Author: Sandra

I wonder if sometimes we experience a painful event and we become very wounded by that specific event.  And I wonder if we have certain wounds that we use as a lens to evaluate every situation from that point forward.  Whenever something pokes that wound, we feel the pain all over again or we hear accusation as if it’s the first time.  We go for years and years or even decades of thinking that we are receiving the same message.  But what if we are really not?  What if our lens of pain is causing us to see things that are not there, or maybe to see things that were never even there in the first place?

I recently watched an episode of This Is Us where Kevin is in a therapy session and tells his family about the pain he felt as a child.  He felt like his brother was his mother’s favorite, and his sister was his father’s favorite.  And he had no one.  He felt like a fifth wheel.  He developed a voice in his head that repeated and said, “You are not enough”.  He tried to drown that voice out with things like football, acting, fame, and then when that didn’t work out, he tried to drown the pain in prescription drugs.

His mother admits that his brother was “easier” to love.  When we see Kevin’s childhood footage, we see that he did experience times that might feel like rejection.  But at the same time he was very loved. The truth was that he had thousands of experiences where his parents reached out to him in love.  But Kevin didn’t remember the love that he experienced, he only remembered the pain.  In the footage of his childhood we also saw how angry, jealous, mean and disrespectful Kevin behaved as a child and how difficult he made it for anyone to love him.  His rejection was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He believed everyone would reject him, so he was angry with them.  His anger came out in treating everyone poorly, and that made it harder for anyone to get close to him.  Also, he believed that he would see rejection, and so he noticed all of the things that could be construed as rejection.  And he failed to notice any of the ways that his family tried to love him.

I wonder if we do this too. One bad experience is used to color everything.  We let our feelings tell us what people must have done to us.  Everyone has their lens that they see things through to interpret events in our lives.  And everyone has feelings that are a result of that interpretation.  I wonder if we could be more open to checking to see if we are seeing things with clear vision.

I wonder if my parents were as neglectful as I experienced them to be.  I wonder if there were hundreds of happy and loving interactions that I just don’t have any memory of.

Early in our marriage John pointed out little mistakes of mine, like forgetting to turn the lights off or hanging the toilet paper the wrong way.  But he learned to have more grace and he stopped pointing out small things.  But those comments had already hurt me.  I felt like he expected perfection and that he was always judging me.

But now as I look back I remember hearing John’s angry voice ringing in my ears each time I made a little mistake, and I would feel more hurt, judged, and angry, even though he had never said one word about those issues for 15 years.  He wasn’t judging me, or saying anything, or even thinking anything.  I was taking something that happened 15 years prior and allowing it to control my thoughts and feelings in the present.  I don’t think he even judged me when he first brought up those things early in our marriage.  But it hurt, so I thought he “hurt” me, and it lodged itself deep.

Sometimes I share an opinion with John and I am not asking him to agree with me, or do anything, I’m just sharing what I think, and the way he reacts, makes me think he is feeling something that is a reaction to something much deeper than what I just shared.  Could he be believing that I am thinking things about him that I’m not even thinking? Could he be hearing accusations where there are none?

I wonder if we all imagine people saying things that they never said.

“I don’t care about you”

“You are stupid”

“You are not good at your job”

“You have to be perfect”

“I don’t love you”

“You are a burden”

“You are not worthwhile”

And we become hurt over and over even though no one is hurting us.  Maybe it’s our own voice yelling inside our head or some voice from the past but not this person.

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached.  People with amputated limbs will sometimes feel pain in the limb that does not even exist.  I think we carry phantom wounds deep inside.   We feel hurt and we believe that someone is hurting us, but if we look more closely, they aren’t.  The pain is real, but it is coming from a phantom wound.

Sometimes, the reason that it is hard to get along with others, is that we believe things should be done a certain way. We give almost moral weight to doing things the way that we think are the “right” or “wrong” way, when they are not “wrong” and “right” ways, but different ways.  Getting along with others requires a willingness to give up our personal preferences and desires.  There is nothing wrong with sharing a personal preference.  We can have opinions and even ask for what we want.  The problem is when we let our desires become demands.  If we are getting angry, then we know our desire has become a demand.  Also, when we want things our way too often, we become difficult to get along with.  We need to be able to hold our preferences with an open hand.  This requires the ability to accept and respect the way other people do things, even if they are not our way.

A perfectionist is someone who becomes obsessed with relatively trivial matters.  They declare these matters to be moral (right or wrong), when they are not.  They make trivial matters of utmost importance.  They allow these things to become more important than the relationship, and cause division between people.  They give criticism and withhold praise when things are not perfect.  They are willing to get angry and argue about small issues.

A perfectionist also holds themselves to an impossibly high moral standard, and judges themselves harshly for not achieving perfection.  They also sometimes see themselves as less flawed than they actually are, because it is too scary to admit to themselves that they are not perfect.  Perfectionism gives a false sense of value, and false sense of pride.

