Get Her Words Out

Amber Alert

We had a paper due in Pastoral Care class this week on family systems and what role we play in our family’s system.

I was pretty much stumped until I found this description:

“Adjuster” - “Lost Child”

This child escapes by attempting to be invisible. They daydream, fantasize, read a lot of books or watch a lot of TV. They deal with reality by withdrawing from it. They deny that they have any feelings and “don’t bother getting upset.”

These children grow up to be adults who find themselves unable to feel and suffer very low self-esteem. They are terrified of intimacy and often have relationship phobia. They are very withdrawn and shy and become socially isolated because that is the only way they know to be safe from being hurt. A lot of actors and writers are ‘lost children’ who have found a way to express emotions while hiding behind their characters. (1)

Except for the becoming an actor part (and there are people who would say becoming a preacher is the same thing) it’s like they’ve been following me around taking notes. 

This is another case where it’s comforting to find out that I am not nearly as unique as I have always imagined myself to be.

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(1)  Burney, Robert, The Basic Roles in Dysfunctional Families (Posted here April 8, 2000)

Way Down Deep . . .

I am under doctor’s order to be more shallow.

I don’t imagine that there are too many people whose therapist tells them that they have to learn to be more superficial.  Actually the words she used were “more surface-y.”

She thinks that the reason I have such a hard time doing small talk and keeping up with conversations is that I spend too much time reflecting on what I am going to say and that I think too deeply about what I should say.  She says that I need to be more playful, more surface-y and less concerned with rules.

How do you learn to be shallow?  It seems obvious that doing long reflective posts on your blog about the rules of superficiality is not the way to go.

I’m really all about rules; at least for myself.  I know that other people can play around with rules and get away with it, but I have never felt that I could.  It’s why I don’t speed on highways, not because I have any real objection to speeding, but because I know that I will get caught when I break the rules.

I want there to be rules for conversation, then I could just compare what was just said to a list of rules and come up with a reply.  I’m a math geek, and what I want is a “conversation function,” a kind of black box where I can enter what the other person in the conversation has said and the box will apply a set of rules and give me the proper response.

In the real world, because there are no predetermined rules, I feel like every conversation is a problem that I have to solve from scratch and that takes time and energy.  Casual conversation is hard work.

All of this is also why I struggle with flirtation (see “Games People Play,” below).  I want there to be rules and guidelines for all interactions.  I don’t trust myself when there are no rules because, just like I know that I will get caught speeding, I know that I will say or do something offensive or hurtful if I just go with the flow.

I guess, though, if I am ever going to be able to really connect with other people, I need to make a serious effort to be less serious.

2 for 1 special

I learned something about myself this week.  Or at least I figured out how to express something that I may have known all along.

When it comes to writing the things that are important to me that I take particularly seriously, I can’t write just one thing.

I noticed that this week when I was working on a prayer for healing for Monday’s chapel service (look on the sidebar in “other writings” for the finished product).  It turned out that I couldn’t write that without writing “Games People Play,” the post that precedes this one.

They don’t have anything to do with each other, but I think when I open my self up to the kind of creative thought that it took to write the prayer I also have to open myself up to the kind of personal reflection that lead to the blog post.  The doors are connected somehow, and I think many times in the past I have tried to fight the connection and I have just gotten completely blocked.  The more I fight writing the second thing the more the thoughts and ideas of it intrude into the first.

Another recent example is from the end off our fall semester.  I had to write a research paper on Jeremiah for my Exilic Prophets course.  It turned out that in order to do that, I also had to write a long personal letter explaining myself to the young woman who I now know to call my “limerent object.”  Again, they didn’t have anything to do with each other, but they both had to come out, or neither one would.  But that paper turned out to be one of the best I have written here, and I would bet my allowing myself to express the other thoughts at the same time had a lot to do with it.

I’ve been noticing that most of my sermons end up being at least partially about how I wrote them, and I wonder if that isn’t another aspect of this phenomenon.  When I open myself up to the work of writing the sermon I also open myself up to reflecting on the process.

I wonder what it will mean to my writing as I start to look for this process to occur.

Games People Play

I was reminded tonight of something that happened more than a year ago, and which showed me exactly just how clueless I am when it comes to those flirtatious little games that people play.

In this case it was a normal dinner in the cafeteria, and across the table from me were two juniors, both in their mid twenties.  She got up to get something and while she was gone he took a bowl or something off her tray and hid it.   When she came back they played a little keep away game with it and apparently had a great time doing it.

I sat across from them watching all this, completely baffled about why he would want to that and why she wasn’t pissed at him.  I knew that if I tried to do anything like that I would come off as a big jerk, and I really didn’t understand why he didn’t.  (It seems to have worked for them though, since they are now a couple and to all outward evidences happy together.)

There is a very cynical part of me that thinks that it has something to do with the fact that they are both beautiful.  It seems like it’s a lot easier to get away with things like that if you're beautiful than it is if you look like me.

My therapist has explained it to me that it was a good thing because of the attention that he was giving her, and that I need to learn how to be more light-hearted and carefree, then I would be able to do things like that.

The problem for me starts with the way that I was picked on as a child.  And before you say anything, yes I know that everyone was picked on as a child, that doesn't make it any easier for me.  In my youth it went from taunting and name calling to sneaking up behind me and yelling in my ear and pointing and laughing when I reacted to it.

Unfortunately, the people who would do things like that learned fairly quickly that they could get a rise out of me, which they thought was great and which encouraged them to do even more.  And the advice I got from adults was “you just shouldn’t let things like that bother you, if you don’t let them bother you, they will just stop.”

The thing was, I couldn’t keep myself from being bothered and not only did I internalize the things that the bullies were taunting me with, I internalized the idea that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t make myself ignore them.

What I learned was to be very quiet, to try my best to be invisible, and to never show emotion, because that just gives them an opening to attack through.

When I see the kind of dinner table behavior that I started with, I can’t see it through the lens of “isn’t that fun and playful,” I see it through a lens of “that’s just like something the bullies would have done to me so they could make fun of me for getting mad.”  And to see that kind of behavior rewarded says to me that the bullies were right, and that their behavior was the way people should behave.

It hurts me to think that if I want to find a companion, I have to learn to behave that way.

Butterflies and Wind

It was very windy here this evening, but it was so nice otherwise that I went out to sit on the bench outside my quad anyway.

While I was sitting there I watched a butterfly going about its short butterfly life, doing butterfly things and being tossed about by the wind.

As I was sitting there watching, it occurred to me that butterflies’ lives are so short that for this one its entire knowledge of the world will involve wind.  As far as it knows, it has always been windy and it always will be.  It could just as easily have come out of its cocoon on a day with no wind, and its image of the world would have been completely different.  It never would have known what wind was, just as today it had no opportunity to know calm.

In the sweep of history our lives are really not all that much less ephemeral than the lives of butterflies.  I know that butterflies and humans are different in that we have the ability to look back at history and see how some things change.

Still I wonder, what are the forces that toss us around and that seem to us as permanent and universal as the wind seemed to that butterfly?  And like the butterfly emerging on the calm day, what are the things that are missing from our lives that we cannot even imagine?