Spoiler alert: it deals with the necessity for commitment to freedom, healing, wholeness, and the Kingdom of God to get us through the times when it seems to be getting worse instead of better.

The theme of the teaching is that to be imitators of Jesus, we can be open and vulnerable to the people we encounter just as Jesus did.

Resa Alsan’s critical thinking, articulate language, powerful scholarship, and compassionate understanding help me not only have a better understanding of one of the worlds largest religions, but also to understand myself better as a Christian, a product of Western Civilization, and an American. To read the history and struggles of Islam, to compare and contrast those struggles and development with the history of Christianity and understanding the profound integration and importance of religion in United States’ “secular” government and hence to give up some of the fear engendered by phrases like “Islamic State” we hear in our fear mongering media.

Shame Story

Let me tell you a ‘shame story.’

Once upon a time, only a few months ago, I volunteered to do a training for a group of therapists. Each of them paid the YWCA $50 to come and hear me talk, for three hours, about attachment theory and couples counseling. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and I believe a good way to learn something is to teach it, so this could only make me a better therapist.

I was excited and nervous. I had never tried to give a training for such a long period of time. I knew I had a tendency to think and talk theoretically instead of practically and anecdotally.  I wanted to be seen as knowledgeable, competent, skilled, charismatic. I wanted to share my excitement for the topic and to provide value.

The charisma did not happen. I got explicit messages from some that I was going too slow and to get to the meat of the topic. About 2/3s of the way through some of the people had left already. When I got to the part of trying to do exercises to experience the work, the group decided to share their own stories instead.

By the end, I knew I hadn’t connected as I wanted but felt like I had at least shared important information. That was until I read the evaluations. I read a couple comments that said I was unprepared and incompetent.

I suddenly felt like a waste of space, I was ready to believe that I had no business doing therapy at all. I wanted to personally pay a refund to everyone who attended. I felt sick in my stomach and I so desperately wanted their forgiveness and approval. I was caught in the depths of shame.

Shame: the intensely painful emotion or experience of believing that we are flawed or inadequate and therefore believing we are unworthy of love and belonging.

Brené Brown, author of The Gifts of Imperfection, has chosen fear and shame as her focus of academic study. She has stimulated my interest in and excitement at learning the dynamics of shame and the healing process.  She defines shame as

the intensely painful emotion or experience of believing that we are flawed or inadequate and therefore believing we are unworthy of love or belonging.

As I was caught in my storm of shame, I believed myself unworthy. I believed (at my fearful core) that I was unworthy to practice psycho-therapy and couples counseling. My internal critic was saying “who do you think you are trying to teach, much less practice psychotherapy?” “You don’t belong in this profession.” “You may not belong anywhere.” “You deserve their contempt.”

Sin: Disconnection for God, Self, Others, and Creation

I want to reflect on the parallels between our understanding of shame and sin. In a Bethel Bible Study I took years ago, we were taught that

sin is that which separates us from God, from ourselves, from others, and from creation.

The Hebrew Scripture’s word translated as sin means missing the mark or falling short of the mark. Sin is those things where we miss the mark resulting in the consequences of disconnection.

Sin can also be understood as the condition of being separated from God, ourselves, others, and creation. It’s not necessarily things done or left undone but our fallen state where we lack and long for connection with God, neighbors, and selves.

So sin both causes or is the state of disconnection. Shame is the emotional experience of fear of that disconnection.

Love, Belonging, and Worthiness

“A deep sense of love and belonging in an irreducible need of all men, women, and children.” (Brown) We are neurologically hardwired to seek love and connection. It is essential to our survival as an organism. It is part of our God created nature.

The intense pain of shame leads us to try to conform, to try and appease, to pretend to be someone other than who we are. We worry if our house measures up to our neighbors’, we worry if we are too fat, too weak, too light, too dark. Are my hors d’oeuvres satisfactory? Am I dressed fashionably enough or too much? [And everything is a fashion statement.] We chase externally defined (and contradictory) standards of perfection.

