This morning we are going to cover the subject of shame, what it is, where it comes from and what it does to us, and how to be healed of its effects. To introduce the subject we can now look at the fourth “big lie”, which I believe is the biggest and most powerful lie of our enemy. First though, I want to us to remind ourselves of the other three big lies, they are:
· I MUST MEET CERTAIN STANDARDS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.
This first lie is about performing to feel worthy.
· I MUST BE APPROVED BY CERTAIN OTHERS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.
This second lie is about getting approval from others to feel worthy.
· THOSE WHO FAIL ARE UNWORTHY OF LOVE AND DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED.
This third lie is about condemnation leading us to feel unworthy.
And now we come to the biggest lie of all:
· I AM WHAT I AM. I CANNOT CHANGE. I AM HOPELESS.
Has anybody here felt that way? Can any of us here describe a time when this lie was circling around in our minds? Maybe someone has felt it recently and can go through the circumstances surrounding feeling like we cannot change. (Discuss)
What is going on in us when the feelings surrounding an event cause us to have a sense of hopelessness or maybe powerlessness? As you might expect from our lesson subject, what we experience is something called shame. Shame is an emotion, and in my opinion it is the most powerful emotion that we ever experience. Let’s define it now, so that we can all start from the same reference point.
Shame Defined.
Webster’s dictionary defines shame like this:
Shame is a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety.
In a book by psychoanalyst Michael Lewis (Shame: The Exposed Self) he defines shame this way:
Shame can be defined simply as the feeling we have when we evaluate our actions, feelings or behavior and conclude we have done wrong. It encompasses the whole of ourselves; it generates a wish to hide, to disappear or even to die.
There are so many definitions of shame that it is usually a totally confusing emotion to get a grip on, but we all know what it feels like. So let me attempt to lay it out clearly for us.
Shame is a strong, powerful, and painful secondary emotion. It comes after we experience a primary emotion resulting from the exposure, or fear of exposure, of something we have done, something others have done that reflects on us or something that happens around us that we experience as a lack of personal value. The three major primary emotions that can lead to shame are guilt, humiliation and worthlessness.
So we can all fully understand what I’ve just said, let’s go through the elements of shame:
· It is an emotion! This means that it is internally generated inside our soul as a response to circumstances. It belongs to us, nobody can give it to us, and we own it.
· It is strong and powerful. Shame has the ability to sink us, to change the direction of our lives or to stimulate us to choose to change.
· It is a secondary emotion. This means it is felt after we feel a primary emotion like guilt, humiliation or worthlessness.
· It is always preceded by exposure or fear of exposure of something. We could have a sinful action exposed, or an embarrassing situation arises, or we simply realize something negative about ourselves. Other people could be involved in the exposed actions or we could experience an internal exposure of something.
· It is all about who we are! The end point of shame is that we have a sense of being less than we thought we were, or being less than what someone else thought we were.
· Shame is most often accompanied with a desire to hide or run away somehow.
· Shame is usually held in the deepest and darkest part of our inner being, and is kept secret.
Before we move on, I want to be sure to answer everybody’s questions about this definition.
The Purpose of Shame
Were you aware that shame has a purpose? What do you think it might be? (Discuss) God created all things, including the difficult painful emotion of shame. He didn’t do that to control us through the punishing effects of shame, He did it out of His love for us. This is what God’s purpose for shame is:
· The purpose of shame is to reveal our need for God.
One of the best ways to show this is by looking at the account of the fall in Genesis. Let’s look first at Gen 2:25:
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. NASU
This was before the fall; Adam and Eve had never experienced shame, much like our very young children demonstrate that they have no shame in them.
Then came the fall and the result was this, as laid out in Gen 3:7-10:
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, " Where are you?" He said, " I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself." NASU
In the context of shame, was what happening here? (Discuss) Adam and Eve realized that they had done something wrong, and experienced guilt. They saw their nakedness, that they were fully exposed in a physical sense, and felt the humiliation of it. They also realized that they had been less than the Lord might have expected, and felt that they had little value, which is worthlessness. The sum of these things brought them to shame, and fearing exposure to the Lord, they tried to cover themselves up and hid.
Instead of going to the Lord, they ran away. Isn’t that so like us today? Shame is a state of broken heartedness, and only the Lord can heal it. That is why shame is designed to reveal our need for the Lord. Without His assistance we cannot get rid of it. We might be able to find some relief from it in some ways such as addictive behaviors, but it will still be there until we take it to the Lord, and let Him remove it. This has been so true in my life, until I confessed my shame and all the baggage that went with it, I couldn’t receive His healing.
Shame in the Scriptures
Throughout the old and new testaments shame is viewed as a just consequence of sin and a way to punish people. In fact we see, particularly in the Psalms, that the writers would pray that their enemies be brought to shame. Let’s look at a couple of examples, Ps 31:17 and Ps 109:29:
Let me not be put to shame, O Lord, for I call upon You; Let the wicked be put to shame, let them be silent in Sheol. NASU
Let my accusers be clothed with dishonor, and let them cover themselves with their own shame as with a robe. NASU
Evidently God wants us, through His word, to understand that shame is something to be avoided as it is painful to endure, and that the best way to avoid it is to live in obedience.
How Shame Works
This is how it works. Something occurs and we experience shame as a result of it. At that point the emotion is just sitting inside our soul and we have to resolve it, or deal with it in some way. My question for you here is, “what do we usually do with it”? We typically take one of two paths, God’s path or our own. I’m going to start by looking at what we normally do to deal with shame.
Let me introduce you to a new idea, the emotion closet. We all have an emotion closet; it is the place where we hang up all our emotions. In my bedroom closet at home I have my clothes hanging up in sub sections, shirts there, pants over there, shoes on the rack, and underwear and socks in the drawer. The stuff I really don’t like is relegated to the back where I can’t see it easily. It is organized, but it doesn’t have to be, it could just be all thrown in and be a complete mess. That is how your personal emotional closet is, you might have an anger section, a shame section, a pride section, your guilt is thrown on the floor and your humiliations you keep in a drawer. The shame section is kept way in the back, because we really don’t want to deal with it, so it gets stuffed in the deepest and darkest place we can find. You also have places you keep your joy, peace and happy emotional clothes, and the whole thing could be organized or might also be a big mess. And we all know people we might call “messed up” don’t we?
