What is your biggest problem?

I asked my community the question “What is your biggest problem?” and here are some of the answers I received: the State of the Union, the media, joblessness, brain cancer, a spouse’s cheating ways, a child’s substance use disorder, a bankruptcy, infertility and a toxic work environment. My favorite response was this one: selfishness on my part.

Problems do come in all shapes and sizes, and as my grandmother used to say, “Honey, it takes two to tango.” Meaning, of course, that a problem usually can be divided up among all parties even if the split is a little uneven.

Let me ask this again: WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST PROBLEM?

I have a friend who once was married to a really bad man; it was very difficult but she eventually was able to get out of the abusive situation and move away to protect herself. I am absolutely convinced that she saved her life and possibly the life of her child by doing the very hard and brave things she did to end this marriage.

Today, she’s turned around and married another man and HE’S turned out to be the slapping around kind too. Before you are tempted to think “What’s HER problem?”, consider this:

How many times has the doctor suggested you change a particular habit to improve your health (lose weight, stop drinking to give your fatty liver a break, stop eating gluten, stop having unprotected sex with strangers, reduce your carbohydrate intake to get your blood sugar under control, etc.) and you just cannot stop gaining weight, drinking, eating gluten, having sex with strangers, or eating carbs in excess? I thought so. #metoo

I have a theory. In my friend’s case, throughout the long road to divorce and safety, the most obvious problem was that her husband could NOT stop rearranging her face. His issue was a doozy and was super obvious once she stopped trying to hide it with spackled-on makeup and long sleeves. In fact, her entire team kept telling her, “Your husband has a problem.” Which is factually true. I said it myself. But what I did not intend for her to hear was, “Your husband has a problem and your problems will all go away if you leave him.”

What she needed to know, as we all do, is that after she got herself and child to safety, her NEXT biggest problem that would need exploration and intention was to figure out her own vulnerabilities and compulsivities. (More on this later.) I understand that sometimes abusers are extremely clever and really smart people never see it coming until they get smacked in the face - and even then, it is confusing to figure out what is going on. AND. All of us have vulnerabilities that assault our good sense and leave us with patterns of repetitive, habitual, unconscious ways of thinking, feeling and doing that are stumbling blocks for living a healthy and reasonably happy life. This is a problem that she needed to address. She did not. The pattern has returned. She thinks she has lousy luck with men. I think it is far more complicated than a run of bad luck.

To be continued…

Why does this keep happening to me?

Ever asked yourself that question? I have. Years ago our family was in a car accident as we returned from a Thanksgiving holiday weekend in D.C. It was a rainy Sunday morning, the roads were slick, and we were almost home. Pete later reported that as he drove down interstate 95 that morning he thought about how much he loved our minivan, which he had found used for an excellent price. I was breathing a sigh of relief. We had managed to drive down 95 in pouring rain without too much traffic or witnessing a horrible accident.

Two miles from home a young man delivering pizza lost control of his car while fiddling with his radio and slid into us head on. We were almost stopped when he hit us as Pete saw him fishtailing along Forest Hill Avenue. It totaled our car; I sustained a concussion and later developed cataracts from the impact of the airbag. Otherwise, it was just super scary. Friends came and loaded up our travel gear, we went home and dealt with the aftermath.

The other driver’s car had made impact on the back side panel of his sliding vehicle. He then careened off the road on the other side and disappeared down a small embankment. Our car was smoking and we didn’t know why so we were scrambling to get out, afraid it was going to catch on fire. (We later learned that airbags smoke after they deploy.) After the drama of those early moments, it occurred to our daughter to wonder about the other guy.

As she began asking about his well-being, here he comes wobbling up the little hill. Obviously shaken, my daughter asks, “Are you OK?”

He replied, “Man, why does this stuff keeping happening to me? Last week I had an accident and the week before that I got a ticket. I don’t understand why I have such bad luck.” If you know my daughter you realize that this was a strategic error on his part. She explained to him in no uncertain terms that the only common denominator in all those events was him. And perhaps he should take some time to consider his choices and his driving capability. This guy, like the rest of us, was NOT making the connection between his actions and his outcomes.

For the next few days, I am going to talk about why this is such a dangerous and common error on the part of humanity, and each of us individually. It is having a huge impact on our spiritual lives. Our spiritual lives have a tremendous impact on how we see, interact with, and affect the world. This is a big deal. The reason that we sometimes feel like a particular kind of bad experience is picking on us may be, in part, because we are managing our life in such a way as to make that pattern of behavior and consequences not only likely, but inevitable. I can say this to you because it is also true for me, so I am here with my heart in my hands as I say this: there is just stuff about each of us that we are not getting, and it is impacting us and others in a negative way. I’m sorry but it is true. Want to change? I know you do! But there is a powerful internal resistance to making the necessary changes that we need to talk about.