Matthew’s scripture tells us these external standards are false standards and cannot get us what we want and need.

Even more radically than that, they tell us that we are worthy, valued and loved just as we are, right this moment. Do you believe that? Do you believe that you are worthy and valuable just the way you are, right now? Do you know that you are worthy, valued and loved, just the way you are, right this moment? It’s hard to believe and accept but the evidence of God dying on the cross proves it.

Path of Shame Resilience

So what is the path out of our false belief that we are unworthy, fatally flawed, and unlovable? What is the path out of shame?

The facile answer we hear through things like the Four Spiritual Laws, and Campus Crusade, and Sunday morning evangelical television preachers sum it up so simply:

• we need to confess our sins, and
• we need to receive Jesus Christ into our lives.

While I know those words are true, I sometimes find them meaningless and un-actionable.

I would like to explore the steps Brené Brown outlines for the path out of shame and explore how those steps parallel our experience in, and as, a healing community and the Body of Christ.

First, back to my shame story. As I was suffering through my feelings of shame, and belief in my unworthiness, I tried to do my psycho-therapeutic best Cognitive Behavioral disputation of my thinking errors. I challenged my tendency to maximize a couple of comments as if they were everyone’s comments. I challenged myself to admit I did get positive comments on the evaluations too. I reminded myself that the critical comments may be coming from their own hurts and brokenness. I reminded myself that I couldn’t honestly know what and why they were thinking what they thought. I reminded myself that just because I feared it, it didn’t mean it was truth that I would become a pariah in the Austin counseling community. But, I still felt stuck in the grip of shame.

I shared my feelings of hurt and shame with my wife and with my Cursillo 4th Day group.  I tend to share them just like I’m sharing it here, intellectually and breezily. These steps helped me limp through but I still hurt.

Finally, I shared it with my professional peer support group. They affirmed how painful such narcissistic wounds are. And then, my colleague, friend, and former supervisor, Paul Boone, LPC offered me feedback that he was hearing a painful story but I was telling it with smiles and ironic jokes and he found that confusing. I wasn’t really owning my story. He shared with me his history of observing me discounting myself, and he assured me that I am a good therapist and he assured me that I am enough. I broke down in tears, he helped me connect with my pain, acknowledge my pain, and credibly affirm that I am enough. My healing accelerated. I felt lighter. I felt a huge burden lifted. I felt strong enough to courageously serve my clients. I felt gratitude and in that gratitude, joy.

Brené Brown’s steps for healing shame are:

• Learn to recognize our shame
• learn to critically analyze and dispute the shaming messages we hear from ourselves and others
• reach out to trusted others to own and share our story
• speak ‘shame’

Reflecting back, I see how I followed these steps: I knew I was in the grips of a shaming demon by my negative self-talk, the fearfulness, and the sick feeling in my stomach; I practiced using my rational brain to dispute those harmful messages, I reached out to my family, community and peers, and especially my psycho-therapeutic community helped me find the language of ‘shame’.

Path of Salvation

I’m arguing that salvation means freedom from sin and one aspect of that freedom is freedom from shame.

Salvation, our eternal life starting right now, means living in loving compassionate connection with ourselves, our neighbors, and with God.

Brené Brown argues, and I agree, that our capacity for compassion and love of others is limited by our capacity for compassion and love for ourselves. I’m arguing that if God loves us unconditionally, right now, for exactly who we are, we can start reaching to be imitators of God and start practicing compassion and love for ourselves, others, and God.

We can start doing that by telling our story to trustworthy others. We might start with God during our private prayers and journalizing, with a Cursillo retreat, with an accountability group, with a Spiritual Director, through the sacrament of Reconciliation of the Penitent (Confession), through talking to a therapist, through a 12-step program, through talking to our spouse, through talking to a trusted friend. There are so many possibilities

This is an invitation to start practicing Salvation by claiming our own story and claiming our God ordained worthiness.

