therapy

Forgiving Your Parents Though You Have Considered All the Facts

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

There is a podcast episode with Alain de Botton called Be as Weird As You Are. Not surprisingly, a great deal of it is about what it says on the tin: being as weird as you are.

For me, though, his discussion on forgiving your parents is the most memorable. Here is a sampling of it.

I know we’re supposed to forgive, and yet I think a lot of us know behaviour in a parent that’s just endemically s**tty. I think it’s too Hollywood to go, I love you anyway.

No, it was awful, and there’s no excuse.

And then there’s the question of, what do we do with that? It requires a dose of salutary pessimism, of going, they were my parent. I carry it as a wound forever that that parent who should have been there for me, did not act as they should. I can’t reinvent my notion of children and parents. I can’t pretend that something was that wasn’t, or wasn’t that was. I’ve got to stay loyal to my feeling that something went really badly wrong here.

There is a way to say I refuse to keep looking at that. I’ve seen it, I’ve wept, I’ve done the work, now on to something else, because life is short. There are other people who do not have this issue, I let it go. There is a certain dignity in saying, ‘There is something awful here.’ I just park it, I just move away.

I don’t forgive it. 

I understand it, I’m not naive about it, but I’m going elsewhere, thank you very much. To protect myself. Everybody reaches that stage in adulthood, where you think about the other person, okay you had the power, you had the ability to change, to not pass it on. Huge compassion for what you went through, but did you really need to do that thing, and then did you really need to, over many years, not say sorry, not properly acknowledge it, not properly go into it? Was that, is that, forgivable?

I find de Botton’s words thought-provoking, but I’m not sure what to make of them. On one hand, I agree with his main insight: don’t sugarcoat your parents’ bad behaviour. If parents dote on your siblings but ignore you, for instance–it’s okay to call that out. It’s okay to say they are not acting in a loving way, full stop. Without trying to cover for them. Perhaps your parents have consistently mocked, belittled, or guilt-tripped you. Perhaps even now, well into adulthood, the few interactions they have with you continue in that vein, without any discernible effort to connect with you.

If so, de Botton is right: it’s okay to call a spade a spade. They’re being unloving. They’re not being good parents. In fact, they’re not being parents at all, they’re being childish. You’ve been abandoned. Your parent hasn’t enjoyed you for who you are. You’ve been deprived of something every child should have, a loving parent.

It is brutal to experience a sense of abandonment, a sense of being disowned. For Esther and me, our absence of loving parents was exacerbated a few years ago when we left our traditional Anabaptist community. Although sincere and earnest, the ‘plain people’ can sometimes display cultish behaviours, especially toward those who leave. Scholars might say there is something of a persecuted-persecutor complex on display here. Yesterday’s persecuted become today’s persecutor. All four of our parents are still alive, but there is currently something of a living death in some aspects of our relationship between each other. Maybe we haven’t done our part in connecting with them, although it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying.

De Botton would say, get on with life. They’re a lost cause. But I don’t think that’s quite the whole story. For one thing, a commitment to the Christian faith requires forgiveness. I don’t think de Botton has that commitment, so that colours his perspective. Although some days it’s a bit shaky, I have that commitment. That throws a real wrench in the gears, if I’m honest. A spanner in the works. I pray every day, in the Our Father, for God to forgive our sins as we forgive others. Unless I forgive others, says Jesus, God cannot forgive me. It’s not that God won’t forgive me if I don’t forgive others, it’s that God can’t forgive me. Forgive, it says in the Gospels, not seven times but seventy times seven.

Yet forgiveness is tricky business. Forgiveness is a capacious word. It has many aspects. It’s not rolling over and playing nice. It’s not minimizing the awful things people are capable of. Otherwise, we take away character development. We remove the hero’s journey from the human story. We let people off the hook. We become relativistic and cynical about human nature, about human potential.

Ah, yes, our parents treat us badly, but you should have seen the way their parents treated them.

It could have been far worse. Some people have had it far worse!

At least they stayed together all these years.

Such sugarcoating is well-intentioned. We want to go easy on our parents. My theory is that, subconsciously, we hope our kids will also excuse our mistakes, of which there no doubt are an abundance. With what measure you mete, it shall be measured unto you.

There is some wisdom in that. The failures of our parents are indeed multi-generational. They commit them because their parents committed them. Their parents were also cruel to them; and cruel in the same specific ways. Furthermore, why should we think we are immune to inheriting those same dysfunctions? If these traits are multigenerational, it is right and good to show a bit of humility in preparation for when our kids develop their own ability to judge us.

Which brings us to a paradox.

This is the first part of the paradox. When our parents are unloving, we must be clear in calling them out. We have to. If we call unloving behaviour loving, we risk turning real, Christian love into a sick parody of what it actually is. The love of Christ is, and always will be: sacrificial, impartial, unconditional, tender, seeking connection, vulnerable, emphasizing relationship over manmade rules.

