wondering what a Christian was doing on their turf. The thought amused me, so I quietly said, “Don’t worry fellows. I’m just here to get a yogurt.”
I lived in an early haven for New Age religion. I was rarely exposed to it directly, but I believe that I picked up on the spirits behind it. During my perfectionist stage, I sometimes tried to use objects as charms to tap into supernatural help. No one had taught me to do this or encouraged me in this direction. I believe I was sensing the spiritual atmosphere that was active in the town, and it was natural for me to try to use it to my advantage.
The spiritual forces associated with the false god of permissive-love seemed to provide wonderful advantages. They set me free to enjoy life and let go of the many issues my overheated Parent had blown out of proportion. They offered a philosophy that kept me from rage.
Still, the false god of permissive-love couldn’t heal the buried trauma that had sprung from my conflict with my parents. He couldn’t undo the damage brought by the Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow that had produced perfectionism. All he could do was make those feelings seem out of place.
Moral conflicts over something as insignificant as smoking were relics of a childhood I was eager to forget. They clashed with sayings like “do your own thing,” and they made me feel frightened in the world, as if I was fighting a doomed and lonely war against its pleasures instead of enjoying it. My new view of life was lighthearted and fun, and I needed to adopt a new view of smoking to match it.
I didn’t consciously think about this at the time, of course. I was simply following a flow of feelings and events that seemed to be leading me through life. It wasn’t until many years later that I began to understand the logic that had led to my downward spiral.
God’s answers were off the grid of what I considered. I didn’t look at ideas like sin, judgment, forgiveness, and new life. If I had, they might have appeared to be part of the problem rather than the solution. They pointed out people’s mistakes and magnified them with the threat of judgment and hell. That seemed arrogant – an “I’m better than you” attitude. I didn’t want to conclude that I was right and someone else was wrong. I wanted everyone to be right. My heart looked for a seemingly more humble “solution,” one in which no one was at fault.
That “solution” presented itself. I’m not sure how much of it was inspired by demonic spirits and how much came from my subconscious. What I do know is that out of the churning of my <page 38>heart there appeared a set of thoughts and feelings that seemed to resolve my issues. Unfortunately, this “solution” threw me into confusion for decades.
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0008 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page