Lies I Have Believed

And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend,
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

-from "The Sad Shepherd”, W.B. Yeats

My first best friend was my mother. She used to read me stories while I played. She stopped cooking and cleaning and diaper changing and phone calling, and sat in a chair in the kitchen, pausing to chat with me about characters and the choices they made and what it all meant. Most of my “play” involved the absorbing work of cutting pieces of paper and sticking them together again with scotch tape. But all the while I imagined and planned my paper projects, the stories went on around me, and my mother and I were bound together by our shared participation in them. The places we went and the people we met in books changed, but our friendship was a constant. It was exciting and safe all at the same time, and I felt that I could go anywhere and do anything and still belong wherever my mother was. She was tall and beautiful and had cool, smooth skin and sure hands, and I believed that she knew everything worth knowing – where to pick wild blueberries, and how to do somersaults, what my father’s favorite foods were, how to open the shells of chestnuts, and how to hold a kitten so it wouldn’t cry. When I wanted to build a doll house, she found me cardboard boxes. When I decided to play “hobo”, she packed me a picnic lunch and wrapped it in a handkerchief that I could tie onto a stick like the pictures in books. She was the one who taught me where to look for pussywillows in the spring and how to suck the honey from purple clover, which ferns were the ones we could eat and how to climb back down a tree. I felt brave and powerful with her love wrapped about me. I could wander through woods and fields and always she was there to come home to, ready to hear my stories and help me plan my next foray.

I have shards of memories that mark the bewildering loss of that friendship we shared. Waking early in the morning as my father left for work and crawling into her bed, a palpable sorrow hung about her like a blanket. I wanted to snuggle, but settled for the satisfaction of giving her the only comfort my small self could offer – warmth at her back. Asking for scotch tape and her promising to buy it, then forgetting; my disappointed whine, and her sharp, annoyed reply that she would not promise me things anymore. I had no way of knowing that my father had been involved in a terrible accident at work, that a man had died in his arms, and that both of my parents were battling childhood terrors and destructive memories, and struggling with all that it means to feel powerless and alone as an adult. Tossed on the dark seas of chaotic emotions and fears, they looked for ways to do what had to be done – work, care for three young children, and engage appropriately in social life. My father bottled his emotions up tight so they burst out in awe-inducing rage at odd times. He was sometimes full of jokes and too-loud laughter, and sometimes suddenly angry over juice-spills or poorly-phrased comments. My mother simply withdrew. She was there, calm and helpful and always trying to pick up all the pieces of everyone, but she was not present. Her self had retreated too far inside to be touched or known. Her hands still brushed my hair and poured milk on my cereal but she was suddenly unknowable and untouchable.

I have spent so much of my emotional life half-conscious of a great bleeding wound in me. I had neither facts nor understanding nor model with which to sort through the complicated feelings that replaced my security. There was loneliness and a sense of being rejected, but even stronger was the overwhelming pity I felt for my mother’s hurt, which I could sense but not understand. Alongside the fear, the shame, the confusion, and the grief was a strange consolation I found in finding ways that I, a child, could comfort a mother whose care for me became a thing to emulate rather than just receive. Then there was confusion – the fog that spread over everything when I tried to decipher my own feelings. My self-centered child-mind was convinced that something awful and defective in me was responsible for the baffling loss I felt and my inability to process it. I told myself a story - that hurt and helpless frustration were part of the difficulties of growing up and I was over-emotional. (How I have tried to be less emotional!) And then, running underneath everything was a desperate longing to restore that precious friendship. It had made me brave and at peace, and I was dying to be those things again. I pursued it in attention-seeking, in neediness and pre-occupation with emotional connection, in emotionally manipulative behaviours. When that failed, I resented my mother and fought her and dismissed her. All the time, I ached for her.

I didn’t know what had happened to my father and my family until I was a teenager. Those weren’t the kinds of stories people tell children or think they need to know. My parents wore themselves to their frayed edges trying to protect us from what had torn them apart. Even when I knew, I couldn’t make the connection with my own hurts, which were wrapped up in other stories about me and my emotions and a defectiveness that I was anxious to forget or at least hide. I have loathed the weakness I felt the truth revealed in me. I have been ashamed of the emotions that limit my ability to give generously and set healthy boundaries and maintain my sense of self. I have pushed myself down and stepped on the tenderest parts of me as a way of dulling the roar of fear, magnified by a little of the truth.