This is also an invitation to be come persons, and a people, worthy of the sacred trust of having people share their stories on their path to newness of life.

Demons of the Inner World

I’m hesitant to use ‘Satan’, ‘Demon’, or ‘Powers’ type language when formulating an understanding the root cause of issues be they spiritual, emotional, or relational. I find that thinking in those terms leads me either to feelings of helplessness or it leads me to adopt a combat and struggle mentality instead of a mentality of compassion and love.

I like Walter Wink’s understanding of ‘Satan’ and ‘The Powers’ as the fallen spirituality at the heart of our institutional and human systems that lead us to use power, coercion, and violence to get what we want or need.

Name-calling is a form of violence. When I call something ‘demonic’ I practice the violence of name-calling. I think it is the subtle and clever nature of evil to tempt us to use its own tools of power, coercion, and violence to confront it. When I indulge in the violence of labeling something as ‘demonic’ I am in the thrall of the very same fallen spirituality that I want to confront. I fall to this temptation when I am frightened by the destructive potentials I see in the person or system.

Having said all that, I recognize that when we ‘name’ our fears [demons] that have control over us, they often lose much of their power. But we need to name them specifically and with compassion, not condemnation. When we name our vulnerable places, our shame, our fears of disconnection; incompetence; loneliness; helplessness; hopelessness; then we start to take away their ‘demonic’ power over us and start to claim our healthy desires and initiate the process of healing.

When I start such name-calling I am indulging in lazy-mindedness and avoiding the work of understanding motivation and needs of the person or system I’m labeling (be it me or a client).

When I start such name-calling, I am indulging in the blame-game and abandoning responsibility to work towards the redemption of the person, system, or situation.

I subscribe to Walter Wink’s formulation:

• The Powers are created by God [and hence good].
• The Powers are fallen.
• The Powers are in need of redemption.

When I adopt this point of view, I can let go of a little of my fear, I can ask the object of my fears such questions as:

• What wholesome purpose are you working towards or what wholesome desire is driving you?
• If all things are Gift, in what way are you a Gift to me?
• How can I best respond to you with Love?

In the therapy process some of the process is making friends with those parts of our selves we don’t like or are frightened by. Those parts may be the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, or those parts that are frightened or those parts that are in pain. To make friends with our hurting parts is to ask them:

• How they are working to protect us?
• How did they grow so strong?
• What is their wholesome desire for us?
• What do they want/need?

In these ways, we are working to redeem those fallen and death dealing parts of ourselves, to respond to them with love and healing.

1. Let them know you are concerned
   • “When you say ‘sometimes I just want to end it all’ I take it seriously”
   • “You seem especially (down, angry, withdrawn, sad, …) lately and I’m concerned”
2. Ask them if they are suicidal. Be direct, avoid euphemisms.
   • “Are you thinking about killing yourself?”
3. Explore their thoughts and plans
   • “Have you thought about how you might kill yourself?”
   • “Do you actually have the [gun, pills, rope, ...] available?
   • “How likely are you to act on these thoughts?”
4. Decide how dangerous the suicidal threat stands
   • Emergency: they have a concrete plan, access to the plan, and feel likely to act
   • Urgent: concrete plan, but don’t have access to plan, or don’t feel like acting on it now
   • Important: vague plan, no access, credibly affirm they won’t act on thoughts
   • There is no unimportant threat
5. Take action to reduce the threat
   • If the threat level is Emergency
     • take them to hospital emergency room, or
     • call 911 (ask for mental health officer if your community has them)
   • If threat level is Urgent
     • ask for commitment to not act on plan without calling and talking to someone (you, suicide hotline, pastor, emergency room, therapist)
     • reduce lethality of plan
       • remove guns, pills, alcohol, …
       • arrange for them to not be alone
     • commit to helping them find professional support
   • If the threat level is Important
     • commit to helping them find professional support (MD, psychiatrist, mental health therapist)
     • follow through till they get help
6. Acknowledge the reality and depth of their pain
7. Affirm your care and concern
8. Affirm that things can get better
9. Commit to follow-up
10. Follow-up

1. take your medications as prescribed
2. get 30-40 minutes of exercise daily,
3. eat healthy,
4. get enough rest,
5. call for help if you are at risk of hurting yourself.

