So I started blogging briefly in December on a different site, and quickly lost steam after a couple of posts due to holiday travels and general holiday craziness. I’m back on track now, and already have something to post from today (fourth day of semester). First though, I’m going to load in the two or three posts I previoiusly made to get them “on the record,” so here goes.
Original Tuesday, December 2nd post on pain avoidance:
We have learned so well to protect ourselves, that we forgot sometimes the cost of that protection, both in terms of our relationships and our learning and growing experiences. It is indeed important to protect ourselves, without a doubt, but I think we have become over-protective, at too great a cost. A liberal friend of mine whose family is much more conservative has challenging conversations when she goes to visit, some very challenging for her, particularly around areas of gay rights and gay marriage. Some of her friends have advocated cutting off that portion of her family entirely, and have a hard time understanding why she is planning on moving several states to be closer to home.
I think that we have become so protective of ourselves and so pain avoidant that we miss out on connections, to both friends and family, and on learning and growth opportunities. It is ok to have disagreements with people, especially people we care about and who are close to us, and still maintain the connection. It can be hard, especially when talking about issues with which we closely identify, because it feels like our very identity, who we are, is being threatened, when people disagree with us. So instead of learning to be more secure in ourselves by having this disagreements and coming through them still feeling whole, we avoid having the conversations, and often cut ourselves off entirely. This happens with friends and family alike; we avoid pain, we avoid conflict. Sometimes it is threat to identity we are avoiding, but other times it is truths about ourselves that we are avoiding, either because we are insecure or shameful about them, or because there is internal pain associated with the situation, fact, or event, and we want to avoid that pain at all costs. Unfortunately for us when we do this, we not only lose the connection to those we care about, we also prevent our own healing and growth. We avoid learning how to be able to disagree on matters that are dear to us, and still be secure in who we are. We avoid learning about places within ourselves that we feel shame about ourselves. And we avoid learning about places in ourselves that carry pain with them. In all three cases, we are better off in the short term, because we have avoided the pain in the moment, but we are not better off in the long term, because we have denied ourselves an opportunity to heal and grow (not to mention the possibility of eventually changing someone’s mind). That pain and shame is still there, it doesn’t go away just because we have avoided it, and we must still carry it, even if we are not consciously aware of it. To steal a paragraph from my own sermon that I delivered this past Sunday:
If you are carrying around a backpack with 20 pounds of rocks in it, all day, every day, and you even wear that backpack to bed, that sounds mighty uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Would pretending that the rocks weren’t in the backpack make the load any lighter? Would not thinking about the heaviness of the rocks and the pack make the work of carrying around that load any less onerous?
In the words of Sam Keen: “If you run from your own woundedness, it will fester. If you deny it, it will pollute others. The fundamental rule of the psyche is that whatever you resist, persists.”