Except there is a big difference, you treat your physical clothes and emotional clothes differently! With your physical clothes you wear them, and when they get dirty you clean them, when they get worn you usually throw them out. With your emotional clothes after you’ve worn them you hang them back up in your emotional closet. Over the years you manage to accumulate a whole stack of emotional clothes. By the time a person is an adult they have got a fully stuffed closet.
Now the problems begin to happen, because we haven’t been keeping our emotional closet clean. Let’s use shame as an example. What are we supposed to do with shame? Take it to the Lord. When we don’t, we find our closet is full of emotional clothes, some are okay like joy and peace, but the positive emotions are typically overrun by the negative ones like shame. What we actually do is to take our shame out of our emotional closet and put in on again. After we’ve worn it a while we put in right back in the closet, and this leads to more problems.
Consider this, let us say we took out an article of new clothing from our clothes closet and wore it, and then we hung it up after we had finished with it, without cleaning it. Then a while later we took it out again, wore it and hung it back up. Then we did that a few times. What would the clothes be like? More importantly what would the closet be like? Yes, the clothes would be dirty and they would get stinky, if you don’t believe me try it! The closet would also get smelly, wouldn’t it? In fact the other clean clothes might even pick up the odor.
It is the same with shame. If we leave it in our emotional closet, we will continually take it out and wear it, and then put it back on its hanger. Eventually it begins to smell and it dominates our whole soul. This is what psychologists call a “shame based identity”; the smell of unresolved shame taints everything about our soul, our thoughts, feelings and actions. Any joy, peace, serenity or other positive feeling that comes into our life gets quickly infected and seems to disappear. Shame is a gigantic burden that many of us carry around, usually as a well-kept secret. It stops us from leading a victorious Christian life.
God’s Remedy For Shame
What does God say to do with shame? There is no actual verse that says something like “give me your shame” or “to dispose of your shame, drop it in the offering plate at church”. We do have a promise from Christ that addresses all burdensome emotions like shame, anger, worthlessness, hopelessness and guilt. We find it in Mt 11:28-30:
"Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." NASU
This is a reaffirmation and clarification of the promise found in Jer 6:16:
Thus says the Lord, “Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls.” NASU
There is a large amount of spiritual meat in the promise that Christ made. So let us dissect it to fully comprehend how shame, and any other painful emotion, is to be dealt with.
First, Jesus says, “come to me”. He is speaking here about coming to him as one would a friend, as a part of an intimate relationship. If a person has accepted Christ, they have the necessary relationship, if they have chosen their own path, Christ can only wait until they chose to accept Him.
Next, we see the phrase “weary and heavy laden”. Jesus is talking here about the emotional burdens that we carry around in our emotional closet. These are the ones that keep us awake, or disturb our sleep, and cause us to worry; they wear us down and wear us out. Shame will do this.
Third is the emotional exchange. Jesus says, “I will give you rest”. He is offering to take our emotional burdens and replace them with the emotions of rest such as peace, support and comfort.
Then he moves to saying, “take my yoke”, which means, “do these things like me”. He says we are to learn from Him, which means we can learn to help ourselves in the handling of the burdensome emotions. What do we need to learn? Please don’t miss this, because here Jesus gives us the antidote to the poison of painful emotions. He says, “For I am gentle and humble in heart”, and that is what we are to learn. We are to learn to develop Christ like gentleness and humility.
Fifth comes the promise that if we do all these things, have a relationship with Christ, bring our painful emotions to Him for exchange and learn Christ like gentleness and humility then “we WILL find rest for our souls”.
Lastly, we see that all this is true because His “yoke of gentleness and humility” is easy and His “burden of our painful emotions” is light.
When Shame is Unresolved
The last point I want to cover today is about what happens when shame is allowed to continue to stink up our emotional closet. We develop something that psychologists call a “shame based identity”. Basically we start to act on shame-induced beliefs such as, we are not worthy, we have no value, we are hopeless and we are not loved. These are painful things to deal with, and so we will develop methods of relieving the problematical emotion of shame. We will typically self-medicate somehow by doing things like indulging in addictive behaviors, withdrawing from relationships, striving to perform and becoming perfectionistic.
This is where I return to the purpose of shame; it is to reveal the need we have for God. For it is only God who can heal us of shame, and He can only do that if we turn to Him.
Let us resolve to not be like Adam and Eve in our response to our own feelings of shame. Let us not run away, hide and cover up our shame. Let us not hang up our shame in our emotion closet and stink out our soul. Let us take it to God for healing. We can choose to retain a shame-based identity, or we can choose to accept the identity that God has for us. How we deal with our shame is a mark of how far we have come in our Christian maturity. Consider what the writer of Hebrews says to us in Heb 12:1-2:
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. NASU
This is a great place to end the lesson. Seeing what Jesus did with His shame, He took it to the cross and despised it. In the same way, we ought to follow our leader by taking our encumbering shame to the cross, and hand it over to the living God.
Showing posts with label Recovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recovery. Show all posts
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The Approval Addict
Today we come to the lesson you have all been eagerly waiting for. We are going to look at the problem of being hooked on other people’s opinions. Right there at the beginning of chapter 4 we can see today’s big lie:
I MUST BE APPROVED BY CERTAIN OTHERS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.
This big lie, which most people have as a false belief in their heart, results in us craving approval, affirmation and acceptance from other people. The great problem here is that the need for approval is legitimate, but the way we seek to meet that need is not.
Let us first establish that seeking approval is actually legitimate, meaning that we were created with this need in our soul, by looking at Jn 12:42-43:
Nevertheless many even of the rulers believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God. NASU
Here we can see that the Apostle John is telling us what was happening within the leadership of the Jews in Israel. Many of them actually turned to Jesus and believed. However, because they substituted the approval of men in the place of the approval of God, they didn’t confess that Jesus was Lord. This statement from John tells us that approval is legitimate as a need, and that it is found in God.