The root cause of perfectionism is a belief that your worth is determined by the opinion of others, and by what you accomplish, and fail to accomplish.  They believe that they gain or lose value based on their behavior.  A perfectionist has too low of an opinion of himself because he has normal human limitations and fails to be perfect.  But he is also prideful in his ability to maintain stricter criteria than other humans.

The cure for perfectionism is to accept yourself as a human being with human limits and human vulnerabilities to mistakes and criticisms.

The way you see yourself affects the way you treat others, because we evaluate others using the same criteria we use for ourselves.  Your value does not come from being perfect.  Remember that when you make a mistake, it does not need to threaten your value.  Learn to be comfortable with mistakes and imperfection.  Have compassion for yourself instead of getting angry with yourself.  This will lead to having more patience and compassion for others.

Strive to be perfectly human (dependent on God) instead of being perfect.  In other words, know your identity.

Most people look to their skills, accomplishments, status, and or appearance for their identity.  Identity is very tied to self-acceptance, self-worth, self-image, and self-esteem.  It is all “how I view myself”.  People use these things as a source of being “ok” with yourself, feeling like you are “enough”, feeling confident and secure, liking yourself.  When we get our identity from things about us, it leads to either pride or self-hatred/low self-esteem.  We need to discover our God given identity and gain our self-acceptance from the only true source of our worth.

Who are you? What is your Identity? You are God’s prized creation.  You possess dignity. You are worthy of respect.  You are worthy of high esteem. You are God’s chosen and adopted child.  You are a loved son or a loved daughter.  You are a citizen of heaven.  You are God’s heir.  You are worth dying for. You are worth saving.  You are worth loving every day of eternity.

3 Biblical Truths:

1.We are only valuable because of God’s love. We are not valuable because of looks, talents, or anything that we do.  God’s love is the only thing that makes us valuable.  This truth leads us to humility as we realize our need for dependence on God rather than ourselves.  We are incapable of earning our own value.

2.We are completely valuable because of God’s love. God’s love actually makes us worthy of respect and high esteem.  This truth leads us to a very positive self-image, but not in a prideful way, because it is based on what God has done not what we have done.  We receive our value as a gift, not something we can earn.  This gift is unconditional; it can’t be earned or lost by our behavior.  We can be confident and secure in our value as a person at all times because of God’s love.

3.We can never be more or less valuable than anyone else.  There is no room for comparison.  God decides who is valuable, not us, and not the world.  And God said everyone has value, so everyone does. God says that every single one of us is important, valuable and needed, and no one is any more or less valuable than anyone else. God gave us value and we should not let anyone take it away.  We need to decide to be secure in His love for us.  And we should never treat someone else like they are less valuable than us, because that would be like stealing away from them the value that God gave them.

Sometimes when people tell us that we have hurt them, we become angry and defensive.  We don’t want to take on more blame than we deserve.  We find a way to turn the blame back on them.  We blame them for hurting us.  But the truth is the pain that we feel comes from our own realization of being sinners, and not wanting to be a sinner because we must protect our view of ourselves.  We want to see ourselves in a good light.  Admitting being a sinner is admitting failure.  It is survival, we must protect our view of ourselves because if we are not good people even though we try to be, we are a failure at life.  We don’t want to admit that we have faults, because then we can’t evaluate ourselves as a good person. We need to see ourselves as a good person because self-worth is based on seeing yourself in a good light.  Self-esteem is liking yourself, and you can’t like yourself if you are not a good person.

But the truth is, we are not good. Our sin nature is not likable and we can’t get rid of it.  But our sin nature is not us.  Our true self is our spirit which is redeemed by God and it is only “good” because Christ has redeemed it, not because of our own success.  We ourselves could never be good.  But we can love our redeemed selves, not because of goodness but because of gratefulness to God with humility.  We can love our “self” that is clean and redeemed by God. But we still have to fully own (admit to) our sinfulness; it is a part of us.  The fact that we are still sinners does not have to threaten our love/acceptance of ourselves; we can love ourselves the exact way that God does.  He loves us even in our sin because we are worth it not because of righteous things we have done but because of his grace.  We can love ourselves in spite of our sinfulness because we have been redeemed.  This is a humble love for ourselves because we did not earn our lovableness, God provided our value by his choice to love us. When we try to love ourselves because we are so good it is based on a lie, a false evaluation of ourselves, because no one is good even on their best days.  Goodness is not achievable, so if goodness is the indicator of self-like, no one can every really like themselves legitimately because we are sinners and will continue to sin until death.  We need to have a healthy love and acceptance of ourselves based on what God has done, not what we have done.  And we need to fully accept that we are not only sinners, but we are responsible for each and every one of our sinful thoughts and actions, and we need to hold ourselves responsible for our sin rather than deny that it exists.

“A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored.”  “A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self.”  David Benner

When we recognize that we don’t need to be “good” to be a valuable person, we are free to accept ourselves, the good, bad, and the ugly.  We can acknowledge our shortcomings and not be so threatened.  We can listen to the feelings of others and actually care about how they feel and apologize when necessary, even when we ourselves are in pain.  When we know our true identity in Christ, we become secure.  We become strong enough to hear painful things about ourselves.  And we become strong enough to care about others in spite of the pain.