WILL THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR PAST FREE US FROM THE PRESENT?

Does understanding our past relieve us of its influence? A male complained that he had consistently taken abuse from friends and acquaintances. He didn’t feel that he had the right to assert himself against their abuse. However, through psychotherapy, he saw that this had been the way he had been treated by his caregivers. He then “understood” that not speaking up for his welfare and setting boundaries were behaviors and a self-concept he had inherited and that they no longer had to dictate his life. He therefore began to set needful boundaries with his friends and acquaintances.

We don’t like seeing anyone abused, so we regard this as a “success story,” but is it? There are two problems here. For one thing, our memories can be either distorted or highly selective. Therefore, this male might not be connecting the right dots in his analysis of his past and how it impacts his present.

However, we might think, “Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is now finding relief from his feelings of unworthiness and is now setting necessary boundaries.”

This might be true, but he is left with a problem that will eventually resurface. Even if he has correctly assessed that his failure to set boundaries was a product of his past, it still fails to give him the rationale he needs to resist victimization.

Let me try to illustrate this point. If we realize that our past “nurturing” inculcated us with the idea that we should tolerate abuse, all this realization tells us is that we need not be led by our past. However, it fails to tell us what we should be led by or to give us an objective standard of behavioral and cognitive rightness. It doesn’t tell us why we shouldn’t tolerate abuse.

It is like the girl who was taught that it is wrong to abuse others. While this might help her to understand her disdain for abuse, it does not answer the question, “Is it wrong to abuse?” It would therefore be absurd for her to begin to abuse others, because she now understands that her disdain for abuse had come from her parents.

It is not enough for us to merely connect the dots and to understand our present inclinations from the perspective of the past. Instead, it is more important to have an objective standard for right behavior.

When I first began going to church, I felt strongly that everyone who came to shake my hand was a hypocrite. However, I found that it is more important to live by the guidance of the objective truths of Scripture and love others than it was to understand why I felt this way. When I began to treat others with love, miraculously my opinions of them changed.

It wasn’t enough for me to know that my feelings of self-loathing came from the way I had been treated as a child. Instead, I needed to know that I was lovable and had value. This was something that I was unable to obtain through psychotherapy. Nor did it seem to matter how many times the psychotherapist would assure me that I am a “good person.” My deeply ingrained feelings of self-loathing would just laugh at these reassurances.

What could assure me that I had value? The psychotherapist’s words were only his opinions and were unable to penetrate to the depths where my feelings were preaching their life-controlling messages.

It was only Jesus who was able to break through my deadly waves of self-loathing. I became assured that if He loved me so much that He had died for me, while I was His enemy, He would love me all the more once I became His friend (Romans 5:8-10).

This awareness didn’t come overnight. Since I had not known love as a child, it was hard for me to believe/feel that God now loved me. I had hated myself and therefore projected that everyone else, including God, hated me. And I felt sure of this. I was also sure that I had to produce a steady stream of successes in order to be worthy of anyone’s love. This, of course, caused me to envy and even hate those who had more success.

However, Scripture began to rewrite my own script. I began to experience the “love of God that passes all understanding” (Ephesians 3:19) and the assurance that He would never leave me (Romans 8:38-39). Even through suffering, the words of my Savior became more real to me:

·       “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Jesus does give us a “yoke” and a “burden,” but these can become the instruments of freedom from many of the things that oppress us.

DOES PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINE MORALITY?

In “Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality” (2015), psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple has written that it does:

·       Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.

Psychology not only regards us as a product of social and genetic causation, but it also communicates a materialistic worldview in which our values have no objective basis. Instead, we are told that our values are relative to the material causes that have produced us.

With these materialistic assumptions in place, we are doomed to see ourselves as nothing more than materials and the result of material causes. How degrading!

Dalrymple reveals that:

·       The fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.

How does clinical psych cause self-obsession? Simple – it claims that you have the resources within yourself to change. You just have to learn how to unlock these resources. One way is to believe in yourself by building your self-esteem, and this requires a lot of self-obsession and self-reconstruction.

Why? Life is difficult. We need hope to get out of bed in the morning. Without God, hope inevitably centers on the self, and this will cause us to obsess on whether or not we can bear the weight of this hope. This turns out to be a costly hope.

In contrast, Jesus taught:

·       Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Consequently, I no longer have anything to prove to myself. This is because I am no longer the source of my hope. A great relief!

DENIAL AND THE REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE OUR EVIL IMPULSES AND EVEN GOD

We have been bred on the philosophy, “You got to believe in yourself.” However, this belief is like an addiction to porn.

Let me try to explain. In order to believe in ourselves, we have to see ourselves in a favorable way. This means that we have to inflate our self-esteem. How do we do this? We feed ourselves on positive affirmations and deny or suppress the negative.

Once we get the rush of thinking that we are superior, it is hard to let go of it. Instead, we have to continually feed ourselves with positive illusions in order to regain the initial rush. This means we will become increasingly self-deluded as we pursue our mentally induced “high.”

