Here’s the thing about getting better from a serious illness.
You have setbacks. But every time you have a setback you learn something new.
As you clear away the layers that have built up around your illness and your
response to it over the years you start to see the deeper issues. The stubborn
ones that started it all off in the first place, the ones that will be hardest
to shift. Also, the physical processes that are underlying the mental ones.
I once described getting better as like digging up dandelions
out of your lawn rather than cutting the tops off, now it feels more like
uprooting a tree. There are thousands of smaller roots which you can cut off quite
easily but they all feed into 2 or 3 great big gnarly roots that go miles down.
To get to them you need to clear out the little ones that are gripping the ground
all around, solidifying them in place. Then you can start to dig down through
the rocks and soil and get hot and sweaty and exhausted, so you can loosen them,
see them clearly to start chopping them into pieces and pulling them out. Which
is a long-winded way of saying it’s actually much harder than uprooting
dandelions and it turns out it’s all connected.
Anyway, recent events have created some clarity on the massive,
gnarly, deep roots of my illness and although the process has been agonising
and exhausting as usual, I’m quite excited about things that I have understood.
They feel like things that once dealt with will bring really good change. One
of them is recognising how much I am driven by relational fear. Which is ironic
because I would have told you a few years ago that relational fear was
something I didn’t possess. People who knew me well would have told you that
too. I offer up intimacy without strings or reservations to anyone who comes
along, I expose my vulnerabilities, I trust people and expect the best of them
and I get beaten and wounded time and time again by the sinfulness, selfishness
and self-protection of others. I learn the hard way every time that most people
will take advantage of your generosity and then kick you to the curb when they
no longer have need of you, but never seem to retain that learning into the
next situation. It used to make my mother despair.
But it turns out that all that behaviour is actually driven by
fear. Completely understandable fear. It is behaviour that I learned as a child
to survive. By the time I was 6 years old I had a fixed understanding that I
was fat (untrue at the time), ugly, stupid and unworthy of kindness. On reflection,
all of those things were untrue, but they were the core of my
self-understanding. My parents were
going through a nasty separation and there was no adult in my life who could
understand or help. In fact, without meaning to, they tended to make it much
worse. I retreated and was excluded and this reinforced my sense of being
unacceptable to others. But then I discovered something. If you make yourself
emotionally available to people in distress they are nice to you. I was blessed
with empathy and I could use it to make people like me. It didn’t last, people
recovered from their distress and rejected you as unnecessary and went back to the
centre of a group of people who had no time or interest in you (as a best case
scenario). But for that while, being the person who understood and cared and
gave compassion without stint insulated me from isolation and rejection and abuse.
It was my safe place.
For decades it was the only way I knew how to do relationship
and it left me vulnerable to rejection over and over again. In some ways it is
still the only way I know how to do relationship, in that the habit of making
myself available and emotional vulnerable to people and engaging in empathy is
a habit I have never learned to break. The only thing that has changed is that
I no longer need it to feel acceptable to people, that the beliefs that underpinned
it as the only way that I would be worthy of kindness and attention are gone.
And it can be a phenomenal gift. A blessing, I respond automatically to the
mood of the people around me and that makes me, I have been told, good company.
I mirror your feelings which makes talking to me a comfort, I mirror your
interests, which is flattering. I am emotionally open with my friends which
makes them feel they can be open with me and trust me. All these things are good
things.
But there is a hangovers from this mode of existence
which is far from good for me. It is that my default setting is to use
empathy as a tool of manipulation. It seems like it is about you but actually it
is about me, making me safe, even in the short term from being despised and
rejected by you. Something that looks kind is actually fundamentally selfish
and ugly. That motivation is and always has been deeply enmeshed with the
actual love that I have for people and the real desire to make others feel
better. But it is there, and the evidence of that is when I can’t do anything
to make you feel better or what you need is beyond my ability to give I tend to get stressed
and panicky. My tendency to become overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of
others has its root in this sin.
Praise be to God that through the gospel of grace I am able
to look square in the face of that fact that one of the things I have always
liked most about myself and that others like about me has an ugly, nasty root
in sin. In fact, more than something I like about myself, it is something of a
pillar of my identity. I am a person who cares and understands, I’m intuitive
and empathetic. It’s also something I look to still to give me a measure of
security in relationship, I may now expect you to like me for myself, or not
and that’s fine, but there is part of me that looks to the fact that I make you
feel good as source of security in our friendship. My tendency to get insecure when
I am a bit low and be afraid to spend time with people in case they get fed up with
me is evidence of that.
So, this is something that I look to for identity and
security and it has to go. But here as always it gets tricky. A behaviour you
developed as a survival strategy at 6 and have perfected throughout your entire
life, a behaviour that is utterly entangled with good and loving parts of you
that you have no wish to lose, a behaviour that was for many years the only
safe place you have known in relationships, how on earth do you even begin to
tackle that?
Well, of course, the beginning of the answer is that you don’t.
You can’t. But there is someone who can. An expert gardener who knows just
where to cut and how hard to pull to take up the sinful root but leave the
healthy, loving plant free to thrive. Which is a metaphorical way of saying the
first and last thing that needs to happen is prayer. My father has shown me I
have a problem, and my father wants me to bring it to him to fix.
And there is truth I can listen to, to help the process
along, there is the sword of the spirit, the gardener’s tool for cutting out
the sin. Firstly, I need to love people more, not less. Loving them means
making our relationship about them, not about me. Loving them is finding my safety
and security in the Lord and not in their needing me or making them feel good.
Loving them means being free to say hard things that they need to hear, means
being able to hear their pain and not be incapacitated by it and so unable to
help, means trusting them enough to be myself and letting them decide whether I
am a person they want to know or spend time with.
But where do I find the power to love like this? I can only
love like this when I am utterly safe relationally, so that although
relationship always gives people the power to hurt you, it cannot destroy you. What
we all need from relationship I think really boils down to this: knowing and being
known. This is where true security lies. This person knows me. They know the
good, the bad, the ugly and they still love me. They still want what is best for
me, they are still on my side, they still accept me. My best friend is the person
who knows me best and doesn’t turn away in disgust.
Jesus is the one who can
give us this. The only one. The verse that comes back again and again is “then
I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”. I am fully known by my God, and one
day I shall know him fully. Even more “we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is”, the more I see him as he is the more I shall be like him, and
one day I will see him fully and completely and that will make me love as fully
and completely as he loves. This is how to love: to become like Jesus. And how
to we become like him? We see him as he is.
We see him the man, the human and
all the details of his life and the way he interacted with people and the way
he loved people. We see him the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, the chosen one
who will rule as God’s king over God’s kingdom forever. We see him the suffering
servant, who humbled himself under the unjust judgement of sinful man, submitting
to death on a cross, enduring God’s curse and wrath so we can enjoy God’s
blessing. We see him the resurrection and the life, reigning in heaven,
interceding for his people, with them always by his spirit, gathering in his children
and preparing his bride for the wedding feast. We see him, the God who knows us
fully, living, serving, dying, rising, reigning for us, who hated, rejected, despised,
betrayed and abandoned him. This is intimacy. This is security. This is love.
