Today’s essay concludes four weeks of examining the relationship between our humanity and emotional pain.
Which is a relief, because if you think this stuff is heavy going and hard to read, please spare a thought and consider what it feels like to write it. What happened to the essays about Hawaiian jam, Scottish Rock, and Country Roads?
For both your sake and mine, I hope the next wave of inspiration strikes a happier tone!
But now, back to today’s programming. If you’ve been following the plot, the first essay, “Unhappy Trails” describes how, some weeks ago, I was involuntarily forced to confront a buried hurt from my distant past. In that essay, and the next two, “Personality, Personhood, and Purpose” and “Pain Threshold”, I share my thoughts on the nature of emotional pain, why it has such power over our lives, and how I processed this sudden and unwanted intrusion of deeply suppressed hurt.
I closed the last essay by promising to take you through my thought processes, and to share the insights that emerged from it. If you have not already, I would appreciate if you go back and read the last three essays. I’ve put a lot of time, and emotional energy, into these, and I truly believe you will get more out of the next five minutes if you first invest the ten minutes that involves.
Once you’ve done that, let’s pick up from where we left off at the end of “Pain Threshold”:
[T]he involuntary dredging up of this deep pain to the surface […] completely upended my reality. I couldn’t sleep. I debated myself constantly. I painfully wrote, deleted, rewrote, and sent long emails to the people concerned.
Most crucially, I had many deep, honest, conversations with my wife, who understands me, knows my history, and sees my pain more than anyone else. She is God’s gift to me. In listening to me, she showed me great compassion and understanding. She supported me, and gave me space, as I needed. But she also had the strength and integrity to expect more of me than I myself believed I was capable of.
She gently redirected my eyes away from my pain, first towards my limited self, then at my limitless God. This redirection encouraged me to speak to Him, to ask what I should make of my circumstances. In opening myself up to Him, and in listening, I started to work through the many complicated and conflicting emotions I felt.
As I promised last week, what follows is an effort to organize what was a chaotic period of many days into a logical arc that is easy for a reader to follow. If only it unfolded with such precision, I would be the better for it. But it did not. Most of the time, I had feelings that were difficult to articulate. I would say things to myself, thinking that is what I felt, but as I challenged myself, I would realize my thoughts were incomplete, or inconsistent.
I did a lot of mental and emotional wrestling. How do I feel? Why do I feel that way? Is it fair to feel that way? What would make me feel different? Do I want to feel different? How do I want to feel? What would help me get there? Is that reasonable to expect?
Yeah, it was pretty tortured. But hopefully what follows is organized and sequenced enough to be helpful.
Letting Go. For the sake of privacy, I will not go into granular detail regarding the circumstances giving rise to the hurt I felt many years ago. Suffice it to say, I was offered, by one individual concerned, a non-specific blanket apology (of the “I’m not sure what I did, but if I did anything wrong…” variety). By another individual concerned, I was urged to consider the perspective that (paraphrasing) “not everything has to be so complicated, sometimes things should be simple”. Whether intended that way or not, I received both admonishments as challenges to explain why I could not simply let go of my pain and start over.
Forgiving. Consequently, I spent a lot of time reconsidering my views on the concept of forgiveness. I have written about forgiveness several times, most notably here. I think it is one of the most important graces with which we can mark our lives, to be able to forgive wrongs. And it bothered me to think that I was unable or unwilling to forgive, because we are commanded to forgive, and I have a desire to obey.
Hard-heartedness. Initially, I considered the possibility I was reluctant to forgive the one individual because the blanket apology felt insincere, and the second individual because their response marginalized my feelings. I asked myself whether these mattered, and whether I could find a way to forgiveness in response to imperfect olive branches. In the process, I tried to envisage receiving a sincere apology, and engaging in an honest conversation explaining my feelings (actually going so far as to script the latter). But in both instances, I could not feel my heart softening. It made me wonder if I was closed-hearted, or if the pain was embedded so deep that it could not ever be dislodged.
Surrender & Conflict. It turns out I needed space – oddly, in the form of a business trip and some busy work days. I came out at the other end of that mental break with some fresh perspectives. I re-examined my heart, asking if I felt resentment towards the individuals concerned. I decided that I did not, or at least it was much diminished from before. It seemed to me that the steps I had taken to resolve my anger during the pandemic (see “Pain Threshold” from last week) had also defused much of the resentment I previously felt. And I concluded that I had in fact probably forgiven them, along with people who had committed other unrelated wrongs, as part of my recent faith journey and a decision to more deeply surrender my life to Christ. But this produced a quandary: if I had forgiven, why the inner conflict?
Pain Holdover. I believe the answer is that despite having forgiven, I had not forgotten, and still carried deep hurt from many years ago. Forgiving does not mean we no longer feel pain. In fact, it is the enduring nature of the pain that gives the grace of forgiveness its power. And the evidence of pain was plentiful. In talking to my wife, it did not take much before I would get upset reciting the incidents of many years ago that caused the pain. Once again, I heard myself asking out loud why certain choices were made or certain words were said. The ease with which these bad feelings were stirred up contributed greatly to my initial confusion. At first, I mistook these sensations for a lack of forgiveness. But as I continued to process my feelings, other possibilities emerged.