I want to be very clear here. We all have the need for approval built into us, it is God designed for the purpose of internally pointing us toward Him. Whenever you feel the need to be approved of, or affirmed, or accepted, or validated, it is legitimate. There is no reason to carry any sense of guilt about feeling needy. God gave each one of us this need for our spiritual benefit, so that might connect with Him as our provider, as our “need-meeter”. It is when we deal with this legitimate need in illegitimate ways that we get off track in all our relationships.
Let us look at some of the sources of this illegitimacy. Starting with the knowledge that our need for approval is given to us from God, can we identify where our need for men’s approval might have come from? This is my list, and it is prioritized.
· Our parents.
· Our immediate family.
· Our childhood friends.
· Our loose social groups. (Like church or the boy scouts or school)
· Our extended family.
· Co-workers.
In my opinion the top two have way more influence than all the others combined. Why might this be so? Let us look up a famous verse from Proverbs, Pr 22:6:
Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it. NASU
Mostly we hear about this verse in the context of raising kids, which it does apply to. It is usually focused on pointing kids toward understanding right and wrong and knowing God, but it has a deeper significance. The Hebrew word “chanak” translated here as “train up” has a better translation and it is “point down a narrow path”. When you add it to the Hebrew word “derek”, meaning “the way”, or figuratively “in the true things of life”, you get a slightly different and deeper picture. Let’s look at Jn 14:6:
Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. NASU
Putting these things together what do you see? It is the essentially the same message, in one we are told to teach our kids that what the way, truth and life is, in the second Jesus is clarifying it, He is the way, truth and life. The verse in Proverbs is telling the person raising the child to point them toward God in everything. In the context of our lesson about approval, it means that even as a child we are to point them toward God as the source for approval, from as early a time as possible. A child sees his or her parents as god in the flesh, and from the beginning of their life seeks approval from them. This is normal and natural, but it won’t serve them well when they get older, because they begin to replace parental approval with other’s approval instead of God’s approval. And men’s approval is always conditional!
It happens to all of us, at some point we realize we are not approved of by somebody important to us. What do we experience at that moment? (Open) That is right, we experience rejection. How many rejection moments does it take before we start to have a fear of rejection? I don’t know, but I suspect it is not many.
The single biggest original source for the fear of rejection is abandonment during childhood, the second biggest is child abuse. I am an abandoned child, and this fear of rejection is a core issue with me. It has led to some significant “acting out” over the years, and I may never get it conquered, but I’m working on it. Does anybody else identify with the fear of rejection? (Open) Did anybody take the “fear of rejection test”?
Let’s move on to some of the more practical aspects of the results of the fear of rejection. The book lists several:
· Anger, Resentment and Hostility.
· Being Easily Manipulated.
· Codependency.
· Avoidance of People.
· Control.
· Depression.
· Repeating of Negative Messages.
· Hypersensitivity to the opinions of others.
· Hypo sensitivity.
Due to the constraints of time I am only going to cover in detail three of the items from this list. These are Codependency, Avoidance of People and Hypersensitivity.
Codependency
There are as many definitions of codependency as there are codependents! So let us see what the class thinks it is. (Open) As we have heard all of us have some form of understanding of what it might mean. CODA, Codependents Anonymous does not have a definition because of this very issue of being unable to define it accurately. So they define it through a list of behaviors, which I am handing out now.
In co-dependency, others have control over us because we care more about their needs and feelings than our own. When we have a need for approval that gets met by serving the needs of others, and receiving a reward of other’s approval, then we have become codependent. Let me step through that again so that we all understand it well:
· First, we all have a need for approval.
· Second, we find that serving others results in us feeling approved, and our need is at least temporarily met.
· Third, we go back to this approach again, and it works again, so we develop a compulsion.
· Fourth, we start to do this frequently, and it becomes necessary for us to be able to emotionally survive each day.
· Fifth, we hand over the emotional control of our lives to others, usually just one or two individuals, and we are addicted to it.
· Sixth, our life is totally out of control, and we don’t know it, as we appear to be functioning normally.
· Seventh, if we don’t get help we break down.
Usually most of us get stuck at the fifth point, we are addicted to people pleasing. We don’t feel that life is okay unless those around us are okay.
At the root of this problem, which started with a legitimate need for approval, is self-centeredness. The legitimate need is met through our own efforts; we control how we meet it, and sometimes try to control the people around us to get it met. Is it all about us!
What we call codependency is a significant barrier to our personal spiritual growth and our ability to serve God. In a section of Scripture (Gal 1:6-10) that deals with the preaching and teaching of a false gospel, Paul identifies the reason it was happening, he didn’t call it approval based codependency but that is what it is. He concludes with two simple rhetorical questions in verse 10, let’s read it:
For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ. NASU
Paul presents this as and either/or challenge. This is because we all face the problem of making men as our object of worship, which is either secularism or humanism, versus making Christ our object of worship, which is Christianity. Jesus Himself summed it up as part of His “Sermon on the Mount” in Mt 6:24:
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. NASU
I have quoted the whole verse here, but, in my opinion, it really ought to have been split into two verses. The relevant part here is the first sentence. Jesus says you can’t serve, and be devoted to, two masters. In the context of the need for approval and codependency or approval addiction it means this. You are not able to serve and worship God while you are serving and worshipping your own self-focused needs.
Tough words indeed! Codependency generated through the need for approval or fear of rejection can actually stop a person from being able to live for Christ. Let’s look now at some of the ways we exhibit codependent behavior in our normal daily lives. Let’s refer to the list I handed out earlier, and we can pick on one or two of them:
· Denial of feelings: codependents often have a hard time feeling their own emotions. They are too busy feeling other people’s emotions for them to connect with their own.
· Projection of feelings: A codependent will often project his or her feelings onto others, assuming that they feel the same things. This can be particularly damaging for a parent to do this to a child, as the parent will often tell the child what to feel.