De Botton is right, it’s important to say it when our parents don’t show love toward us. Whether they have deliberately resisted God’s invitation to love, or whether they genuinely have never seen a pathway to love, one painful truth remains: they have not wrapped us, their children, up in their arms and loved us without reservation. And that is an unspeakable sadness.

But there is a second part of the paradox. We, who now are parents ourselves, are caught up in the same web as they are, as well as their parents and grandparents before them. The same destructive tendencies that plagued our parents will also plague us, are already plaguing us. So to return to de Botton’s word, we need compassion. Amid our stark and honest evaluation, we also need compassion. But it cannot be a cheap compassion. True forgiveness is never flippant. We forgive, not as we ignore the facts, but after we have considered the facts, all the facts.

If we cannot name intergenerational sin, we will never break free of its spell. If we cannot show compassion toward our ancestors, we will never have the clarity and sanity to make improvements in our own parenting.

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* The title for this post is drawn from the recently-deceased poet Wendell Berry’s poem, Manifesto–The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. His original line is, ‘Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.’

Can Humans Flourish Without Therapy?

Gideon Yutzy2 Comments

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.”

The Wisdom of Self-Care

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Every month or two a group of us meet for a conversation club. When the group is in sync an hour seems to go by in seconds, and the event becomes a high point of my earthly existence. People from a variety of backgrounds have attended and we try to choose a topic of general interest. In our most recent meeting we discussed self-care.

Before extolling the benefits of self-care, we listed ways we have seen it abused. Arpad, a Hindu from Kashmir, mentioned people applying skin products in the name of self-care only to find that in the long term these products cause damage to their skin.

Next a Baháʼí named Kent, from Michigan but living in Waterford, pointed out another dangerous parody of self-care: the trend for college students to protest views in any way different from theirs. Students will even call these different views “toxic” and ask that the staff or classmates who hold them be removed from campus so that nobody feels “threatened” or “harmed.” It seems clear that the interaction patterns on social media fuel this overreaction. Our consensus was that too much fragility kills public discourse and could obviously not be true self-care.

Self-care, we agreed, must make us more resilient in the long term. I brought up the neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda who has studied epigenetics–traits you inherit because of your parents’ environment and behaviour. In studying the children of Holocaust survivors, Yehuda found that some were disempowered through their knowledge of their parents’ trauma, but others became more resilient. The latter is obviously preferable. The best self-care results in more resources, not fewer.

Nobody in our group had experienced trauma at the level of Holocaust survivors, yet all of us have either gone for therapy or know someone who has. The question is, does therapy actually make us more resilient? A recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Plenty of People Could Quit Therapy Right Now” concludes that therapy has become a luxury for privileged Westerners. Someone in our group wondered if there are no better ways to spend 100 dollars than on hour-long navel-gazing sessions, especially when we have neighbours who don’t have enough money for food and shelter.

Yet the comment from Shika, another (barefoot) Hindu in the group, was also true: we cannot heal others until we find healing. Hurt people hurt people, goes the old adage. We will fail to bring true and lasting help to others if we ourselves carry open wounds. How can we show forgiveness and compassion to others if we cannot extend it to ourselves? In airline safety parlance, passengers should fasten their own oxygen masks before assisting others.

An itinerant German who had joined us for the day observed that Jesus said to love our neighbour as ourselves, and it follows that we cannot love others if we don’t know how to love ourselves. St. Paul seems to consider some measure of self-care inevitable: “No one ever yet hated their own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.”

“Acquire inner peace,” said the Russian mystic, ” and thousands around you will find their salvation.” How best to find that inner peace can be discussed at length, but what is not up for debate is the necessity of doing so. As Christians we sing about being poured out like wine/upon the altar of God, but how can we be poured out if we are never filled? We heard from different members about how they recharge their batteries, everything from crafting, jogging, and watching Netflix by the fireside to–among the more devout–leading youth camps, 5-minute meditations, and daily prayer.

Additionally, several people testified to the usefulness of therapy (despite the negative assessment of it a few minutes earlier). A Catholic named Dela said that in her home country of Cameroon a kind of therapy happens naturally because neighbours have an open, honest way of communicating. Keeping your front door closed during the day, a practice we take for granted, would raise suspicion in Cameroon. In contrast, we in the West often put on our best face when we have problems, and we tiptoe around others when we sense problems in their lives. Dela reckons this way of relating is one reason we need therapy in the first place. Still she does not dismiss therapy. After all this is our sociological ferment, and therapy just might offer a solution to the mess we got ourselves into.

Mentally, I also noted the importance of not romanticising the past. History is replete with people who were psychologically unstable in ways that their embodied community, however much of a boon it was, could not support them.

