Relief in Powerlessness

In the summer of 2012, I began realizing our family’s time on the mission field was coming to an end. I’ll spare you all the gory details but suffice to say that I wanted a deeper level of emotional wholeness as a sexual abuse survivor and the resources I needed for such an intense process simply weren’t available.

It was a tortuous decision for someone who had “made life work” in confining emotional spaces for fifteen years.

Was this phase of life truly different? Was I at my tipping point? Couldn’t I figure this out, without having to leave?

I remember thinking one day, “This would be so much easier if my team leaders would just send me home.” And a split second later I knew I’d hate that too.

For eight, eternally long months I battled my inner demons as I chose to care for my own soul over other people and things. Slowly I realized it was a choice only I could make—unless of course I were in full-blown crisis. And that is the convenience of a crisis—others are forced to choose for you.

Suicidal depression, extramarital affairs or substance addiction would have compelled others, whether it was morally or legally, to push my own eject button.

Choice is a risk.

Which means…

Choice may cost us something of immeasurable value.

Therefore…

Choice feels like a burden.

So…

Powerlessness becomes a relief.

Those tortuous months of choosing for myself gave me two wonderful gifts:

1) A visceral reaction of disgust to stories (like in the musical number below) where the path of abdicating choice is portrayed as an easy escape route.

2) Opportunities to walk alongside clients at the same crossroads—will they choose to care for themselves as faithfully as they care for the world around them?

The battle to hold a sense of agency over our lives is so important to win because abdicating to powerlessness can be retraumatizing, creating even more fear in holding power in our own lives.

What important choices did you make growing up? What were the risk factors in those moments? Did these experiences encourage you to exercise choice or abdicate your power in order to avoid blame, isolation or rejection? In your life today, what’s a situation in which you would rather not choose? What collision are you hoping to avoid? What story, if told, would massage some of the scar tissue constraining your authority in caring for yourself?

From the song “On the Steps of the Palance” from Into the Woods:

Better run along home
And avoid the collision
Though at home they don't care
I'll be better of there
Where there's nothing to choose
So there's nothing to lose
So I'll pry up my shoes
Wait no thinking it through
Things don't have to collide
I know what my decision is
Which is not to decide
I'll just leave him a clue
For example, a shoe
And then see what he'll do

Now it's he and not you
Who is stuck with a shoe
In a stew, in the goo.

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Beginning March 1st: Membership packages designed for….

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TRADITIONAL COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP:

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Like me, many of you desire to see wholeness in the lives of others! Beginning in March, I’m offering a unique learning opportunity for social workers, chaplains, nonprofit employees, ministers, small group leaders, and missionary care specialists.

Subscribe as a service provider and receive:

• monthly content (including a 30-minute audio file expounding on important therapeutic categories)

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Parasite and Privilege

Last Friday, my new favorite NPR podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour, tipped me off that Parasite was a fabulous film and true contender for Best Picture. Seeing it only the night before the Oscars aired, my awe at its creative brilliance was still fresh allowing me to celebrate as it won award after award.

There are so many praiseworthy aspect of Bong Joon-Ho’s stunning film but I most valuabled its expansion of my view of privilege. Much like Roald Dahl uses the ridiculous in his book Matilda to expose subtle, abusive parenting, Joon-Ho’s far-fetched thriller expands our window of tolerance for engaging the uncomfortable reality of the disparity between affluence and poverty.

At one point in the film, the Kim family has their almost subterranean apartment flooded by a overnight torrential downpour. Images of floating possessions, a backed up sewage system and a night in a makeshift shelter at a school are a gut-punching contrast to the Park family’s naive relief over the rain’s benefit to their lawn the next morning. Parasite helped me concretely understand the privilege of welcoming rather than fearing the weather.

And that has stayed with me as I’ve shoveled snow almost daily this past week to keep my inclined driveway safe for my teenage driver. Privilege is the luxury to roll my eyes at the forecast or enjoy watching the snowfall from beneath a quilt, rather than fearing its effect. The means to insure my teenage driver, owning a family car (much less two!), and being able to afford a shovel are all privileges of wealth.

Snow has concretely anchored me this week to the flood scene in Parasite, but other threads in my life are also woven into the reality of my privilege.

Last week I began a new role as a case manager for the nonprofit Bridge of Hope. Tonight I’ll visit my first client, a single mom enrolled in our housing subsidy program designed to prevent her recidivism back into homelessness. I am anticipating this new role will force me to straddle both my present privilege of being a two income family as well as my past childhood of living not far above the poverty line as the child of a single mother.

Last week I also spent hours on the phone seeking to secure a medication that has helped me successfully manage a chronic illness. My copay for the first two years of my diagnosis was $0 but insurance companies and their specialty pharmacies altering the “tiers” of the drug I rely on have now made it unaffordable. I’m straddling both the privilege of having health insurance and not qualifying for medicaid as well as the handicap those are, ironically, in seeking financial assistance.

Parasite. Privilege. Snow. Homelessness. Medication. Any movie that helps me more deeply engage my own personal experience of privilege, as well as feel seen in ways it is absent in my life, is indeed Oscar worthy!

What did privilege look like for you growing up? In what ways did you experience affluence and poverty—either physically or metaphorically? What story of straddling privilege and the absence of it do you need to tell in order to be more compassionate to yourself and others in the present?

Unlearned

My favorite new discovery is an On Being podcast called Poetry Unbound. The first episode highlights a poem by Brad Aaron Modlin that is both simplistic and haunting, reminding me of places in my story where I felt like an orphan trying to navigate life on my own without a compass.

Whether it is how to be at rest with unfinished things, give myself over to a fantasy novel, celebrate without sugar or appreciate eye liner, there is much goodness I’ve taught myself as an adult that would have been so nourishing to have learned at an earlier age.

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”

A poem for what you learn alone by Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer.

She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home.

This prompted Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.

What do you remember learning, discovering or figuring out on your own growing up? What did you want to be able to do but had no one to teach you? In what ways did you feel you were left to stumbled through the dark and what heartache did that bring? What story of navigating life alone do you need to tell in order to be kinder to how long it’s taken you to learn what others have always seemed to know?