· Enabling behavior: The fear of rejection can lead us to contribute to the bad behavior of another person. One example is the spouse that keeps buying booze for their alcoholic partner. Another is the girl who turns to prostitution to keep her boyfriend in drug money. And what about the mother who does her kids homework for them?
· Hanging on: This is where we fear losing a relationship and feeling abandoned so much that we tolerate bad stuff. This could be the wife who stays with her abusive husband, or the boy that dates a girl who belittles him with others.
There are so many more examples we could bring up, but you get the idea. I personally believe that we live in a culture where codependency, driven out of the need for approval, is the biggest compulsive behavior problem we have.
Avoidance of People
Here we have a seemingly big contradiction. We live with a need for approval from people, and the fear of rejection that goes with it, but we avoid people. What is going on here? (Open)
Have you ever been told that your work is not satisfactory or that your hair doesn’t look good or something like that and experienced a sense of personal rejection? I have! When you meet people who say these things to you consistently, you then do your best to avoid them. You might say it is because they are so negative, but it is not! It is because we feel rejected. It wouldn’t surprise me if we all know someone who stays at work to avoid going home to his or her spouse. Now we know that it may all be about the “worker” feeling rejected in their own home.
Some of these “avoiders” can also be the life and soul of the party, and they are good at socializing. The problem is they never go deep with others for fear of rejection. They will often have no true friends, the kind you share secrets with, for fear of receiving disapproving messages, and consequently feeling bad about themselves. The “avoiders” are actually lonely people.
Can any of us here, apart from me, identify with this “avoider” label? (Discuss)
Hypersensitivity
Some of us are devastated when another person says something remotely negative about us. A comment about how we look or how we are dressed can ruin us for the day. Some of us worry about what complete strangers are thinking about us. These are all examples of being very sensitive to other people’s opinions.
This particular problem gets so bizarre that some of us even take negative self image thoughts about ourselves and project them to others as if they thought them. This means that we can, in our own minds, turn an accepting person into a critical monster. We all know people who are accepting of everyone around them. However, there may be one or two individuals in the group who believe that they are not accepted or approved of by this person. This could be the projection/rejection phenomenon at work.
Does anybody have any examples that they can share about hypersensitivity in people in their lives?
Finally I want to say this. Approval of others is a big deal, and we all have to pay attention to what God says about this subject. I think it is best summed up in Rom 15:7:
Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. NASU
Next week we will cover God’s answer to the problem of approval addiction and codependency; reconciliation.
I MUST BE APPROVED BY CERTAIN OTHERS TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.
This big lie, which most people have as a false belief in their heart, results in us craving approval, affirmation and acceptance from other people. The great problem here is that the need for approval is legitimate, but the way we seek to meet that need is not.
Let us first establish that seeking approval is actually legitimate, meaning that we were created with this need in our soul, by looking at Jn 12:42-43:
Nevertheless many even of the rulers believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God. NASU
Here we can see that the Apostle John is telling us what was happening within the leadership of the Jews in Israel. Many of them actually turned to Jesus and believed. However, because they substituted the approval of men in the place of the approval of God, they didn’t confess that Jesus was Lord. This statement from John tells us that approval is legitimate as a need, and that it is found in God.
I want to be very clear here. We all have the need for approval built into us, it is God designed for the purpose of internally pointing us toward Him. Whenever you feel the need to be approved of, or affirmed, or accepted, or validated, it is legitimate. There is no reason to carry any sense of guilt about feeling needy. God gave each one of us this need for our spiritual benefit, so that might connect with Him as our provider, as our “need-meeter”. It is when we deal with this legitimate need in illegitimate ways that we get off track in all our relationships.
Let us look at some of the sources of this illegitimacy. Starting with the knowledge that our need for approval is given to us from God, can we identify where our need for men’s approval might have come from? This is my list, and it is prioritized.
· Our parents.
· Our immediate family.
· Our childhood friends.
· Our loose social groups. (Like church or the boy scouts or school)
· Our extended family.
· Co-workers.
In my opinion the top two have way more influence than all the others combined. Why might this be so? Let us look up a famous verse from Proverbs, Pr 22:6:
Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it. NASU
Mostly we hear about this verse in the context of raising kids, which it does apply to. It is usually focused on pointing kids toward understanding right and wrong and knowing God, but it has a deeper significance. The Hebrew word “chanak” translated here as “train up” has a better translation and it is “point down a narrow path”. When you add it to the Hebrew word “derek”, meaning “the way”, or figuratively “in the true things of life”, you get a slightly different and deeper picture. Let’s look at Jn 14:6:
Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. NASU
Putting these things together what do you see? It is the essentially the same message, in one we are told to teach our kids that what the way, truth and life is, in the second Jesus is clarifying it, He is the way, truth and life. The verse in Proverbs is telling the person raising the child to point them toward God in everything. In the context of our lesson about approval, it means that even as a child we are to point them toward God as the source for approval, from as early a time as possible. A child sees his or her parents as god in the flesh, and from the beginning of their life seeks approval from them. This is normal and natural, but it won’t serve them well when they get older, because they begin to replace parental approval with other’s approval instead of God’s approval. And men’s approval is always conditional!
It happens to all of us, at some point we realize we are not approved of by somebody important to us. What do we experience at that moment? (Open) That is right, we experience rejection. How many rejection moments does it take before we start to have a fear of rejection? I don’t know, but I suspect it is not many.
The single biggest original source for the fear of rejection is abandonment during childhood, the second biggest is child abuse. I am an abandoned child, and this fear of rejection is a core issue with me. It has led to some significant “acting out” over the years, and I may never get it conquered, but I’m working on it. Does anybody else identify with the fear of rejection? (Open) Did anybody take the “fear of rejection test”?
Let’s move on to some of the more practical aspects of the results of the fear of rejection. The book lists several:
· Anger, Resentment and Hostility.
· Being Easily Manipulated.
· Codependency.
· Avoidance of People.
· Control.
· Depression.
· Repeating of Negative Messages.
· Hypersensitivity to the opinions of others.
· Hypo sensitivity.
Due to the constraints of time I am only going to cover in detail three of the items from this list. These are Codependency, Avoidance of People and Hypersensitivity.
