Vulnerability and Courage

“In our culture,” teaches Dr. Brené Brown, “we associate vulnerability with emotions we want to avoid such as fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet we too often lose sight of the fact that vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity, authenticity, and love.” When we say we love someone, we MUST risk vulnerability, or contempt and resentment will creep into the relationship. Those that love you know when you're disingenuous-without vulnerability, actions don't connect with words.“The research shows that we try to ward disappointment with a shield of cynicism, disarm shame by numbing ourselves against joy, and circumvent grief by shutting off our willingness to love.” You may be shielded from disappointment and hurt, but you'll also be alone behind your shield. To love someone is to hurt sometimes. If someone really loves us, they don't intend to hurt and will spend much time making up for unintentional wounding. Those who deny vulnerability will hurt then act as if they haven't wounded the one they love. Think about it. I am thankful today that I try, most of the time, to have a heart that continues to love even when I think I've been hurt by another's actions or responses. I have to muster the courage most days to do that when it would be easier just to shrug my shoulders and try to stop caring about others. Some days it seems a lot easier to just give up and go hide somewhere where I think no one can hurt me again. Still, I'm not made that way. No matter what the hurt, I get back our there and try again. And that, my friends, is courage.

I heard a friend today say "it's not fair!" in response to a situation that was hurtful. Our response is often to get angry and withdraw; it's natural to put our guard up when we feel wounded. I see that a lot with the political posts on FB. People are afraid: afraid of losing something, afraid of being hurt, or afraid of not getting what they want. It takes a lot of courage to continue to keep your heart open to love, and open to other people when you'd rather not be hurt anymore. That's why I believe that LOVE is the most courageous thing a person can do. Anyone can hate. anyone can be angry. Those who choose to respond with compassion and love choose to look past their fear and look toward hope.

When we choose the courage to understand why someone "does" something to us, we realize that much of what we experience is our reaction to someone else instead of the other person's actions. It's difficult to guess someone's intentions, especially someone you don't know well, or a stranger. However, it is especially complicated with those to whom we've given access to our personal stories, our deepest relationships, and we begin to perceive that they hurt us because we see something deeply flawed within ourselves. We take our flaws and we filter everyone else's actions through them, resulting in a life where we feel constantly attacked and/or used. Resentment builds. Our relationships wither. But, what if we could just find the courage to love our own SELF - flaws and all? What if we found the courage to stop letting the actions and opinions of others determine what we think of ourselves as individuals? With all our mistakes, and all the things we've learned from our experiences, what if we began to view our inner selves as whole and complete?

Mostly, if we found the courage to do that, we could bring compassion to others, bring empathy to others, and begin to understand that life ISN'T fair - and that's ok. Life has nothing personal against us. Life is a tapestry of experiences and our reactions to them. We can choose to stop trying to weave together the different colored threads of our experience, dye them all black, and make them a snarled, tangled web of misery that protects us from other experiences. In that web, we'll be safe, and anyone that approaches will be paralyzed and consumed by our fear. Eventually, our webs will bump into other webs, and become helplessly tangled in an unmanageable knot of despair from which few will be able to escape, but we will be safe in the center of that large web - each disconnected and preying on each other until only the matted morass of black threads remains, and we no longer have the strength or will to try to liberate ourselves. 

OR... we can choose to take each of the threads, see them for the color they are, and find a way to knot them around each other. Parts of the tapestry might be muted, parts might be bright, and other parts might be splotches of misery. The picture will come together as it will come together, but it will be a whole picture that we can share, that might keep someone else warm, or that might keep us warm in the days when we need shelter. There will be flaws in the weaving of the tapestry, but we will be able to see the picture we weave as we begin to tie it into the tapestries around us, creating a large picture of how our lives are interconnected, but one not more important than the other. Do you have enough courage to try to love? Do you have enough courage to open your heart to the possibility that you might be hurt again?

More about stories...

