To both my relief, and dismay, I have discovered that there is indeed a pattern. My relief is the result of having detected a pattern, but my dismay is the result of discovering that this pattern is pretty complex.

To demonstrate, I am going to use the following (fictional) scenario as an example:

1. Someone calls me a “dummy”.

2. I react by feeling hurt, sad, angry, and confused.

3. My hurt feelings give rise to one or more of the following responses: I snap back with an insult of my own, I wander off feeling sorry for myself and trying to figure out why that person doesn’t like me, I begin to wonder if that person is going to try and turn others against me. . .and so on.

Notice that my responses (which take up the bulk of my time and energy) are not directly the result of being called dumb, but are instead in response to my hurt feelings. My responses are only secondarily connected to the situation: The time and energy that I invest in my responsive actions is primarily connected to my emotional reaction, not the incident itself.

This is a hard pattern to challenge and change, so lately I have been just trying to pay attention to this process.  I’m trying to catch myself between my emotional reactions and my continued response. I’d like to think that eventually I can get enough distance between the emotion and my response so as to figure out whether I am making an appropriate investment.

I’ll keep trying, anyway.

The ladies room at work is evil.

Truly.

(So evil, I call it “The Ego Deflator”.)

You see, no matter how cute I am feeling, one look in the ladies room mirror will strip me of any such delusions.  Every line, every shadow, every broken capillary, every imperfection in my face screams from the mirror, assuring me of my soon-to-be-celebrated 40th birthday. When I look in that mirror, I look pale, sallow, washed out, tired, and old.

To be fair, I am not the mirror’s only target. All the other women at work have the same complaint: We just end up looking SO bad in that mirror.

Now some might say that our irritation is just vanity: We don’t want to accept our imperfections or the fact that we are aging.

(This is probably true.)

Yet this mirror doesn’t tell us the truth about how we look. It can’t, because the lighting in the ladies room is horrid. The bulbs are of the ultraviolet variety, and not only do  they give off a rather unflattering glow, there aren’t enough of them, and the walls of the washroom are a nasty, dingy grey which reflects badly in the light.

So while we ladies do see some very real flaws when we peer into that ladies room mirror, we are also seeing ourselves, not as we really are, but how we look in contaminated light. We see our true flaws, to be sure, but we also see “flaws” that aren’t really there.

(The light can be corrupted. The light can be distorted.)

(And because I am human, I am quick to believe in the distortion.)

The mirror doesn’t tell me how I really look, because all it can do is reflect the light available to it.  It took me awhile to realize this, though. I assumed that light was light. Eventually I paid more attention to my environment, and talked to others that shared it, to realize that the light was contaminated.

(I need to know the light better. When I truly know the light, I can know when it has been corrupted. Then I might be able to only see what is truly there.)

This blog post is part of this month’s Synchroblog on Light and Darkness as Motifs of Spirituality. Check out the other posts below:

Phil Wyman finds Darkness: a Thin Place for the Soul
Adam Gonnerman on being “In Darkness”
Jeff Goins is “Walking in the Light with Jesus”
Ellen Haroutunian finds Holy Darkness
Bethany Stedman thinks Light is Coming
Julie Clawson walks through Darkness and Light
Kathy Escobar will Take a Sliver Anyday
Susan Barnes at …and here’s a photo of one I made earlier
Joe Miller thinks you can Discover Light in Darkness
Beth Patterson talks about Advent: Awaiting the Ancient and the Ever New
Liz Dyer says What the Heck
Sally Coleman muses about Light into Darkness
Steve Hayes with the Lord of the Dark
Josh Jinno with Spiritual Motifs of Darkness and Light
KW Leslie contrasts Darkness versus blackness
Erin Word writes Fire and Sacrifice

The total delay for the second car? Probably about three seconds.

Apparently this waste of three seconds was enough to make the second car’s driver very irate. He began to lean on his horn and curse the driver of the first car. Then the driver of the first car stopped his car, further delaying the driver of the second car, and responded with cursing and horn-blowing of his own. After a bit of start and stop, both drivers drove off the lot, gunning their engines as they did so.

The time taken up by the angry exchange? Probably about fifteen seconds, and I’d bet anything that both drivers were fairly steamed for at least a minute or two after they drove off.

Total time of delay: 3 seconds.