Codependency
There are as many definitions of codependency as there are codependents! So let us see what the class thinks it is. (Open) As we have heard all of us have some form of understanding of what it might mean. CODA, Codependents Anonymous does not have a definition because of this very issue of being unable to define it accurately. So they define it through a list of behaviors, which I am handing out now.
In co-dependency, others have control over us because we care more about their needs and feelings than our own. When we have a need for approval that gets met by serving the needs of others, and receiving a reward of other’s approval, then we have become codependent. Let me step through that again so that we all understand it well:
· First, we all have a need for approval.
· Second, we find that serving others results in us feeling approved, and our need is at least temporarily met.
· Third, we go back to this approach again, and it works again, so we develop a compulsion.
· Fourth, we start to do this frequently, and it becomes necessary for us to be able to emotionally survive each day.
· Fifth, we hand over the emotional control of our lives to others, usually just one or two individuals, and we are addicted to it.
· Sixth, our life is totally out of control, and we don’t know it, as we appear to be functioning normally.
· Seventh, if we don’t get help we break down.
Usually most of us get stuck at the fifth point, we are addicted to people pleasing. We don’t feel that life is okay unless those around us are okay.
At the root of this problem, which started with a legitimate need for approval, is self-centeredness. The legitimate need is met through our own efforts; we control how we meet it, and sometimes try to control the people around us to get it met. Is it all about us!
What we call codependency is a significant barrier to our personal spiritual growth and our ability to serve God. In a section of Scripture (Gal 1:6-10) that deals with the preaching and teaching of a false gospel, Paul identifies the reason it was happening, he didn’t call it approval based codependency but that is what it is. He concludes with two simple rhetorical questions in verse 10, let’s read it:
For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ. NASU
Paul presents this as and either/or challenge. This is because we all face the problem of making men as our object of worship, which is either secularism or humanism, versus making Christ our object of worship, which is Christianity. Jesus Himself summed it up as part of His “Sermon on the Mount” in Mt 6:24:
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. NASU
I have quoted the whole verse here, but, in my opinion, it really ought to have been split into two verses. The relevant part here is the first sentence. Jesus says you can’t serve, and be devoted to, two masters. In the context of the need for approval and codependency or approval addiction it means this. You are not able to serve and worship God while you are serving and worshipping your own self-focused needs.
Tough words indeed! Codependency generated through the need for approval or fear of rejection can actually stop a person from being able to live for Christ. Let’s look now at some of the ways we exhibit codependent behavior in our normal daily lives. Let’s refer to the list I handed out earlier, and we can pick on one or two of them:
· Denial of feelings: codependents often have a hard time feeling their own emotions. They are too busy feeling other people’s emotions for them to connect with their own.
· Projection of feelings: A codependent will often project his or her feelings onto others, assuming that they feel the same things. This can be particularly damaging for a parent to do this to a child, as the parent will often tell the child what to feel.
· Enabling behavior: The fear of rejection can lead us to contribute to the bad behavior of another person. One example is the spouse that keeps buying booze for their alcoholic partner. Another is the girl who turns to prostitution to keep her boyfriend in drug money. And what about the mother who does her kids homework for them?
· Hanging on: This is where we fear losing a relationship and feeling abandoned so much that we tolerate bad stuff. This could be the wife who stays with her abusive husband, or the boy that dates a girl who belittles him with others.
There are so many more examples we could bring up, but you get the idea. I personally believe that we live in a culture where codependency, driven out of the need for approval, is the biggest compulsive behavior problem we have.
Avoidance of People
Here we have a seemingly big contradiction. We live with a need for approval from people, and the fear of rejection that goes with it, but we avoid people. What is going on here? (Open)
Have you ever been told that your work is not satisfactory or that your hair doesn’t look good or something like that and experienced a sense of personal rejection? I have! When you meet people who say these things to you consistently, you then do your best to avoid them. You might say it is because they are so negative, but it is not! It is because we feel rejected. It wouldn’t surprise me if we all know someone who stays at work to avoid going home to his or her spouse. Now we know that it may all be about the “worker” feeling rejected in their own home.
Some of these “avoiders” can also be the life and soul of the party, and they are good at socializing. The problem is they never go deep with others for fear of rejection. They will often have no true friends, the kind you share secrets with, for fear of receiving disapproving messages, and consequently feeling bad about themselves. The “avoiders” are actually lonely people.
Can any of us here, apart from me, identify with this “avoider” label? (Discuss)
Hypersensitivity
Some of us are devastated when another person says something remotely negative about us. A comment about how we look or how we are dressed can ruin us for the day. Some of us worry about what complete strangers are thinking about us. These are all examples of being very sensitive to other people’s opinions.
This particular problem gets so bizarre that some of us even take negative self image thoughts about ourselves and project them to others as if they thought them. This means that we can, in our own minds, turn an accepting person into a critical monster. We all know people who are accepting of everyone around them. However, there may be one or two individuals in the group who believe that they are not accepted or approved of by this person. This could be the projection/rejection phenomenon at work.
Does anybody have any examples that they can share about hypersensitivity in people in their lives?
Finally I want to say this. Approval of others is a big deal, and we all have to pay attention to what God says about this subject. I think it is best summed up in Rom 15:7:
Therefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God. NASU
Next week we will cover God’s answer to the problem of approval addiction and codependency; reconciliation.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Don't try to tie your own Shoelaces!
This is a special blog entry. It is the text of my presentation on "powerlessness" made at Celebrate Recovery on Friday, July 11, 2008. It includes the slides I used and the scripture references that go with them.
SLIDE ONE – Powerless (Introductory Slide)
Tonight’s lesson is officially titled “powerless”, but I’m going to give it a special name:
Don’t try to tie your own shoelaces!
Tonight we are on the second of two lessons revolving around Principle one and Step 1. The first lesson, which began a yearlong trek through the whole CR 12 step curriculum, was called “denial”. This lesson is officially titled “powerless”. To grasp what goes on in the early stages of a recovery program it is important to view these two things together, denial and powerless. I want to give you a visual aid here. I need a volunteer to help me with this.
