Hitting the Rawest Nerve

Few things evoke so strong a reaction in us as someone taking our deepest fears about ourselves and speaking them back to us. We feel as though the curtain has been pulled back, we have been discovered, found out.

Sometimes the thing feared and spoken is true. Sometimes, it's a lie. It is almost always impossible to know the truth of the matter immediately.

I think this painful dynamic is what is actually at the center of what makes break-ups and divorces so incredibly painful. It confirms the deepest fear (in this case a certain lie) many of us are tempted to believe about ourselves: that we are unloveable.

Target or a Flea Market? Understanding You for Your Best Life Now

So let's say that you and I are both listening to the same sermon on forgiveness. And let's say that at the end of the sermon, you feel forgiven but I don't.

As someone who teaches in a variety of contexts, I'm really interested in how people learn. How do we process, engage with ideas or concepts in such a way that we not only cognitively understand them but actually come to inhabit them, make them a part of who we are?

Obviously, some of this is mystery, the work of the Holy Spirit. But there are some patterns that we can identify about how people learn, how they approach new information or ideas.

A friend of mine recently sent me a set of concepts about how people learn or approach new ideas called "Neuro-Linguistics Programming."

This has proven helpful to me as I understand how I learn as well as how I work in a team environment...and how I relate to my wonderful wife. Take a look:

1. There are three primary learning styles: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic (some add "Reading/writing" in there as well).

So the sermon on forgiveness (which is primarily an auditory experience) will be enhanced by power point images or a visual aid of some other sort, since something like 60% of the population are visual learners.

2. Global to Specific or Specific to Global. Global to specific learners want the headline first, details after. Specific to global learners are more scientific. They want a full case to be articulated leading up to the final conclusion.

3. Move Toward or Move Away. "Move toward" people are aggressively interested in new ideas, goals, outcomes. "Move away" people are more likely to see the cost involved in a new idea and be more cautious in moving in a different direction.

I'm a "move toward" person in a big way. This can have serious negative consequences in my marriage, as I'm married to a wonderful "move away" person. Understanding this dynamic has helped me to be more patient in proposing an idea and more appreciative of the fact that not every idea I have is a good one.

This also has significant outworkings in my work. I tend to crank out ideas and goals by the boatload. This can overwhelm or intimidate or just plain annoy my co-staff and the students who work most closely with me.

I have to work hard to keep communication lines open and ask for forgiveness regularly. And sometimes, I just need to shut up. I usually realize that too late. But I'm working on it.

4. Procedural or Options. Procedural people like routines and systems. Options people like to create their own ways, or have lots of freedom and flexibility in how they work. Think shopping at Target (procedural, organize, clearly marked) v. shopping at a flea market (mass, happy chaos).

None of these is right or wrong. It's just preferences. All of them could have sinful outworkings if left un-redeemed.

But knowing this stuff can make you a kinder, gentler, better spouse, co-worker, roommate, and friend. Enjoy!

Super-Size Me: Shame Part 2

So one question that has always rolled around in my head has been this: how is that people can in be overflowing with confidence bordering on arrogance in one moment and then within just a few seconds swing in the complete opposite direction towards self-hatred and self-despair?

It would seem that the two are related, but I didn't really get the depths of the connection. And then this summer, I read a tremendous book that pulled the two extremes of arrogance and self-hatred together.

The book is called Sin, Pride and Self-Acceptance. I posted on it multiple times over the summer as the book pulled the curtain back on these issues for me. If you're interested, click here and scroll down to the June 20th post and then scroll back up from there.

The author draws on the work of Karen Horney, an early 20th century psychologist. Horney suggests that early on in our lives we experience anxiety on two primary levels: inter-personally and intra-personally, that is, within our own selves about ourselves.

To deal with the intrapersonal anxiety, Horney contends that the way that we cope is by creating in our imaginations our "idealized selves."

The idealized self is an image of ourselves where we take all of our own understandings of our own best qualities and blow those up exponentially. It's us, super-sized and super-human, performing perfectly. Here's how Horney explains this:

"A person builds up an idealized image of himself because he cannot tolerate himself as he actually is.

The image counteracts this calamity; but having placed himself on a pedestal, he can tolerate his real self still less and starts to rage against it, to despise himself and chafe under the yoke of his own unattainable demands upon himself.

He wavers then between self-adoration and self-contempt, between his idealized imgae and his despised image, with no solid middle ground to fall on."

So returning to my battle with shame over the bounced check. If shame is fundamentally working out the equation "I owe me," where is that "me" coming from? Who's telling me that I am "the type of person who doesn't bounce checks?" Where does that idealized image of myself come from?

We've created our own monsters, a super-sized image of ourselves that is impossible to actually live up to and that continuously looms large over us. When we actually "hit the mark" of that supersized person from time to time, it results in pride. When we miss that mark (which is most of the time) the result is shame: I owe me.

Anger, Guilt, and Shame in the Ledger, Part 1

Back in February I posted some thoughts on anger riffing off of a podcast from Andy Stanley. Stanley proposes that at the root of our anger is an open account: "you owe me."

Your friend owed it to you to not stab you in the back. They did, so you get angry.

Working off of this, guilt is also about an open account: "I owe you." I've done something to wrong you and now I'm in debt to you, I need to make it up to you somehow.

The problem is that usually the debt can never be paid back. Your friend said what they said, it can't be taken back. You can't take back what you said or how you harmed the other person.

So what we need to do is close the ledger, forgive the accounts. We need to extend forgiveness where we're angry. Otherwise that anger will destroy all our relationships. We need to accept God's forgiveness where we feel guilty (even if the person involved isn't willing to extend forgiveness to us), because guilt is a ball and chain, hampering our ability to take risks and love in relationships.

I've been thinking about this the past couple of days in relation to shame. I'm wondering if we might be able to uproot shame if we can understand some of how it is woven into our lives.

Leaving anger behind for a moment and framing guilt and shame a slightly different way, guilt is feeling bad about something that we've done, shame is feeling bad about who we are.

And so I wonder if we might use Stanley's ledger analogy and frame-up shame in this way: shame equals "I owe me."

If I bounce a check, I feel guilty as a husband for costing our family the bounced check fee. But at a deeper level, I feel ashamed because I have not lived up to my own sense of being the kind of guy that doesn't bounce checks.

I have a self-image as a responsible, reasonably intelligent human being who can balance a check book. And my sense of shame is the result of my inability to live up to the internal voices and standards that I have created or set for myself.

Shame, then, is a self-inflicted disease.