Photo by Fabrizio Frigeni on Unsplash Forgetting. In “Unforgettable”, the essay linked in the second bullet above, I cited 1 Corinthians 13:5 – that “love keeps no record of wrongs”. What does this verse mean? It seems to ask for more than forgiveness. Does it ask that we also forget? I reflected on this, a lot. I asked myself, why did I still get so upset remembering the past? What purpose did it serve? Was it evidence that my forgiveness was not complete? But through my meditation, I arrived at the conclusion that my “upset-ness” served two important purposes.
Catharsis... First, these were deeply buried pains. I needed to re-live them, to re-acknowledge them, in order to initiate the cathartic process of working through these feelings. I needed to be situated in my pain to address it. Suppressing it (the strategy of “compartmentalization and containment” described in earlier essays) would not help. Rather, I needed to rip out the pain and look at the entirety of its ugliness.
…and Cognition. The second purpose served by my “upset-ness” followed from the first. In working through the pain, I recognized that I had not yet addressed the reality that pain was not only inflicted on me, but also on others around me. This made me, to a degree, angry again, but on their behalf. But more importantly, I realized that the conflict I was feeling was in part a desire to protect both myself, and these others, from further pain.
What’s in an Apology? My thoughts came back to the apology. It was half-hearted and non-specific. At the same time, I wasn’t necessarily seeking a sincere one as a condition for forgiveness, since I had already, to some extent, forgiven. I also focused on the admonition to not make things “so complicated” and to simply let go. What was the source of my resistance to this suggestion? Why could I not simply not start over and re-engage?
Starting Over. And then it struck me – what really bothered me about the apology and the admonition was the lack of self-awareness in how they were proffered. Rather than indicating a genuine desire, borne out of an understanding of my pain, to reset the terms of the relationship, to build up the lost trust from the ground floor, the underlying assumption shared by both individuals was that it would be easy or trivial to “go back to the good old days”.
As I continued to process my feelings, I kept coming back to the fear that if I simply “let things go”, I would be exposing myself to hurt again. After all, I had distanced myself from these individuals over many years to protect not just myself, but also the people around me. The trauma I had experienced had taken decades to repair. And I simply did not trust, in the manner the conversation was unfolding, that this time would be different. The saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, that’s not going to happen.
The “V” Word. But please also understand what I am not saying. I am not saying that I am a victim. I don’t believe the people who hurt me set out to hurt me. We often hurt people we love, even when we are not intending to. Being in close relationship with someone, that risk is always there, because we are at our most open, our most vulnerable, with those we are close to. It is the blooming rose that is easily bruised, not the growing bud. I am not a victim, and I am not seeking a victim’s apology. But I am bruised. Perhaps less bruised than I once was, but I am bruised nonetheless. In my last essay I explained how my healing process has been facilitative (enabling a path forward) rather than restorative (resolving the root of pain).
True healing and authentic trust – restoration and redemption – takes work.All worthwhile things do.
No Hollywood Ending. So where does that leave me? Not anywhere great, to be honest. I have resolved to be open-minded about the situation going forward, to try to approach future efforts with as much good faith as I can muster. I owe it to everyone, especially myself, to behave fairly if a viable pathway to restoration and redemption opens.
At the same time, I need to be realistic, and acknowledge that restoration and redemption requires emotional maturity, openness, commitment, introspection, self-awareness, and mutual reflection. All of which may simply not be forthcoming from the individuals concerned.
Which leaves me to consider: what are my options at this point?
Protect. I could take a protective posture, and continue to insulate myself from them, but this may come across as unconstructive.
Pretend. I could fake a reconciliatory posture and pretend all is fine, but that would involve exposing myself and my loved ones to future insensitivity. More importantly, I despise pretending, because it’s an insidiously corrosive behavior that destroys both relationships and souls.
Prepare. Finally, I can simply observe that we are where we are, remain prayerful, and see what happens next.
For now, I’ve more or less landed on option 3.
As I describe in “St.Valentine & The Flame” and “Return of the King”, there are some wounds that do not heal, and we carry them as ever-scars. This is one of life’s realities. But the presence of a wound does not stop us. We keep going, knowing that wounds make us more alive to the invisible hurts that others may carry.
(For the reader’s clarity, the trauma I refer to in those two posts is a completely different one from the subject of this essay (so much pain, ikr), so please don’t expend precious energy trying to synthesize everything - though it is worth observing that separate traumas can have a reinforcing effect, in the same way a tangled ball of string becomes more difficult to untangle if you senselessly pull at it).
Will this unfold in a way such that full or partial restorative healing is in my future? Or is all of that too much to expect or ask? In a way, it matters a great deal. I don’t want to carry unhealed wounds forever. But that’s not entirely up to me. And so, in that sense, it doesn’t matter all that much. Because whatever may (or may not) happen, I have things to do, places to go, people to love, essays to write, a life to live, and a mission to serve.
We keep rolling, and I’m glad I’ve got you with me along the way.
I know this essay series was demanding, and may have been painful to follow in more ways than one. Thanks for sticking with it.
I’ll see you again, same time, same place, next Wednesday.
Grace and peace,
J