(Have the volunteer adopt a boxer’s stance, and instruct him or her to gently throw a punch, block it with one arm and counter with a punch of your own, making sure that no contact is actually made)
Now let’s do that again with some instruction first. I am going to name my left arm “denial” and my right arm we are calling “power”. As my volunteer begins to try to deal with their problem, they strike out against it, that is the first punch thrown. BUT, it was blocked by “denial” and they were knocked back down by “power”. Please say thank to my volunteer.
Inside us there is a fight going on, our Soul experiences a deep desire to get out of our problem, but it also has developed a strong denial barrier and a habit of doing things under its own power. Last time we looked at denial, this week we are going to look at coming out from operating under our own power and recognizing that we must adopt an attitude of powerlessness.
Let’s look at tonight’s Principle, Step and associated verses.
SLIDE TWO – Principle 1
SLIDE THREE – Mt 5:3
SLIDE FOUR – Step 1
SLIDE FIVE – Rom 7:18
I’m now going to quickly run through tonight’s acrostic for the lesson, you will find it laid out on the front of the worksheet which should have been on the chair as you came in tonight. The seven items I’m going to cover are called “serenity robbers” in the CR participant guides. I want to first acknowledge that that is a good way of thinking about them, and then I want to add a different description, I call them barriers to personal growth, barriers to becoming powerless, barriers that keep us in our hurts habits and hang-ups. The first one is PRIDE.
SLIDE SIX – Pride
SLIDE SEVEN – Pr 29:23
SLIDE EIGHT – The “deadly mixture” slide.
Pride is a very unique thing. It is deadly to our Soul. Pride is present when we have an overly high opinion of ourselves and our abilities. Pride is what got Satan kicked out of heaven. What is so deadly about it? It is simple, when we are prideful, we think we know it all, and when we operate this way, we exclude God from our lives. In the extreme, we even act as though we are God. My life has been full of pride, born out of self-reliance, and God has been dealing with me about this. He has given me a word picture. He says “Ken, when you are being prideful you are poking me in the eye with a pointed stick”. My interpretation of this message is that my pride is offensive and painful to God, and that when I am that way He is not able to help because I have driven Him away. Does that make sense to you?
SLIDE NINE – Only ifs
SLIDE TEN – Lk 12:2-3
Have you ever had a case of the “if onlys”? If only I could quit gambling, if only he would stop drinking, if only she would quit nagging. If you have you have done this, you have indulged in the great rationalizing strategy of wishful thinking. It is a total emotional energy drain. This “only if” habit can just get you stuck in dreaming about what might be, and it completely stops you in trying to get out of denial. This wishful thinking deludes you into believing you have some sort of personal power to get your wish fulfilled. It is a trap.
SLIDE ELEVEN – Worry
SLIDE TWELVE – Mt 6:34
Does anybody here get anxious? Has anxiety ever helped solve a problem? When Jesus spoke these words for us in the “Sermon on the Mount” He was trying to get us to understand that worrying shuts us down and in some ways shuts God out. It is as if we don’t trust God to protect and provide for us. For those that do worry, that thought about not trusting God might initiate a guilt trip; it is not meant to. It is meant to encourage us to consider if we are pushing out God when we really don’t mean to, if we are taking our reasonable concerns to a level where they control our thoughts and feelings, thereby locking God out. The next time a worry comes your way, try to figure out whether you actually have control over the issue and if you are not allowing God to help you deal with whatever is causing you concern.
SLIDE THIRTEEN – Escape
SLIDE FOURTEEN – Eph 5:13-14.
One of the major characteristics of a state of denial is fantasizing, in this lesson we call it escaping. Did you know that there is a whole industry built around this very problem, it is called the romance industry, and I can give you three big examples, soap operas, romance novels and action movies? All of us escape reality from time to time; the problem comes when we make escape a part of our addiction lifestyle. It is as significant as pride in being a barrier to healing. When we escape, or fantasize, we actually are exercising internal power that allows our mind and heart to ignore our real life issues. We are being powerful not powerless.
I hope I haven’t pricked too many bubbles by exposing soaps and action movies for what they are!
SLIDE FIFTEEN –Resentments
SLIDE SIXTEEN – Eph 4:26-27
Resentments are emotional cancers. If we don’t resolve them, they sit inside our Soul and grow. They grow and take over, and in the extreme all our resentments merge together and totally dominate our lives. The cancer of resentments oozes, it releases a kind of Soul pus in the form of bitterness, strife, anger, and hatred; and this pus takes over our lives, it controls us. In step four we begin to learn to identify and let go of these cancers, but here in step one we have to acknowledge that they exist, and that they are a part of us, and we own them. The relevant truth here is that the resentments are in charge; and as a result we are actually powerless.
SLIDE SEVENTEEN – Loneliness
SLIDE EIGHTEEN – Heb 13:1-2
So many people, who are living in a life driven by a compulsive behavior or addiction, experience significant loneliness. Why do they do this? The short answer is shame, the most powerful negative emotion that exists. For some of us it feels better to be alone than to have our weaknesses exposed. Some of us may not have heard this before; fear of exposure of who we are is the same thing as shame. Psychologists use the term “shame based identity” to describe someone who would rather be alone, and not be exposed, than to relate on an intimate basis with another person. Our loneliness is a choice; we exert our personal energy or power to stay that way. If we choose the alternative, and attempt bonding relationships, we admit we are powerless, allowing God and other people to help us.
SLIDE NINETEEN – Emptiness
SLIDE TWENTY – Jn 10:10
I think this barrier is a relative of loneliness, which we just covered. When we live in a “shame based” existence, we do our best to empty ourselves of all our feelings. It takes a great deal of emotional energy and internal power to do this. This emptying activity leads to a sense of hopelessness about our future. The good news is that Jesus came to change that as our verse states.