So what? Don’t we need to think highly about ourselves? For one thing, I don’t think that we are able to see the costs of this addiction.

If we fail to see our dark side, we will not be able to stand against its power. And it is powerful. In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver has presented many examples of the power of the dark side – our overwhelming need for positive affirmations:

•                Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)

Writer Gore Vidal had been very transparent about the need – the addiction – to continually prove his superiority:

•                “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” (58)

If we have become addicted to an inflated self-esteem, it is an addiction that always needs to be fed. It is also an addiction of jealousy.

The more we are on the self-inflationary track, to more we will become unable to receive corrective criticism. Why? We have trained ourselves to only see the self-congratulatory messages, not the negative. These bring us down, and we need to be high.

In fact, our antennas become acutely attuned to negative messages. On numerous occasions, when I had stated the simple Biblical statement that we are all evil, people have become very defensive, even aggressive. One husband slammed the table, protesting that his wife “is not a sinner.” She then had to calm him down.

He needed to believe that his wife was superior to others, and he was willing to fight to defend her “honor.” His reaction was extreme but it also reflected the extent we will go to defend our or our family’s superior virtue and worthiness.

In order to resist the power of the evil within, we need to both see it, accept it, and stand against it. Believing in oneself opposes these things. It is a drug that resists any true self-reflection. It also destroys and resists humility.

Scripture often points to our blinding pride – our overriding tendency to think too highly of ourselves. In Jesus’ letters to the churches in the Book of Revelation, we read that those two churches that had the highest regard for themselves were actually the worst:

•                “And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. “‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die…’” (Revelation 3:1-2; ESV)

To the church at Laodicea, He writes:

•                For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. (Revelation 3:17)

These two churches had a high estimation of themselves, but they were asleep and had blinded themselves to their true status before God. They were commanded to “wake up” and to repent of their self-trust.

Refusal to see our dark-side is reflected in so many ways. Recently, I went to a meeting of people with emotional/mental problems. To encourage them, I claimed that we are all damaged merchandise. (I didn't add that we are damaged by sin.)

I was surprised to find that several objected to the very-obvious idea that they are damaged. Some didn't like thinking of themselves this way and actively resisted this idea.

Why? After all, they had joined a group which acknowledged that they had emotional problems. Instead, two charged that I had offended them. One fired back:

·       Speak for yourself. I never gave you the right to speak for me.

I was surprised that I had "personally insulted" him. But why such defensiveness? I had surmised that if he had truly accepted himself, he wouldn't have reacted so strongly.

Instead, his reaction suggested that he was unwilling to confront his sin-damaged self. This refusal would damn him to an unending international struggle to suppress his dark-side, as it would continue to emerge, fighting for the stage. This fight also would inevitably deprive him of peace and rest. Besides, when we refuse to acknowledge this dark-side, we no longer have the ability to keep it from stealing center-stage.

He embraced the secular hope - that we have within us the ability to change and to give ourselves the necessary positive affirmations to fuel our engine of transformation. 

However, I offended him again. I suggested that believing that we have the ability to transform ourselves just puts an extra burden on our shoulders. When we find that we are unable, we feel doubly the failure.

I then concluded that we have, therefore, been created to trust in God to do the heavy transformational lifting.

He quickly informed me that I had broken the rules:

·       You can't talk about God here. Not everybody believes in God. If you want to say that the belief in God or the spaghetti monster works for you, that's okay. But you are not allowed to tell me that God must work for me or anyone else here.

God cannot be allowed to exist because He violates the house rules! I guess that settles it. 

However, this rule comes with a high price-tag. We can only deny our dark-side and its Ultimate Answer but at great cost. It is like buttoning our shirt by starting with the wrong button. Every other button will be out of place.

HIGH SELF-ESTEEM vs. LOW SELF-ESTEEM

 

I met an experimental psychologist on the train to Princeton. We eventually touched on the question of what humans need to thrive.

Of course, everyone has a different take on the subject. Some propose that we need high self-esteem, while others propose the opposite – a low self-esteem. I know that this sounds strange, so let me try to explain the rationale of the latter group.

The proponents of a low self-esteem do not call it “low self-esteem,” but that’s what it is. It involves the denial of freewill and moral accountability. They believe that we are just a sophisticated biochemical machine. As such, all of our thinking and deciding is pre-determined by the laws of chemistry and biology. Consequently, everything that we think has already been determined by physical forces. Therefore, there exists absolutely no basis for free choice or even thinking.

How can such a view of humanity be desirable? Isn’t it demeaning to think that we are nothing more than a wet machine, a mere result of chemical-electrical reactions? Psychologist James Hillman warns against adopting a deterministic view of ourselves:

·       “We dull our lives by the way we conceive then…By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents.” (“The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,” Random House, 6)

Why then would some psychologists promote such a demeaning self-image? In the short run, it does relieve shame and guilt. How? Well, if the client is convinced that he couldn’t have acted in a way contrary to his biological programming, then there is no real basis for shame and guilt. These feelings are reduced to inappropriate reactions and can be ignored.