I am thankful for stories… All sorts of stories - books, graphic books, movies, podcasts, scripts… There are so many ways we can read or hear stories.  Stories help us understand the world around us.  My prior discussions of archetypes are one way to understand how stories help us relate to ourselves and to others. Stories teach us things about ourselves we didn’t know before, and stories help us learn to THINK. We don’t have to agree with or like every story we read or hear in order to learn from it. Of course, as an English teacher, I’ve encountered numerous complaints about how students don’t like something they were assigned to read. However, not all stories have to be in book/novel form - they can be short illustrations that help make a point about a situation. That is how Jesus taught his disciples, and then He told his followers to teach their children in His way (storytelling!). Thinking about this, I looked up the definitions of “story” and “parable”.

Definition of story (Merriam-Webster): an account of incidents or events; a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question; a fictional narrative shorter than a novel.  From the Latin “historia” - history.

Definition of parable (Merriam-Webster): a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle. From Greek “parabole” - comparison, side by side.

The beauty of finding the definitions demonstrates, to me, that stories are useful for teaching and learning - a parable IS a story that makes a side-by-side comparison, and it’s usually understood that the listener or reader will be making a judgment at the end of the story. Because a parable is a story, we can extend our understanding of a side-by-side judgment to stories in general. We often identify with some character, usually the “hero”, of a story. By empathizing or understanding the hero’s activities during a story, we can come to some type of understanding about ourselves through what happens to the hero, or whatever character we identify with. If we go along with this understanding, movies, plays, fairy tales, legends, and all sorts of stories can then become parables for our lives, something from which we develop our morals, principles, attitudes, and viewpoints. Stop thinking of stories as entertainment, and begin to see them as what they were really meant for - guidance through our complicated journeys in “real-life”.  For centuries, cultures have answered important questions with stories or tales. the questions posed are usual esoteric in nature, and not easily satisfied with a quick line or two of advice. For example, Jesus usually told a parable in response to a follower’s question, so the questioner ended up reasoning things out for himself rather than just being told the answer. If you take some time to look up storytelling quotes on Google, you’ll find hundreds of quotes about stories and storytelling, most of which ring true in their various forms of wisdom. Cultures have used stories for healing, wisdom, and learning much longer than our contemporary studies of science and psychology. 

Maybe what we’re missing is the point of the stories. Yes, stories can help us escape from our own lives for while - that’s the real beauty. We think we have suspended any analysis or activity in our personal lives only to leave a story with the realization that we have more understanding than just a little time before. What would happen if we left each story with a question, such as “In the story I just experienced, what were the part I liked the best, and why did I like them”? Better yet, what would happen if we approached every story with a question, question like “What am I seeking in my own life that this story might give me insight about”? Instead of striking ahead blindly through our lives, what would happen if we began to see ourselves in the stories we hear and see?

Maybe you’re thankful for something today - I hope so. I’ve found that being thankful sure has changed my attitude about goes on around me. Besides, I usually have a story about the thing I’m grateful, and stories sure do make my life a little brighter!

Judgment and Criticism

“It is not our job to fix people, change people, or judge/condemn people. It’s our job to love people. The rest is in God’s hands.”  I’ve seen this quote circling Facebook every now and then. I happened to see it today, on the tail end of a discussion with a friend about exercising judgment. We were talking about saying whether a person “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing something. I personally take the view that trying to decide the shoulds and shouldn'ts of someone else's action will only lead to my personal misery. My friend sees the shoulds and shouldn'ts as an opportunity for corrective action.   

When we view others with a judgmental or critical mind, we are essentially condemning and/or sentencing that person. The definition of judge involves hearing, deciding, and pronouncing after deliberation, and the Greek word for judgment use in the New Testament is the word used in relation to a decision passed on the faults of others. When we make judgments based on others’ behaviors, we decide or form an opinion about what that person should or shouldn’t be doing. In essence, we set ourselves up as better then the other (pride) and condemn the other based on behavior. If you follow New Testament scriptures, judging others is extremely detestable to the Lord and this attitude opens many doors for the enemy in our lives (Romans 12:3, Romans 14:4, and Galatians 6:1-3).  Matthew chapter 7 also deals heavily with how we are to conduct ourselves when we judge others. We must have a holy fear of pride and be very careful of judging others.