To be continued…

Scapegoating and Forgiveness: Part III

We're carrying on a conversation from the past few days, feel free to get caught up before reading this one.

Empathy for offenders (when and where it's possible) begins with seeing ourselves as we truly are: people who are just as capable of creating offense as receiving it. Unfortunately, this is not something that can be taught and learned, it can only be discovered. Sadly, we tend to discover this truth only when we find ourselves on the outside of a group, banished, with no false group identity to protect us from seeing ourselves as we really are (this is, again, Girard's thought).

When we recognize the truth about ourselves, then we recognize that there is no great divide between ourselves and other people who cause harm (even, perhaps, our offenders). Now, again, I'm not suggesting there is no moral distinction between a victim of rape and a rapist but, I am suggesting that, over the course of a lifetime, all of us cause harm and are capable of much more. If we discover this about ourselves, then we don't see ourselves as people above wrongdoing.

The goal in viewing ourselves as wrongdoers is not to shame ourselves for being wrongdoers but to simply see ourselves accurately and to discover exactly how much grace and love we receive from God (and, hopefully, community). We do not need to see ourselves only as wrongdoers but as people who miss the mark, people who struggle to live out our certain way of seeing. This is what allows us to empathize with others. We recognize our struggle, and that means we can recognize that others struggle as well. Most people do not get up in the morning with the intention of ruining people's lives. There are, of course, exceptions, but most people cause harm because they are struggling. This means they are not so different from ourselves.

Side note: Of course we’re not going to empathize with every offender and we do not need to empathize with every offender. However, it never hurts to learn to view ourselves accurately and to find a more nuanced perspective on the world in the process. In this case, we discover that we are not only victims of our offenders. Our identity can be much larger, if we can see ourselves accurately. Learning to see that offenders have an identity beyond their offenses is a tangential benefit.

Scapegoating and Forgiveness: Part II

Scapegoating is s a way of placing all of the blame for a given set of circumstances on one person (or relatively few people) even though blame is always, always, always more complicated than that. The act of banishing gives the remainder of the group a false sense of security because we believe, for a time, the source of our conflict has been discovered and resolved. But it does not stay resolved, because we did not locate the true source of conflict.

According to Girard's theory of Mimetic Desire, the true source of conflict is ourselves. In other words, each person is capable of violence, harm, or wrongdoing. Each person on this planet is capable of destroying lives. Not everyone does, but we certainly have the capacity to. Recognizing this truth about ourselves removes the Scapegoat Mechanism as a possibility. Why? Because we recognize that we can’t blame one person for a problem that exists within each member of the entire group. When we recognize the truth about ourselves we find empathy for the scapegoat, knowing that scapegoating is just one more false strategy we pursue in life.

Now, this is not a way of saying that every victim and every offender are moral equivalents. That is most certainly not the case. It is more about how we see ourselves and how we posture ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. If we see ourselves as entirely innocent, as entirely pure, as only a victim of circumstances, then we will struggle with rage, we will struggle with resentment, we will lack empathy, we will be rigid, we will be isolated, and likely more.

If we see ourselves for who we are, there is the possibility that our hearts will crack open, even if it's ever so slightly, and we will discover a state of acceptance. We will find that, while life is not fair, the world is not out to get us. There is a big difference between those two things.

More on these last two paragraphs tomorrow.

Scapegoating and Forgiveness

Rene Girard developed a very popular theory for societal behavior, generally referred to as Mimetic Theory. It goes like this. People learn through imitation. We learn to imitate behaviors (obvious), but we also learn to imitate desire. I learn to want what you want. Think about keeping up with the Jones’: My neighbor wants a Porsche, all of a sudden I want a Porsche. That is mimetic desire- it is wanting what other people want- not just doing what other people do. Because we all learn to desire what everyone else wants, humans are inevitably in competition with one another. This causes conflict and chaos. The only way we’ve found to deal with the conflict and chaos is to find someone to blame and to remove this person from the society (or group). This is called the Scapegoat Mechanism.

So, in an addicted family system, it’s easy to blame the substance use disordered person for all of the family’s problems and to banish this person from the family. On a societal level, it’s easy to blame immigrants for economic problems if we aren’t doing well financially, and banish them from the country.

You get the idea. It's a way of thinking about complex problems as if they were simple so that we don't need to find a complex solution. Simple solutions are always preferable. The problem is, they are only solutions if they actually solve the problem they are meant to solve.

When it comes to forgiveness and resentment, we may look for simple solutions when complex solutions are the only ones that will address the heart of the matter.

More on this tomorrow.