Pain

[See a companion post from my friend on this same topic here.]

Last week I was in what you might call "serious emotional distress."

And I was watching a cheesy sci-fi drama called Believe (my apologies if you love this show). The Asian female character had been shot to raise the emotional stakes of the show while not actually harming any primary players, and was running a dangerous fever (they performed emergency kitchen-table surgery on her, but she couldn't go to the hospital because she was a fugitive-on-the-run and would go to prison for life, etc.).

So the leader of the supernatural gang kidnaps a doctor and brings him to her bedside. 

"She's not getting better because the wound is infected," says the kidnapped doctor. 

And at that moment, a lightbulb went off for me. 

Because I was in pain. And the pain wasn't getting any better. 

I was wounded. And the wound refused to heal. 

It refused to heal because it was infected. 

And furthermore, this was the wound. Suffering or hurting alone, in isolation, was the wound. I was in it. I am in it. This particular wound is multi-layered and deep, cutting all the way down to the bone. 

I'm no expert on medicine, emotional pain, or cheesy sci-fi dramas, but in my experience, emotional pain, while intense at first, usually gets better over time. It just doesn't hurt as much as it did when it happened. I cry. I feel better. I talk to a friend. More crying. Maybe some blogging thrown in for good measure. And the pain fades. 

This isn't about that kind of pain. This is about the kind of pain that just doesn't seem to get better. A foreign object enters the wound and the wound gets infected. 

Half the time I feel this force, this pain, stuck in my throat, choking me so that it's hard to breathe. 

How does an emotional wound become infected? 

Shame

Roughly 10 years ago I had an experience that left me hurting for what seemed like forever. I was "betrayed" by someone I trusted and the experience left me struggling to heal from wounds that went deeper in my history than I cared to remember or re-live. 

Even now it's difficult for me to articulate what happened, because on the surface it seems like no big deal. But it left me reeling emotionally, and at the time I didn't have the internal or external resources to deal with it. 

So I didn't. Deal with it. Time went on (as it does), and gradually I felt better, okay. Except I wasn't really okay. Somewhere along the way I decided that the way I felt was my fault and that I had used this pain to hurt other people (by not forgiving them, continuing to be hurt and angry, etc.).

I was wrong and I decided that I would never allow this to happen again. I would never again be so hurt that I hurt other people. 

Of course this meant shutting down vulnerability and keeping other people at a safe distance. 

It wasn't until recently when one of my facebook friends posted a quote by Brené Brown that I realized the connection in my mind between vulnerability and being terribly, gut-wrenchingly wounded. The greater the vulnerability, the greater the wound. The more intimate the relationship, the harder it is to recover.

It was a quote about the benefits of being vulnerable, and my mind went, "But what's missing is that the minute you open yourself up in vulnerability, you also open yourself up to be deeply hurt." 

Shame says, "Something is wrong with me. I hurt other people. I must stop myself from hurting other people." (See also, Frozen)

And so the wound doesn't really heal so much as get covered up with protective scar tissue. And getting wounded in the same place hurts like a $##@$%$%.

Isolation

Shame and isolation are closely connected. I felt shame over feeling shame (fun!). I couldn't kick the shame, the anger, or the hurt no matter how much I prayed, cried, journaled or tried to truly forgive.

The moment some of this shame started to lift I was actually crying to my dad about what had happened. And he said, "You can't make someone feel bad for feeling bad! You can't shame someone for feeling shame!"

And I was less alone. 

Shame says, "Don't let your pain and your grief touch other people. Protect them. Suffer alone."

Forgiveness

What was so frustrating about this entire ordeal was how much I tried--really tried--to do the right thing, namely forgive and move on. 

I read all the right verses about forgiveness. I prayed. I had the "I forgive you" conversation. I did everything "right." 

Because that's what Christians do. They forgive. 

But I now think that one of the worst things you can do is to forgive prematurely. 

Forgiveness is so often touted as the gateway to freedom and healing--forgive and be healed. But so often forgiveness functions as a kind of denial: 

You deny the depth of the hurt.

You deny the extent of the damage.

You deny the past hurts that make this present one hurt so bad.

You deny the process of healing that needs to take place before you can truly forgive.

Denial

I am a slow processor. It takes me an eternity to figure out what I am feeling and why. It's an agonizing process and most of the time I just feel like, "Wait. I'm crying again??" as one more layer of the wound rises into consciousness. 

Why didn't anyone tell me that practicing self-compassion makes you feel even worse? That acknowledging the truth of the wound is excruciating. That letting yourself get angry is scary and confusing. That setting boundaries doesn't mean that other people won't violate them, and in fact can serve as a trigger. That you can feel like &*$# and still not know why. That sometimes you ask for empathy and realize the other person is incapable of giving it. That being vulnerable and brave doesn't mean you won't have to do it again tomorrow and the day after that. That I still don't know how to make the pain go away. That I wonder all the time whether I'm crazy and this is just all in my head--that I'm being too sensitive or a drama queen. That asking for help doesn't mean you'll get what you really want or that you even know what you want or would be capable of articulating it if you knew what it was. That sharing your pain can make you feel even more alone and isolated. 