What’s most distressing about judgment of others is the amount of time people devote to judgment. What if we were to use that time to better ourselves? Ultimately, the only actions for which we are accountable are our own. It is the ultimate in pride to assign ourselves as judge and jury for the actions of others - we can not save the world and we cannot change other people. The only actions we can affect are our own.

I’m thankful today for warm winter weather. I was able to get outside and take care of some house maintenance, and feed cows and goats without much trouble. :-) I don’t dislike cold weather, I just found myself grateful to not have to bundle up today. What is one thing you’re thankful for today? Maybe while you're thinking on that, you’ll forget to offer judgment about someone else… 

Experiencing Pain: How can we get past it?

What are you thankful for today? :-) I have some many things to be thankful, I sometimes have a hard time picking one to share - even in my down days, when I sit an think or make a list of what I can be grateful, I realize how truly blessed my life has been. There’s nothing better to lift my spirit. Even if the sad day doesn’t really go away, I have a touchstone of gratefulness to remind me that good things DO happen. Today, I’m thankful (again and again) for my son. He’s such a sweetheart. I can ask him to do anything, and he will do it, or try to do it. He may not always take initiative, but his willingness is an example to me to be more open to helping others when they need help.

So I wrote a little bit about control. I wanted to jump into archetypes and get back to telling stories, but I saw so much about the topic of pain over the past couple of days, I wanted to address that before I move into storytelling. SO, I thought about control, and why we try to maintain a sense of control, and what I’d been reading/seeing about pain. In my mind, control and pain are connected. Our brains translate pain to help keep us safe - genetically, safety and less pain means survival.When we can control our environment, we reduce the risk of pain and increase our chances of survival. In that way, control is strongly related to pain. As far as keeping our physical bodies safe, this is very normal. I believe we can also apply this desire to control and reduce pain to our relationships.

First, I  want you to know that fear and anxiety are absolutely normal reactions to pain - those reactions keep us from experiencing more pain. They are our bodies’ ways of keeping us safe. For instance, when we burn our hands on a stove, we fear touching the stove again so we can avoid the pain of the burn. Our emotional pain triggers the same response in our psyche. The problem is that our reaction to emotional pain can prevent us from achieving what we really want - connection with others. Our actions following a painful emotional episode can lead us into nasty circles of sabotage and unhealthy behavior, leaving us lost in the forest of our reactions without really understanding how we’ve created our own personal “pain loop.”

Here are some thoughts on our reactions to a painful experience:

     1. We want the pain to go away - we don’t want to feel it.

Recognize that our actions during the pain are usually an attempt to dull the pain (addiction). We want to find something to fill our mind so we don’t have to notice the pain - something to numb the pain. What would happen if we simply accepted there is pain in our lives? Why is it wrong to feel pain? Doesn’t that mean that we cared about something, and whatever it was we cared about is over? Who’s saying the pain shouldn’t be there?     

     2. We want to blame someone else for causing our pain.

What often happens when we come out of a painful circumstance is that we end up focusing on what other parties did to us. This reduces our responsibility for being in the circumstance. We feel better because the blaming takes the place of feeling the pain - it helps numb the pain. Some of us are addicted to blaming others for anything bad we experience. The blaming helps us feel in control of what happened. However, the other person or people in the circumstance didn’t do TO us. No. Someone did something - period. We choose to make it about ourselves. We don’t have to be around actions we can’t tolerate and that is many times painful because we care about the person who’s actions are intolerable to us. But our personal pain comes from deciding that someone “shouldn’t” be acting that way around us. What if we could let go of thinking that someone “should” be acting a certain way, and when he/she doesn’t act that way, we could then not take it personally? Really, we can only speak our mind about how we think someone should behave, but we can’t control how another person will act. Those actions are solely their own actions, and really have very little to do with us.

