There is a saying that struck me when I first heard it, and I’ve never forgotten it. The WASP part of me shrinks from reducing a person to a body part, let alone the anal sphincter, but I am going to quote it anyway, because I don’t know how to change the wording without lessening its impact. It goes like this:
“If you meet an asshole once a month, you’ve met an asshole; if you meet an asshole every day, you are the asshole.”
You’re welcome. Something to chew on.
Now, as the quote indicates, it is a sign of emotional maturity to adjust to people’s perception of us. But it gets tricky. Putting too much stock in the opinion of any one person is a sign of emotional immaturity. Often, that person is our parent or our spouse. It could also be our boss, but it usually isn’t the postman.
And yet responding to what large swathes of people think about us is the opposite of emotional immaturity, it is emotional intelligence. It is no bad thing to take into consideration what the general populace thinks about how we show up in their world. So keep that ear to the ground, young Bernard. Or maybe people are screaming. They’re screaming harsh truths about us, at us, and we’re blocking them out.
Whether the feedback is subtle or blaring, might we not owe it to our beloved species to make the necessary calibrations so that we do not come across as total jerks? (Inner WASP so relieved that I chose a safer word.) After all, we are social beings. Nobody is an island. Therefore, it is our duty to learn how to harmonise with our society. I hope that hasn’t been too much of a logical leap.
And preferably we make our adjustments of our own doing, rather than having people bludgeon us with the truth of our asininity. As Janan Ganesh says, “There is a world of difference between knowing you are wrong and being told you are wrong.”
Adjusting ourselves to societal feedback is like dancing the flamenco. On one hand, to be among people is to receive feedback, and interpreting it is paramount. Sometimes we really are the a**hole. I think about this as a person, but also as a teacher. It’s amazing what people around you, especially students, are dying to tell you about yourself if you give them the right opportunity. Sometimes (though perhaps not every day) it’s good to follow Jesus’s example and ask the fearless question, “Who do people say that I am?” And then to take note and act accordingly.
It is equally important, however, not to freak out over the opinions and expectations of just one person, or even one group, and to remember that sometimes we meet people who don’t have our best interests in mind. Sometimes we meet a**holes. I think of the Rudyard Kipling line, “If all men count with you but none too much…”
Honing that dance is hard work, but it is important work. Getting it right could be the difference between being a so-and-so and meeting one.
Inevitably, whenever there is a conversation about therapy, somebody will proclaim that back in the day nobody knew what therapy was, and didn’t they get on just fine without it. Then, after pausing to bask in their fond nostalgia, they might add something like, my goodness, I bet everyone led happier lives without therapy, that in fact *in some cultures today* they still don’t have therapy, and aren’t they some of the happiest people out there and isn’t suicide pretty much nonexistent in Africa, et cetera.
You can tell from the way I’m setting this up that I take issue with this line of thinking. My reasons are numerous, but one of the primary ones is that therapy has improved my life. As the blind fellow Jesus healed in John 9 might have said, “I do not know who or what is sinful, one thing I do know, I was blind and now I see.” The advantage of therapy, provided you are lucky enough to find a good therapy program, is that it gives sight to your blindness. It brings resources for navigating this treacherous maze we call life, and at the end of the day resources are resources no matter their origin.
Notice I said, provided you find a good program. There is a growing number of people criticizing therapy today, and as far as I can tell they all get caught in the same trap: they assume all therapy is the same. But saying all therapy is bad is like saying all food is bad. Any humans dependent on nutrients for survival are going to need food. So also any humans whose lives got messed up–say, by school bullies or war or their parents’ abandonment or spiritual abuse or witnessing an armed bank robbery–need therapy if they wish to flourish. And how does the percentage of people who get messed up psychologically compare with the percentage of people who need nutrients? Hint, it’s the same number in both cases and it has 3 digits.
There are various ways to delineate approaches to therapy. One helpful way is to think of formal therapy versus informal therapy. In the past few years, I have been enrolled in a specific formal model of therapy known as Internal Family Systems (IFS). If you are at all into therapy, you have probably come across it because it’s trending, but if you haven’t, here is a quick summary. IFS envisions the human person as made up of many parts. As the title of Richard Schwartz’s book says, there are “No Bad Parts,” only good parts that are stuck and must be loved into change.
We get to know our myriad parts–whether firefighters, managers, protectors, or exiles–by communicating with them, and even thanking them for the role they have played. No matter how ‘off course’ the parts have been, so goes the theory, they don’t have bad intentions. If we shame our parts, they might go into exile, and we will have fallen that much further behind in the process of finding redemption for them. And let’s remember they can rear their heads again at any moment. Of course, we can always employ the services of a screaming exorcist, and he or she may even appear to be successful, but as often as not God will change our parts the same way God changes people: through love and patience, and free from violence and denunciation.
In my experience, it is a hopeful and redemptive approach to therapy. And it never promises a panacea, as is the criticism (sometimes valid) of so many other kinds of therapy. In fact, IFS is a direct rebuttal to the burgeoning number of quick fixes out there. It is premised on the assumption that communication with our parts will continue the rest of our lives. “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom” (Psalm 51:6). I don’t mean to proof-text, but I can’t help but think verses like this anticipate IFS. As it says in the Epistle to the Romans, “The good that I would, I do not,” and then later, “Present your members as slaves to righteousness.” Yet how can we present our members for righteousness if we are not acquainted with them?
The central idea is not to blame our bad parts but to listen to them, show compassion to them, and engage them so we can gain clarity about our condition. Schwartz identifies 8 C words to recenter us if we are caught in anxiety or shame or other dysfunctional states of mind. My graphic below shows each C-word on points of a star. When we are stuck in the shadowlands (the words in red), the C-words help us find the path back to our true self or, as we might say in the Christian faith, to our identity in Christ.
Like any healthy therapy, IFS does not purport to be the only show in town. But does it nonetheless make life more doable? You already know my answer is yes. That does not mean there are no other paths to self-knowledge and healing, perhaps even some paths that are less formal and thus more playful. Long ago when people still read books, we got self-knowledge and inner healing through literature. Now, for better or for worse, many learning institutes have replaced literature modules with psychology modules. In some sense, formal therapy (psychology) has superseded informal therapy (literature). There are many things to lament about our decreased literary appreciation and the insights into human nature that came with it, but that is no reason to reject models like IFS.
I offer one final way to distinguish among different types of therapy: narcissistic versus interpersonal. The public perception around therapy tends to change from one generation to the next. As Trevor Noah says, “Longer ago, you would have avoided telling a potential dating partner that you’re in therapy, but now it could very well be a selling point.” I am optimistic that at least some of the people in our generation go to therapy with the aim of becoming mature, productive members of society. Therapy, if it is to be effective, requires something from us. It is hard work. Therapy naysayers are correct that navel-gazing for its own sake gets us nowhere. But it is also true that exploring our past story in the right way really can help us find healing and flourishing in the present.
To sum up, we have all been broken and wounded. God can use any instrument to heal us, but the path to healing will never happen in a vacuum. In its most general definition of the word, therapy is nothing more or less than our path to redemption and healing. The human experience is not for wusses. Our path may be winding and may even include some shock therapy. But whatever the path, we ought not to shun God’s instrument of healing.
Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Ephesians 6:13, somehow at once slightly twee and profound (welcome to The Message), puts it well:“Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet.”