SLIDE TWENTY-ONE - Selfishness
SLIDE TWENTY-TWO – Lk 17:33
Okay, it is time to confess. I have prayed Lord, give me, give me, change this, change that and change her! Have you ever wondered something like this? What does God do when the gets these wishes. I think He shakes His divine head saying, “why don’t they get it, the world does not revolve around him or her?” The whole problem with self is that it excludes everyone else, including God. It is an exercise in absolute personal power, and is best thought of as being a complete opposite to powerless. Selfishness is a massive barrier to becoming powerless.
SLIDE TWENTY-THREE – Separation
SLIDE TWENTY-FOUR – Rom 8:38-39
I think of this as the good news. We can retreat into loneliness, and try to empty ourselves, we can become self-centered and prideful, we can try to escape life and even God, but He, the Great Almighty, will never let us do it. He will chase us, He will make us uncomfortable, He will put people in our lives and he will love us constantly. When we try to separate ourselves from His love under our own power, he will work to allow us to be humiliated, and show us how powerless we actually are.
Well, that is the end of the seven “serenity robbers”, now we’ll look very quickly at four active steps we can take to move toward powerlessness.
SLIDE TWENTY-FIVE – Stop Denying the Pain
SLIDE TWENTY-SIX – Ps 6:2-3
Admit it! You can’t do it by yourself, no matter what you have done in life; the emotional pain is still there.
SLIDE TWENTY-SEVEN – Stop playing God
SLIDE TWENTY-EIGHT – Mt 6:24
It is God’s way, which has never failed, or your way, you choose.
SLIDE TWENTY-NINE – Start Admitting Your Powerlessness
SLIDE THIRTY – Mt 19:26
Have you succeeded in dealing with your stuff under your own power? You would not be here if the answer is “yes”. Try God.
SLIDE THIRTY-ONE – Admit Your Life has become Unmanageable
SLIDE THIRTY-TWO – Ps 40:12
Say it! My life is not under control, and I can’t handle it.
I want to finish tonight with a simple exercise we can all do to demonstrate the message that God has for us. Everybody close your eyes, we are going to go into our imaginations. Picture yourself as a five year old. You are sitting on a chair with your shoes on, and your Dad is standing there, waiting. You are trying to tie your shoelaces. Your Dad is saying, “Come on let’s go”. You say, “Dad, let me tie my shoes”. He says “Okay”. But you can’t do it. He says “Come on, we are missing it”, you respond, “Let me tie my shoes”. Now he says, “Let me help you”, you say, “NO, I can do it”, he says “Okay”, but you can’t. He says again “Let me help you”, you reply in anger, “leave me alone, I can do it”, he says “okay”. After a while he says, “Are you ready to go”, knowing that you are not. You say with tears, “I can’t tie my laces”. He says, “I know, I was waiting for you to admit it, now I can help you and we can go forward together”. Okay, we can open our eyes.
Did you get the point? Our heavenly Father wants us to be like children who admit that they can’t go forward in life until they tell the Father, “I’m powerless, I need your help.”
Thank you for listening.
SLIDE ONE – Powerless (Introductory Slide)
Tonight’s lesson is officially titled “powerless”, but I’m going to give it a special name:
Don’t try to tie your own shoelaces!
Tonight we are on the second of two lessons revolving around Principle one and Step 1. The first lesson, which began a yearlong trek through the whole CR 12 step curriculum, was called “denial”. This lesson is officially titled “powerless”. To grasp what goes on in the early stages of a recovery program it is important to view these two things together, denial and powerless. I want to give you a visual aid here. I need a volunteer to help me with this.
(Have the volunteer adopt a boxer’s stance, and instruct him or her to gently throw a punch, block it with one arm and counter with a punch of your own, making sure that no contact is actually made)
Now let’s do that again with some instruction first. I am going to name my left arm “denial” and my right arm we are calling “power”. As my volunteer begins to try to deal with their problem, they strike out against it, that is the first punch thrown. BUT, it was blocked by “denial” and they were knocked back down by “power”. Please say thank to my volunteer.
Inside us there is a fight going on, our Soul experiences a deep desire to get out of our problem, but it also has developed a strong denial barrier and a habit of doing things under its own power. Last time we looked at denial, this week we are going to look at coming out from operating under our own power and recognizing that we must adopt an attitude of powerlessness.
Let’s look at tonight’s Principle, Step and associated verses.
SLIDE TWO – Principle 1
SLIDE THREE – Mt 5:3
SLIDE FOUR – Step 1
SLIDE FIVE – Rom 7:18
I’m now going to quickly run through tonight’s acrostic for the lesson, you will find it laid out on the front of the worksheet which should have been on the chair as you came in tonight. The seven items I’m going to cover are called “serenity robbers” in the CR participant guides. I want to first acknowledge that that is a good way of thinking about them, and then I want to add a different description, I call them barriers to personal growth, barriers to becoming powerless, barriers that keep us in our hurts habits and hang-ups. The first one is PRIDE.
SLIDE SIX – Pride
SLIDE SEVEN – Pr 29:23
SLIDE EIGHT – The “deadly mixture” slide.
Pride is a very unique thing. It is deadly to our Soul. Pride is present when we have an overly high opinion of ourselves and our abilities. Pride is what got Satan kicked out of heaven. What is so deadly about it? It is simple, when we are prideful, we think we know it all, and when we operate this way, we exclude God from our lives. In the extreme, we even act as though we are God. My life has been full of pride, born out of self-reliance, and God has been dealing with me about this. He has given me a word picture. He says “Ken, when you are being prideful you are poking me in the eye with a pointed stick”. My interpretation of this message is that my pride is offensive and painful to God, and that when I am that way He is not able to help because I have driven Him away. Does that make sense to you?
SLIDE NINE – Only ifs
SLIDE TEN – Lk 12:2-3
Have you ever had a case of the “if onlys”? If only I could quit gambling, if only he would stop drinking, if only she would quit nagging. If you have you have done this, you have indulged in the great rationalizing strategy of wishful thinking. It is a total emotional energy drain. This “only if” habit can just get you stuck in dreaming about what might be, and it completely stops you in trying to get out of denial. This wishful thinking deludes you into believing you have some sort of personal power to get your wish fulfilled. It is a trap.