     3. Society conditions us that we must constantly be happy.

Society conditions us to believe that it’s better to be in a relationship - that we’re incomplete without someone else. Have you ever heard anyone ask people in a relationship why they aren’t single? LOL! We are conditioned to think we need another person to compete us. We don’t NEED someone to be happy - and what a lot of pressure to put on another person… Needing someone to “complete” fills an addiction and allows us avoid confronting ourselves.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes and lecture about the Life-Death-Life cycle of our lives. Like our day begins, comes to a zenith, and ends, the patterns and paths of our lives begin, rise, and come to an end. Through the endings, a new opportunity to begin anew appears. Seeds are planted, grow, harvested from the dying plant, and consumed; or seeds are planted, grown, harvested from the dying plant, and saved to plant for the new crop. In our religions, we see the birth/death/rebirth motif play out. Death, physical or metaphorical, isn’t a pleasant experience. To avoid it means to avoid what is an essential part of our human nature. Understanding that pain is a natural part of this process, feeling that pain, marking the place in our lives where we felt the pain, then choosing to grow past it, are all ways to help us cope with the cycle of our lives. 

Survival Archetype: The Child, Revisited

Two years ago, I posted about survival archetypes. Here is the link: http://parttheveil.blogspot.com/2015/07/archetypes-and-healing.html

So much of cognitive therapy helps us deal with childhood experiences that color the way we react to situations and relationships in our adult lives. According to Caroline Myss, The Child has a positive and negative side. In its positive aspect, the child inside us wants to nurture and play. The positive energy that flows from us when we manifest this part of The Child infects others and helps bring out the best in our relationships. The Child has many aspects including The Wounded/Abandoned/Orphaned Child, The Dependent, The Innocent, The Nature Child, and the Divine Child.  

The Wounded Child may be the easiest to identify with because of the focus of therapy since the 1960s. Many have found that childhood traumas have contributed to their actions as adults. In its positive aspect, The Wounded Child helps us have compassion for others and leads us to learn to forgive others. In its negative aspect, we remain grounded in self-pity and tend to seek parental figures instead of learning to be personally resourceful.

The Orphaned Child may have lost one or both parents, of may have experienced a familial situation in which they never “belonged” to the family. Positively, The Orphaned Child learns early independence and a keen sense of judgment based on experience. Negatively, The Orphaned Child seeks substitute families or parental figures, inhibiting the growth of mature adult relationships.

The Innocent Child manifests in the beliefs that all people are basically good.  He/she sees the beauty in spite of ugliness, believes everything is possible, and has a powerful imagination. The shadow Innocent does NOT believe in the possibility of miracles, and may result in a retreat into fantasy instead of facing reality. The injured Innocent Child develops depression or pessimism due to cynical responses to his/her magical thinking.

The Dependent Child is mainly a negative aspect that constantly seeks to fulfill something missing from childhood, although what is missing from childhood may never be defined. The Dependent Child has a hard time relating to others because of extreme self-absorption. The positive aspect of this archetype is that we can learn to spot it in our personalities as a warning to avoid needy and co-dependent behavior.

Many stories relate to The Child archetype: Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, Oliver Twist, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Moses, and more.

Locus of Control, Part 2

How thankful are you for something today? No matter how bad it’s been, can you find one thing to be thankful for?  Today, I’m thankful of rite coincidences, the small signs, that bring hope and peace to my life. :-) 

Yesterday, I introduced two types of control behavior theories: internal and external locus of control (ILOC and ELOC). Hopefully, you identified with one or the other of the two loci of control. I wanted to further discuss these viewpoints, because our tendency may be to say that we are one or the other. While we may tend to be one of the other, we all find ourselves using internal or external locus of control depending on the situation. Another clarification should be directed at internal locus of control. While the description seems more positive in cultural terms, there are drawbacks to being more internal. People with ILOC will be hard on themselves and overanalyze what they’ve done wrong in certain situations. ILOC can also make us hard on others because we have been driven to succeed and expect others to take responsibility to succeed too.  Conversely, ELOC seems more negative in regards to personal responsibility, but ELOC is sometimes an appropriate response to situations. Some situation do actually consist of elements that ARE beyond our control, such as death, or someone else’s actions.

So the locus of control, or our perception of how much control/power we have in a situation will depend on how well we analyze the factors that contributed to our situation. 