Decades later I realized that my mother’s sudden withdrawal from me and from all of us was a trauma response, something that had kept her sane and able to go on living with her own fears and childhood wounds. Disappointment in myself and a growing sense of my own weakness drove me to seek understanding for her, and as I began to see her as someone terrorized by the same things that terrorize me, I could begin to realize just what had happened to both of us. As mercy for my mother grew in me, I gained the ability to give the same mercy to myself, and that was what gave me the strength to face the dark in me.

Mercy. It’s not just softness; it’s clarity. It adds context to truth. It gives us eyes that can look into the harsh light of reality without being burned. Oh, this is why we need Jesus. The great and gracious, high and holy Creator-Father-God is not enough. Jesus is not only God-become-human; he is the One in whom “mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Psalm 85:10). He is the lens through which we can begin to look at the whole truth.

Half-truths are easy to co-opt. Detached from the story of the Truth, they lend their authority to lies and become bastions for fear and shame. There is nothing like a lie attached to a bit of truth for destructive power. Lies twist and warp and retell the stories that define us. The whole universe hangs on a story. What we are and who we are and what it means to be, is strung on plotlines. The stories I told myself about what happened, and who I was, were full of insidious lies both big and small. I hadn’t seen them before. Yet even when I knew about them, I didn’t know what to do with them. You can’t just un-believe the stories you have been telling yourself for forty years.

But I have learned a few truths in forty years, too. I know a little about where to take dark things. Jesus, Faithful and True, can root out heart hurts, and he knows how to handle even the ugliest of truths. I cried to him, and he answered me.

“Pull out all the lies and all the fears,” he said. “Unwind them, unlace them, and lay them all out here in the light, before me. For every single one, I will tell you the truth. When you hear their flapping and their hoarse whispers in the dark, fight them with the truth. You have not chosen darkness, but light. I will defend you, even in your own heart.”

And so this is where I find myself: drawing long, tangled lies out of my heart. This is the story of my dealing with darkness in myself, the lies I have believed, and the truth I have received from the Man of Sorrows.

I will tell the truth of all the ways that darkness has defeated me, so that I may have the honour of telling how Jesus is overcoming it.

Lie #1

My inability to regulate my emotions and my comfort-seeking is a mark of weakness and a flaw in my character. The way that I continually swing back and forth between needing belonging and needing freedom is unreasonable and shameful. This incongruency in me reveals me as defective, immature, and ridiculous.

The Truth

I developed a defensive mode for a situation in which I was emotionally unsafe. That defense was the healthiest option available to me at the time. As a child, I lacked the brain development and the information to understand and deal with a painful loss, and I stored it whole, as an open wound. When it gets touched, the pain is still there, whole and ungrieved. Big, childish, unprocessed emotions are the natural consequence of a situation that is baffling and unfair, and while they are difficult and messy, a healthy, adult response to them is not shame but compassion. My inability to self-regulate is not my fault and even though it’s not good, it’s not a failure. It was an appropriate response for the context. Their spillover into the rest of my life might look similar to lack of self-control, but it’s not the same thing, and I don’t need to hate myself or blame myself for it. God can heal even this wound, and he can give me strength where I had only weakness. I don’t need to hide myself; there is refuge in Jesus and he bids me ask without shame.

“You know how I am scorned, disgraced, and shamed;
All my enemies are before you.
Scorn has broken my heart
And has left me helpless;
I looked for sympathy, but there was none,
For comforters, but found none.
They put gall in my food
And gave me vinegar for my thirst.”
(Psalm 69:19-21)

“But now, this is what the Lord says-
He who created you, Jacob,
He who formed you, Israel:
‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.’”
(Isaiah 43:1)

“Forget the former things;
Do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
And streams in the wasteland.”
(Isaiah 43:18-19)