An atheist friend had confided that he adopted this self-identity at an early age, and this enabled him to reject these very bothersome feelings. Also, if we believe that we couldn’t have acted otherwise, this view enables us to dismiss feelings of regret and other burdensome feelings. It reduces life to this attitude, “I am just along for the ride. What will be, will be.”

Well, what’s the matter with this comfortable ride? Much! First of all, it contradicts our experience and perceptions that we do have freewill and could have behaved otherwise. To doubt something as basic as our experience of making free choices, is also to doubt all of our perceptions about self. It is also to fail to make sense of this world, where we see that freewill is a relative thing. Some have less freewill than others – the heroin addict and the comatose. However, from the perspective of the above materialistic denial of all freewill, there is no way that we can say that some are more free than others.

For another thing, if we cannot act otherwise, then punishment is no longer justified. Why not? There is no longer any basis for guilt and culpability.

Lastly, if we cannot make changes, why try? Why attempt to learn, improve our job performance, or confront relational problems? Why not take the easy way out – denial and avoidance of anything uncomfortable? In short, this self-concept represents a tragic denial of reality.

High Self-Esteem (HSE): Well, if this form of low self-esteem is a dead end, does this mean that we should aim towards inflating our self-esteem, believing, “I can do it.”

This is the “normal” and more common strategy. HSE gives us a confidence and enables us to get out of bed in the morning and to proactively face life. This strategy had enabled me to face threats. I told myself that nothing could stop me and that I could endure anything that life would throw at me, and it worked, at least until I faced some threats that were bigger than me.

Western society had made HSE into a cult, claiming that it could heal all of our hurts and failures. However, this faith hasn’t been able to withstand scrutiny.  Psychologist Roy Baumeister has extensively researched the relationship between high self-esteem and performance:

• For three decades, I and many other psychologists viewed self-esteem as our profession’s Holy Grail: a psychological trait that would soothe most of individuals’ and society’s woes. We thought that high self-esteem would impart not only success, health, happiness, and prosperity to the people who possessed it, but also stronger marriages, higher employment, and greater educational attainment in the communities that supported it.

• Recently, though, several close analyses of the accumulated research have shaken many psychologists’ faith in self-esteem. My colleagues and I were commissioned to conduct one of these studies by the American Psychological Society, an organization devoted to psychological research. These studies show not only that self-esteem fails to accomplish what we had hoped, but also that it can backfire and contribute to some of the very problems it was thought to thwart. Social sector organizations should therefore reconsider whether they want to dedicate their scarce resources to cultivating self-esteem. In my view, there are other traits, like self-control, that hold much more promise.

• There are now ample data on our population showing that, if anything, Americans tend to overrate and overvalue ourselves. In plain terms, the average American thinks he’s above average. Even the categories of people about whom our society is most concerned do not show any broad deficiency in self esteem. African Americans, for example, routinely score higher on self-esteem measures than do European-Americans.

HSE also represents a flight from reality into what feels good for the time being. However, how can it be a source of problems? In order to manage our lives effectively, we must first understand our lives and their long-term needs. However, HSE represents a rejection of understanding and reality in favor of short-term comfortable feelings.

For one thing, building HSE is always comparative. It is not enough to improve our performance. Instead, HSE requires that we see ourselves as superior. I had taken a test that I feared I had bombed. However, I delighted to find out that I had been given an “A,” until I found that most of the class had received an “A+.” Consequently, this need for HSE brings us into harmful competition with others.

HSE is also a refusal to engage the truth about ourselves. It refuses to look at our painful aspects. As a result, HSE increasingly cannot take criticism and needful self-examination.

HSE spells death to relationships where humility and forgiveness are key. Those afflicted with HSE are increasingly unable to apologize, because they see no need to apologize. Why not? They are assured that it is the other person’s fault.

HSE is seldom grateful for their partner. Why not? They are convinced that they deserve better. As I have learned to confront some ugly truths about myself, the more grateful I became for my wife who would love and tolerate me. However, before I couldn’t and wouldn’t see this. It was just too demeaning.

Both of these options are reality denying. They serve as a comforting addiction, but we find that we need increasingly high doses of this HSE drug. The richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller had been asked, “How much more money do you need to be happy?” His answer – “Always a little bit more.”

Is there a third reality-affirming alternative? As Jesus had taught, our normal response is denial:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

We avoid discomfort and run from the painful truths about ourselves. Is there anything that can break this cycle to enable us to live in the truth and yet not be crushed by it?

We need confidence and hope. However, I have found that Christ has provided for my needs. How? He has loved, assured, and forgiven me to the extent that I can now face my failings confidently and healingIy. Consequently, I no longer need to lie to myself and rely on HSE. I now have Him to rely upon.

And this self-image is ennobling. There is no greater privilege than to know that I am serving the source of all life, truth, and love.

My psychologist acquaintance was listening. I pray that this will become a seed that will germinate.

Taking this case a step further – If psychologists and other professionals are really concerned about human thriving, they have a responsibility to consider Christ, the ultimate among change-Agents.