I wish I could say it's easier this time around, but I actually think it hurts a lot worse. 

As my friend mentioned, sometimes you find yourself telling the same story over and over and over again. It's because you haven't completely figured it out. You haven't gotten relief. The wound hasn't healed. 

Keep telling that story. Go deeper, if you have to. Find safe people who will listen. Don't stop.

A Story Worth Fighting For

I never imagined it would be this much of a struggle to be the hero of my own story, the lead in my high school play, the center of my own narrative.

No one and nothing prepared me for this. Not college. Not courses in feminist, post-modern, post-colonial, or Marxist theory. Not reading Doestoyevsky, the Bronte sisters, Donne, Shakespeare, or George Eliot. Not all the papers I wrote about hybridity, syntax or laughter. Not being good at school or good at my job. Not praise from teachers, employers or peers. 

Nothing. 

Part of being the hero means you get to have layers. So, for example, one of the most jarring things about inhabiting my identity is the baffling (to me) denial that I have a past. That things have happened to me. Not only that things have happened to me, but that I've been affected by these things that have happened to me.

At every fresh encounter with a new person, I'm assumed to be (supposed to be) a blank slate. 

As if you were the first stranger to tell me to, "Smile." 

The first white guy to call me "exotic." 

The first person to ask, "So, where are you from?"

The first man to speak to me in a condescending tone of voice about something technical. 

I'm told that I'm "cynical." That I have a bad attitude. That I "hate white people."

I feel like part of being human is learning from the past, taking in experiences that repeat themselves over and over again, making sense of these experiences and even molding them into a narrative. 

Like any three-dimensional character, don't I deserve a back story too? 

Like Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. But sometimes it seems like even laughter is not allowed to me. Because to laugh is to have a distinct point of view that sees the cracks, the contradictions, the absurdities of the status quo. 

I think I can say that I've paid a price for not aquiecsing to the dominant narrative. And as I fight for my story, I can't help but feel like I'm fighting for my life. That if I don't have this, I have nothing. That if I don't fight for my story, no one else will. 

Let's stop shaming people for feeling like outsiders at church

Ah, a subject close to my heart--and all I could come up with is this clunky title:

"Let's"--as if there is a unified "US" that goes around shaming people.

"Stop"--as if I can actually get people to stop doing anything.

"Shaming"--Now there's a strong word.

"People"--Who are these people?

"Outsiders"--Okay. They feel like outsiders in some way.

"Church"--Refer to the unified "US" of the first word.

There's a phenomenon on facebook and elsewhere that I've started to think of as "Push Back." Push back is the "But what were you wearing?" of mildly controversial conversation. Example:

"Some guy grabbed my butt while I was riding the bus."
"Maybe he was just having a bad day and your ass reminded him of home."

Or:

"It can be difficult being a woman in the entertainment industry."
"I was the only man in my women's studies class."

Or:

"I don't feel like I belong at my church."
"Have you tried joining a small group?"

I think that at heart, a push back response is a misdirect. It misses the point and steers the speaker in another direction, like, "Well, have you tried jiggling the handle?" The listener in effect avoids, glosses over, ignores, minimizes, invalidates the original statement

I think the underlying message when it comes to belonging and church is, "It's not okay that you feel this way."

At first, this might not seem like a particularly shaming response. But think about it.

"I don't feel like I belong."
"It's not okay that I feel this way."
"There must be something wrong with me that I feel this way."
"I should stop talking about this because it makes other people upset."

It's a double burden of shame. And to state the obvious, people who already feel like they don't belong are hyper-sensitive to the shame of feeling "Not Ok."

Sometimes the response from the listener seems to be rooted in defensiveness, as in, "How DARE you suggest that my church is anything but welcoming and inclusive!" This response makes a lot of sense. If the identity of the church is rooted in how welcoming or inclusive it appears or feels to others, then any threat to this appearance or feeling will be met with incredulity and even hostility.

This is frustrating. As if no matter how much vulnerability, humility or honesty I express or how much humor I use to deflect the pain, or how much I qualify every statement, or how much credence I give to other perspectives, my story will still not be validated because it falls outside the boundaries of how church wishes to perceive itself.

Some of the things that Jesus says in the New Testament are pretty funny, especially when he's talking to the Pharisees. It's like they're speaking completely different narratives (they are) and Jesus is like, "I know you are, but what am I?"

He just, like, says stuff, and it's awesome.

Anyway, I think I feel like this a lot. As if I'm trying to tell this story and it's not getting through because the other person immediately imposes his story onto mine. There's instant denial, defensiveness, explanation or "Have you tried online dating?"

It's exhausting. I'm tired. I'm very, very tired.