Total time of angry exchange: 15 seconds (at least).

So for wait of 3 seconds, the second driver (roping the first driver along with him) invested 5 times the length of the delay in unproductive honking, cursing, and, yes, being delayed even longer.

Christians might call this poor stewardship of time and emotional energy. The rest of the world would probably just say that this was a boneheaded thing to do. No matter what you call it, though,  the neither driver will ever get his squandered time or energy back.

After watching this little drama unfold, I came to the realization that I am often (ok, usually, even)  just as wasteful of my energy and resources as these drivers. A slight inconvenience, a careless word, or, in some cases, even a positive exchange can result in behavior that is totally out of proportion to the actual stimulus. Thus a good stimulus is minimized by wasted time and energy, while a bad stimulus has the distinction of being made, by myself, even more damaging because of energy and time I invest in it.

I have some thoughts on why I (and perhaps others) do this, and I will write about them in my next post. But for now, it is enough to remember those squabbling drivers, investing fivefold in their own misery over a measly three seconds.

(Ok, I am going to be transparent: I haven’t posted in a month because I’ve been too busy working on my much more popular tea blog. But I’ve realized that my ministry extends beyond tea, so I am going to try and be more regular about posting here.)

Back to transparency. As I discussed in my last post on this subject, we often seek to define transparency by what might be termed “transparency best practices”: We shift from “transparency” to things like accountability and honesty without considering what it is to be transparent. And as my blogging pal Paul Meyers noted in his comment, most people aren’t even good enough at being honest with themselves to be truly transparent.

Since I definitely fall into this last category, I had to think long and hard for an example of how to be transparent.

And then I thought of my glass teapots.

I own three teapots. One is white porcelain and opaque. The others are clear glass. I confess to being more fond of the glass teapots because I like to be able to see the tea leaves unfurl as they steep. I like to be able to watch the color of the tea liquor darken so that I can know exactly when the tea is ready to be poured. I like being able to see if the teapot is in need of emptying/cleaning at a glance.  I like being able to examine the leaves after I drink my tea without getting my hands wet.

I like being able to see right through those pots. And the interesting thing is that those pots don’t have to do anything other than hold my tea.  They don’t try to be transparent or function transparently. They are transparent.

Now humans are not teapots. Unlike a teapot we have personalities, moral agency, and intelligence. We have souls. But I still think that my humble teapots have something to teach us about transparency, namely that it is in large part dependent on what we are made of: If we build up a persona out of defensiveness and/or opportunism, it won’t matter how “accountable” or honest we are to others, we still aren’t going to be transparent.  We will continue to manage, or try to manage, how others see us and what it is that they see  and in the process render ourselves even more unknowable to ourselves and to others.

If we are transparent, we are knowable, both by ourselves and others. It isn’t a matter of our actively disclosing information or being “accountable”. Instead, when we are transparent, we are knowable to others: What they know of us depends on their physical/spiritual/emotional/mental proximity to us, rather than strictly on our own actions.

And we become more knowable, we can better know ourselves.

More on this later. Thanks for reading.

Insight #3

“Self-development programs often concentrate on helping people to distinguish between their “needs” and “wants”. Wants are minimized as something that we have control over and that can be changed via discipline, insight, character improvement, etc. Needs, however, are seldom questioned. When people want to make changes in their lives, they are asked to distinguish between wants and needs such that people focus on their wants and end up paying far less attention to their needs.

But needs (with very few exceptions such as food and oxygen) are also self-constructions. They just don’t seem like it because they appear to us to be crucial to the very foundations of our being. And in some cases, they probably are, but this doesn’t mean that we are going to wither away and die if we challenge them. It does mean, however, that we are going to have to change, oftentimes dramatically, and in ways that are distinctly uncomfortable for us.”

This was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to work on. In fact, it was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to even identify. By the time we reach adulthood, we have built an identity that is based on assumptions about what we “need”. This identity (and the assumptions) are the result of life experiences (both positive and damaging, examined and unexamined). The trouble is, while these things may well be “needed” by us, they aren’t necessarily good for us. In order to get healthy (spiritually, physically, mentally, etc) we are going to need to change, and part of that change is going to have to be questioning and (in some cases) dismissing our “needs”.