SLIDE ELEVEN – Worry
SLIDE TWELVE – Mt 6:34
Does anybody here get anxious? Has anxiety ever helped solve a problem? When Jesus spoke these words for us in the “Sermon on the Mount” He was trying to get us to understand that worrying shuts us down and in some ways shuts God out. It is as if we don’t trust God to protect and provide for us. For those that do worry, that thought about not trusting God might initiate a guilt trip; it is not meant to. It is meant to encourage us to consider if we are pushing out God when we really don’t mean to, if we are taking our reasonable concerns to a level where they control our thoughts and feelings, thereby locking God out. The next time a worry comes your way, try to figure out whether you actually have control over the issue and if you are not allowing God to help you deal with whatever is causing you concern.
SLIDE THIRTEEN – Escape
SLIDE FOURTEEN – Eph 5:13-14.
One of the major characteristics of a state of denial is fantasizing, in this lesson we call it escaping. Did you know that there is a whole industry built around this very problem, it is called the romance industry, and I can give you three big examples, soap operas, romance novels and action movies? All of us escape reality from time to time; the problem comes when we make escape a part of our addiction lifestyle. It is as significant as pride in being a barrier to healing. When we escape, or fantasize, we actually are exercising internal power that allows our mind and heart to ignore our real life issues. We are being powerful not powerless.
I hope I haven’t pricked too many bubbles by exposing soaps and action movies for what they are!
SLIDE FIFTEEN –Resentments
SLIDE SIXTEEN – Eph 4:26-27
Resentments are emotional cancers. If we don’t resolve them, they sit inside our Soul and grow. They grow and take over, and in the extreme all our resentments merge together and totally dominate our lives. The cancer of resentments oozes, it releases a kind of Soul pus in the form of bitterness, strife, anger, and hatred; and this pus takes over our lives, it controls us. In step four we begin to learn to identify and let go of these cancers, but here in step one we have to acknowledge that they exist, and that they are a part of us, and we own them. The relevant truth here is that the resentments are in charge; and as a result we are actually powerless.
SLIDE SEVENTEEN – Loneliness
SLIDE EIGHTEEN – Heb 13:1-2
So many people, who are living in a life driven by a compulsive behavior or addiction, experience significant loneliness. Why do they do this? The short answer is shame, the most powerful negative emotion that exists. For some of us it feels better to be alone than to have our weaknesses exposed. Some of us may not have heard this before; fear of exposure of who we are is the same thing as shame. Psychologists use the term “shame based identity” to describe someone who would rather be alone, and not be exposed, than to relate on an intimate basis with another person. Our loneliness is a choice; we exert our personal energy or power to stay that way. If we choose the alternative, and attempt bonding relationships, we admit we are powerless, allowing God and other people to help us.
SLIDE NINETEEN – Emptiness
SLIDE TWENTY – Jn 10:10
I think this barrier is a relative of loneliness, which we just covered. When we live in a “shame based” existence, we do our best to empty ourselves of all our feelings. It takes a great deal of emotional energy and internal power to do this. This emptying activity leads to a sense of hopelessness about our future. The good news is that Jesus came to change that as our verse states.
SLIDE TWENTY-ONE - Selfishness
SLIDE TWENTY-TWO – Lk 17:33
Okay, it is time to confess. I have prayed Lord, give me, give me, change this, change that and change her! Have you ever wondered something like this? What does God do when the gets these wishes. I think He shakes His divine head saying, “why don’t they get it, the world does not revolve around him or her?” The whole problem with self is that it excludes everyone else, including God. It is an exercise in absolute personal power, and is best thought of as being a complete opposite to powerless. Selfishness is a massive barrier to becoming powerless.
SLIDE TWENTY-THREE – Separation
SLIDE TWENTY-FOUR – Rom 8:38-39
I think of this as the good news. We can retreat into loneliness, and try to empty ourselves, we can become self-centered and prideful, we can try to escape life and even God, but He, the Great Almighty, will never let us do it. He will chase us, He will make us uncomfortable, He will put people in our lives and he will love us constantly. When we try to separate ourselves from His love under our own power, he will work to allow us to be humiliated, and show us how powerless we actually are.
Well, that is the end of the seven “serenity robbers”, now we’ll look very quickly at four active steps we can take to move toward powerlessness.
SLIDE TWENTY-FIVE – Stop Denying the Pain
SLIDE TWENTY-SIX – Ps 6:2-3
Admit it! You can’t do it by yourself, no matter what you have done in life; the emotional pain is still there.
SLIDE TWENTY-SEVEN – Stop playing God
SLIDE TWENTY-EIGHT – Mt 6:24
It is God’s way, which has never failed, or your way, you choose.
SLIDE TWENTY-NINE – Start Admitting Your Powerlessness
SLIDE THIRTY – Mt 19:26
Have you succeeded in dealing with your stuff under your own power? You would not be here if the answer is “yes”. Try God.
SLIDE THIRTY-ONE – Admit Your Life has become Unmanageable
SLIDE THIRTY-TWO – Ps 40:12
Say it! My life is not under control, and I can’t handle it.
I want to finish tonight with a simple exercise we can all do to demonstrate the message that God has for us. Everybody close your eyes, we are going to go into our imaginations. Picture yourself as a five year old. You are sitting on a chair with your shoes on, and your Dad is standing there, waiting. You are trying to tie your shoelaces. Your Dad is saying, “Come on let’s go”. You say, “Dad, let me tie my shoes”. He says “Okay”. But you can’t do it. He says “Come on, we are missing it”, you respond, “Let me tie my shoes”. Now he says, “Let me help you”, you say, “NO, I can do it”, he says “Okay”, but you can’t. He says again “Let me help you”, you reply in anger, “leave me alone, I can do it”, he says “okay”. After a while he says, “Are you ready to go”, knowing that you are not. You say with tears, “I can’t tie my laces”. He says, “I know, I was waiting for you to admit it, now I can help you and we can go forward together”. Okay, we can open our eyes.
Did you get the point? Our heavenly Father wants us to be like children who admit that they can’t go forward in life until they tell the Father, “I’m powerless, I need your help.”
Thank you for listening.
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