This may lead a person with a strong ILOC to actually create situations that limit contact without uncontrollable factors, such as collaborative activities. When the person is choosing mostly individual activities, there is no one to blame for mistakes but the person who chose the activity. Thus, the ILOC person maintains control of his/her environment.  

ELOC can help us deal with job layoffs, breakups, or mortality, all of which have factors that are beyond our control. Knowing there are things we can’t control leads us to acceptance of the situation if we can recognize the factors beyond our control without assigning blame.

Most importantly, understanding both approaches can help us process our environment and how we can either control or release control of that which affects our lives. The understanding helps us understand others’ actions toward us as well as our own actions and thoughts toward other people. 

So go give a smile to someone tomorrow - give it freely. Depending on your stronger locus of control, whether a person smiles back at you may depend on whether you feel you can control that other person’s response or not. Notice how you react to the person’s response to your smile. :-)

Control

Control has a number of closely related definitions: the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events,  a means of limiting or regulating something, or  the power to restrain something, especially one's own emotions or actions.  It comes from the late Middle English word “contreroller", the person who keeps accounts or rolls (transactions).  I wanted to tackle control today because it’s something we all have in common. As humans have developed, the deep-seated need for control began as a way to predict circumstances and increase our chances of survival individually and as a species. What this has evolved into is not necessarily a need to actually BE in control, but we long to have a sense of control over our environment. You can see that sense of control exercised through rituals that provide a familiar framework and reassure us that there are some constants in our daily lives - rituals can range from your morning hygiene routine to the practice of religion to athletic activities. Social standards also provide us a sense of control - if everyone follows “the rules”, we feel safer.

Many of us also seek out control by actually moving from just sensing it to taking control and acting on our impulses or plans. Control at this point becomes about power. When we feel we aren’t in control, we feel vulnerable and can imagine all sorts of dire consequences: physical pain, abandonment, emotional pain, the list can go on and on. These imaginings transform into real psychological pain therefore, when the real pain happens, we feel it even more deeply than we imagined it. To complicate the situation, we psychologically gain a sense of control by trying to give that control to others and creating trust. Trust and control actually SUPPORT each other, but when trust is broken, we’ll try and find trust “substitutes” like emotional/physical barriers or monitoring another person’s behavior. The catch-22 is that when we use trust substitutes to give us a sense of control, we enact a vicious cycle that EXCLUDES instead of promotes trust.

All of that is fine and great if we know how to recognize when we have control issues. But how many of us really reflect long enough before we’re acting on our lowered sense of control? I know I can catch myself often acting a little irrationally because I feel powerless/helpless/out of control, but I’m not that great at it when strong emotions are involved. What I tend to do when I know I have a problem is give it a little research to see what I can learn and apply to my own life. :-)  Here’s what I found out about control…

We tend to perceive control in our lives in two ways: internal control (I’m in control) or externally (another has control). You’ll often hear this referred to as “locus of control”. Those of us who exercise a lot of internal control tend to be self-reflective and believe that our actions strong influence on how events turn out.  Those of us who believe there is more external control will tend to blame someone OR praise someone for how an event transpired regardless of our own actions. There are lots of reasons why we end up with a more heavily weighted internal or external locus of control, much of which depends on how helpless or powerless we felt as children. Still, at some point, it is our own responsibility to respond to problems that an internal or external control mode causes us (probably a theory based on internal control! LOL!).  If you are unsure which control type you are, consider the following… A person with a stronger internal control center is proactive, competent, responsible, empathetic, and realizes their full potential (good and bad qualities).  Those people also tend to feel responsibility for others’ feelings, which is not always a good thing. A person with a stronger external control center is thoughtless, chaotic, moves form one extreme to another, tends to feel like a victim, and blame others for his/her circumstances.

It is natural to want to control a given situation in which we find ourselves. Our brain uses a sense of control to help us survive.  Giving up control can be very scary, especially when we’ve operated mostly in one mode of control patterns for a lifetime. The benefits of exploring where we lie on the spectrum of need for control can exceed the fear we feel when we are out of control in situations, especially in relationships and health.

More on locus of control tomorrow… unless something more immediate comes up! :-)

Have an awesomely blessed day out there, and don't forget to give someone a smile today!