This is hard to do because we have deceived ourselves into not questioning our “needs” because they are so ingrained in our psyche. Consequently, we think that not feeding a “need” will result in our crumbling into a million little pieces. We also believe that we are entitled to have our “needs” met, even if meeting these “needs” has consistently resulted in negative consequences for ourselves and others. Finally, even if we decide that we are not going to feed a need, or to (gasp) admit that it isn’t a need after all, we are going to be in for some rough times.

Some very rough times indeed.

This is a continuation of my series on self-deception. For more background, visit the beginning post of the series here.

Insight #2

“Lying to yourself is bad.

The worst part of it is that when you lie to yourself, it makes it that much easier for others, who do not have your best interests at heart, to lie to you about what those lies are. Particularly when they themselves desperately need to believe these lies.”

Self-deception about others can take on many forms, but often involves projection of our own issues onto that person and/or idealizing that person (and thus overlooking their very real faults).Of course, others tell themselves the same sorts of lies about us.

Why do people do this? Because we need justify our feelings about, and reactions to, each other. If we have engaged in self-deception, we have built up a self-image that needs to be propped up by more lies. If our relationships prop up this self-image, it is to our benefit to maintain our self-deception regarding others. They, in turn, tell themselves lies about us in order to maintain their own self-image.

The problems with this round-robin lying are numerous. Many an unhealthy relationship has dragged out longer than it ought because one or both partners inappropriately idealized the other. Similarly, failing to live up to this idealization, and/or projecting negative ideas onto the other can, and regularly does, end relationships that might otherwise have survived.

Even worse, when we are already in a pattern of self-deception, we become more vulnerable to believing the lies that others are already telling themselves about us. After all, our self-deception is often more obvious to others than it is to us, and is thus fairly easy to exploit. If our self-deception has been exposed, we might well be more inclined to listen to what our exposer has to say about us, even if they themselves are telling us their own set of lies. We see this sort of thing happen in dysfunctional romantic relationships, of course, but also between unscrupulous therapists and their clients, as well as gurus/clergy and their disciples.

The sad thing is that ending a pattern of self-deception often, though not always, does require the intervention of outsiders. But if the outsiders we rely on need to believe their own lies, they are unlikely to be of much use to us. And so the pattern of self-deception continues, made even worse by outside cooperation.

As many of my friends and readers know, the past year has been very, very difficult for me. Without getting too far into personal details, I have realized that many of my difficulties have been the result of ongoing self-deception (aka “lying to myself”). In recent months I have been examining some of the ways in which I have lied to myself and have been writing them up in a more private journal. In addition, I am going to be posting some of my insights here in my blog:

Insight #1

“Identifying a problem and the dynamics of that problem are all well and good, but they don’t solve the problem nor do they necessarily enable one to change the behaviors that cause the problem. In fact, the identification of the problem and its dynamics can often become a trap: One feels smug about developing “understanding” while continuing in the same behaviors. This can lead to even greater complacency, even if the immediate situation is resolved or acted upon. The problem still exists, and the problematic behaviors still exist. Thus, real progress is seldom made.”

A therapist friend of mine recently remarked that one of the great false assumptions that people have about therapy is that it is supposed to help them “understand” their problems and situation. However, a good therapist will focus on getting their clients to change their behavior, whether or not the client fully “understands” their situation.

While there is nothing wrong with identifying problems in relationships, patterns of behavior, or trying to understand people’s motives, the “understanding” does nothing to change the situations that people find themselves in. In fact, it takes up time and energy that might be better used in removing oneself from, or changing, the negative situation.

Think about it this way: If a person is in a house and they smell gas, what is their best course of action? Is it to try and understand where the gas is coming from, learning the cause of the gas leak, and studying the properties of natural gas? Or is it to get the heck out of the house before they asphyxiate or get themselves blown up? There is time enough for “understanding” after one flees the danger. The important thing is that one acts in response to what they know to be a negative situation, even if they don’t yet fully understand it.

When we tell ourselves that we are gaining mastery over a negative situation because we understand it, even though nothing has changed as far as our behavior or participation in that situation, we are lying to ourselves. We want to believe that we are “taking action” and/or are “being proactive” because we have thought the situation or circumstances through. Yet all we are doing is continuing in the same behaviors, the same patterns, the same (dare I say it) sins as we always have. We just understand them a bit better.

This is not helpful.