I want to talk about  the idea of ‘Family of Choice’ that I hope is part of your support network. By definition, we all have a ‘Family of Origin’, the family into which we were born and/or raised. Most of us grew up knowing at least the immediate members of our Family of Origin our parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. In our modern families, the family of origin often includes step-parents and siblings as well. Out of all our relationships in the world, often our family of origin is the most familiar to us. Here is a diagram describing the typical experience of someone who knows their family of origin and has a wide range of relationships beyond their immediate family:

Known Family of Origin

In some situations, for instance people brought up and lost in a foster care system, might not know their family of origin or their family of origin is the foster care system:

Unknown Family of Origin

In some isolating situations, someone may have very few relationships outside their family of origin:

Family Isolated from Society

Now let me talk about a ‘family of choice.’ We don’t have any choice in our family of origin, it is what it is. Sometimes our family or origin is destructive and dangerous to our mental, emotional, and sometimes physical well-being. Sometimes, as mentioned above, we don’t even know our family of origin. But we can look for and include people in our lives with the qualities of character and behavior to help us find safety, connection, and growth. A family of choice, might be 5-7 people with the following qualities of character:

• Listening: they have the capacity to listen and really hear what we have to say.
• Respect boundaries: they take ownership of their own thoughts, feelings, behaviors and attitudes and allow us to own our ours.
• Confidentiality: they do not betray confidences
• Honesty: they can give us accurate feedback when we ask for it.
• Accountability: when they make a mistake, they acknowledge it and work to do better.
• Loving: they have our best interests at heart

Of course, to build such a family of choice, we need to reciprocate with the same qualities ourselves. If we are lucky, some but not all of our family of choices members might be part of our family of origin:

Family of Choice includes some Family of Origin

But if nobody in our family of origin qualifies, if none of them help us feel safe, secure, and connected, there is no law that we have to include them in our circle of family of choice:

Family of Choice separate from Family of Origin

Who do you include in your family of choice? Who do you want to or need to add? Can you tell them you want them as a family of choice member? If you can, they are probably a good candidate.

Saturday, February 12
9:00 – 3:00
Austin Seminary

Explore the parallels of the romantic and the spiritual journeys, the unique relational challenges of couples in ministry, and learn skills and habits to nurture your covenental romantic relationships.

Facilitators:

Fonda Latham, LCSW

Jay Nickel, LPC

For Registration click here:

For more information: jay.b.nickel@gmail.com

512-663 -5941

Steve & Celestia Tracy deal with the ‘hard texts’ of I Corithians 11:3

But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. (NIV)

and Ephesians 5:21-33 which deals with the whole issue of submission to each other and to Christ.

I used to subscribe to the Egalitarian view, but I am drawn to that view which challenges me to do better. Steve & Celestia Tracy challenge me in that way. If I claim my male headship in my marriage, it is less claiming a role of authority and more emulating the Godhead’s example of headship through initiation of love, and honoring and empowering.

Initiation of love involves proactively engaging my spouse’s concerns and challenges, being intentional and spontaneous in care and affection, actively engaging the whole family, not passively delegating child-rearing and household concerns to my wife.

Honoring and empowering involves recognizing our spouse as a unique creation of God, with unique gifts and a unique calling to ministry. It is our job to uplift, honor, support, and encourage her in her growth in God as an individual and in her calling to ministry, whatever in may be.

I don’t think I even need to deal with the issue of my partner’s submission. I’m plenty busy enough trying to take care of my own submission.