Triggers, trauma, toxic people–all buzzwords in today’s context, but are they helpful? Do we need to dwell on our problems or can we just “get over it, snowflakes,” as one preacher once admonished his congregation. Well-intentioned advice perhaps, but it is no secret that unaddressed pain can only come back to bite us, rearing its head among the third and fourth generations. The father will eat sour grapes and their children’s teeth will be set on edge, quoth Jeremiah of Anathoth.

In the end, I boil the conversation around self-care down to one word: wisdom. My hunch is that to be human is to experience trauma. However, that trauma exists on a continuum from extreme to mild, and this calls for discernment to know which situations require deep healing work and which ones do not. Therapy is hardly warranted, for instance, when a colleague did not greet me warmly enough when I arrived at work, or when someone else’s post gets more likes than mine. But what if someone was neglected or harmed by their parents and now begins to act out the same relational patterns with their children?

Turning self-care into a god is narcissistic and cripples us into a life of tragic inaction but we do ourselves an equally great disservice when we ignore our past wounds, or worse still inflict them on the people closest to us.

The Book of Proverbs makes strong claims about the role of wisdom: God “has founded the earth by wisdom” (3:19), and “getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do” (4:7, NLT). As another passage in the wisdom literature puts it, “There is a time for everything” (Ecclesiastes 3:3). Wise people know there is a time to care for others and a time to care for ourselves, realising also that somehow, mysteriously, the two are inseparable. Likewise, there is a time to do the deep work of introspection and personal healing–even when it includes the brutal act of naming ways people have wronged us–but there is also a time to let it go and move on.

Wisdom, according to Proverbs, “crieth aloud and uttereth her voice in the street.” In an increasingly complex world, embracing that wisdom is the ultimate act of self-care.

Emotional Healing

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

One of my all-time favourite quotes comes from the Orthodox mystic St Seraphim of Sarov. It is usually translated something like this: “Acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find their salvation.”

Although St. Seraphim’s quote resonated with me immediately, it has also raised an obvious question, namely how do I acquire that inner peace?

The answer probably has more to do with decades of reflective living than blog posts, but nonetheless I’ve been mulling over a possible piece of wisdom: what if we approached inner, emotional healing similarly to how we approach physical healing? The insight is still inchoate, but here are three ways we might do that.

First, what if emotional healing, like physical healing, begins with identifying where the pain comes from? It won’t do any good to salve the chest if we have a toothache. Likewise with emotional pain, it is worth identifying the source of our pain before we try to deal with it.

This is easier said than done because sometimes we cannot identify the source of our emotional pain. What are we to do?

I have just drawn a distinction between the physical and emotional, but sometimes they’re inextricably linked. Sometimes paying attention to the physical makes emotional healing possible. In what situations does my breathing go off kilter? When does my stomach feel tight?

Sometimes, also, it helps to write down what we think the cause of our emotional suffering might be: I feel abandoned by my parents. I had thought I’d stay friends with Maynard (or Velma, or my former Sunday school teacher or my wife’s second cousin) but now we’ve lost touch. I had thought I was going to be a star lecturer at a university. I had thought…

Speaking of star lecturers, I remember something from Dr. Maeve O’Grady in the last class she taught at Waterford Institute of Technology, in which I was a student. “If you can’t name it,” she said, ” you can’t change it.” She was speaking of naming dysfunction in the educational system, but it also applies to emotional healing; unless we name the source of our pain, we will hardly experience healing.

Second, healing requires time. As with physical pain, we have to come to terms with emotional damage and proceed accordingly. After my brother passed away this past summer, I understood the phrase, “the hard work of grief,” in a new way. Humans are inherently limited. The journey to process emotional trauma is arduous and long.

Just as no one enters a pie-eating contest after a long bout of stomach bug, so also nobody sets up shop to give grief counseling right after losing a spouse. And just as someone with acute thrombosis cannot manage a Fortune 500 company, so also victims of spiritual abuse hardly ought to dive in straightaway and pastor a church.

Although we may be tempted to hurry past emotional damage and “just get over it,” we can’t expedite our emotional healing anymore than we can physical healing.

Finally, pain is never in vain if we use it. To return to my above example, it would be a travesty if spiritual abuse survivors never served in a church in any capacity. They have enormous potential to help others spiritually, perhaps more than people who never held toxic views of God.

Both physically and emotionally, redemptive healing culminates in survivors helping those who are still victims. Contributing to someone else’s healing is better than licking our own wounds. As the Malaysian proverb goes, “If you were abandoned by your parents, beware lest you get caught in self-pity and abandon your own child.” (Actually, it’s not a Malaysian proverb at all, I made it up. But I still believe it.)

I will have to refine my insight. It’s still a little raw–matters related to pain often are–but here is the summary: emotional healing, like physical healing, means identifying the source of our pain, allowing time to heal our wounds and using our pain to help others.

Or, to put it another way, acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find their salvation.