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I would like to offer a few preliminary observations from this study to the emerging adults who feel lost on their spiritual journey, and invite those of you who are older leaders to “listen” in. These observations come from your peers—young adults who were nominated by mentors as spiritual exemplars for this study. While these young adults have their own struggles, I hope the common themes emerging from their vibrant spiritual lives will provide encouragement and direction for your spiritual journey.

These young adults feel they have been found by God, and subsequently experience spiritual transformation. Spiritual transformation for them is all about relationships and I think that resonates deeply with Scripture and with psychology. They pursue a deep connection with God in their everyday relationships with friends, mentors, and their communities.

1. Relationships with Friends: The young adult exemplars we interviewed seek spiritual friendships for encouragement and accountability. They realize the importance of good friendships, and the impact they have on their values. They often pray about their friendships. They choose their friends, in part, based on their spiritual life. As they have gotten older, these emerging adults find themselves focusing on deepening a few close friendships.

2. Relationships with Mentors: These young adults reported that mentors were and are very influential in their spiritual development. For some, particularly those who came from unhealthy families, these mentors have been like second parents to them. They conveyed the idea that they wouldn’t be where they are today without these mentors—that these mentors changed their life direction completely. They experience God’s love through these mentors in very concrete ways. They don’t feel they made this experience of love happen through their own effort or merit; instead, they feel God found them. By gradually opening themselves to God’s love as expressed by their mentors, they are being loved into loving. Many of these young adults also came to realize that guidance comes more easily in the context of ongoing relationships, and so they are intentional about pursuing contact with their mentors.

3. Relationships in Community: These young adults talked about becoming increasingly aware of the impact their relational environment has on their spiritual life. They realize that the values of their communities shape their own, for better or worse, and this informs their decisions about how and how much they connect with various groups.

So, your peers would encourage you to find friends, mentors, and a community who want to invest in you, and invest in them. When God finds you, and He will, open your heart just a little bit more, and allow yourself to be loved into loving.

1. Recognize that playing to your strengths is strategic for you and your organization. According to a 2007 Gallup survey, only one-third of workers in the U.S. report having “the opportunity to do what they do best every day.” This suggests that most organizational leaders in the U.S. do not develop a strengths-based culture. In fact, nearly nine of ten people agree or strongly agree that improving in their areas of weakness is the best way to improve performance. This is the current you are swimming against, especially in a dysfunctional system.

Research suggests a very different picture: the greatest potential contribution you will make lies in your strengths. You will grow most in your strengths because you will naturally practice and continue to learn in these areas. And the greatest contribution you will make to your team also lies in your unique strengths. In Strengths Based Leadership, Gallup researchers Tom Rath and Barry Conchie reported that the most successful leadership teams possessed a broad range of strengths that typically spanned four domains: executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Teams need to be well rounded, but you don’t. The most powerful contribution you can make to any system, including a dysfunctional one, is to focus on your strengths.

2. Identify the precise activities that make up your strengths. A first step here is to take the StengthsFinder 2.0 measure developed by Gallup, which you can find at strengthsfinder.com. This will provide you with your top 5 themes, as well as an action plan. While I have found this tremendously helpful, it’s like a 30,000 foot view of your strengths. To really get a handle on your strengths, I have found Marcus Buckingham’s suggestion (in Go Put Your Strengths to Work) extremely helpful: reflect on specific activities you do on a weekly basis, and pay attention to how you feel before, during, and after the activity. As I highlighted in the previous post, do you feel competent in it, compelled to do it, immersed when doing it, and fulfilled after doing it? Or, in contrast, do you feel incompetent, repelled by it, distracted while doing it, and drained afterwards? For a one-week period, write down how you feel about all your major activities. Then once you identify the ones that are strengths, try to capture each one in a clear, one-sentence statement.

3. Create value by gradually spending more of your time on your strengths. In a dysfunctional system, you will be pulled to react to the negative emotion, rigidity or chaos. In order to lead the system toward increased health, you have to proactively shift your job toward your strengths for the good of the organization. This is difficult in all organizations, but especially in dysfunctional systems. First, connect your strengths to your current role. Spend some time thinking about how you can accomplish your functions differently by employing your strengths.

Second, note ideas you’ve had that flow from your strengths but that you may have dismissed without thinking much about it, because they didn’t fit directly in your job description. Over time, you can make them fit. You will have to put some extra time and energy in at the beginning, but once you create tangible value, it will become clear that this activity needs to be done, and that you are the one to do it.

Stay tuned for practical strategy #5: Seek extra support outside of work.

Reflection: What are examples in which you have created value based on your unique strengths?

First, what is a strength? A strength is not just an activity at which you excel. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the whole picture. When an activity is a strength for you, you will:

• Feel competent at it

• Feel fulfilled after doing it

Strengths, then, are activities you are naturally good at; but more than that, you feel compelled to engage in these activities. Instead of having to force yourself to start doing them, it’s just the opposite. You’ll find yourself engaging in these activities even when something else is a higher priority—call it “productive procrastination.” So you feel drawn to these activities before you start doing them. And once you start, you lose track of time because you become immersed in the activity. This experience is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” When you experience flow in doing an activity, you easily focus because the activity is intrinsically enjoyable. When you’re done, you may feel physically tired, but you don’t feel emotionally drained; instead you feel a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

For example, I enjoy teaching and speaking. When I am preparing to present a seminar on a topic I feel competent and interested in, I don’t have to force myself. I naturally gravitate toward spending time preparing. When I’m actually doing the presentation, I become immersed in a “flow” experience. It’s as if everything else fades away in the background and all my attention is focused on the presentation. After doing a presentation, or teaching a class, I am physically tired, but I feel emotionally invigorated.

So, how do you swim upstream in an unhealthy organization? As Marcus Buckingham puts it in Go Put Your Strengths to Work, you need to develop the “push” discipline. Instead of allowing yourself to be pulled by the uncoordinated demands of a dysfunctional system, you need to push, gradually and incrementally, toward your strengths.

Stay tuned for practical strategy #4: Push Toward Your Strengths.

Reflection: When do you experience flow?

Neuroscience has taught us that we catch each other’s emotion. It’s like a Wi-Fi connection for emotions. It happens mostly through the nonverbal channels of communication that are processed very rapidly and outside of our conscious awareness by the right brain and the subcortex, or the lower part of the brain. So if there is negative emotion in the system, you’re going to catch it automatically. How, then, do you absorb it and not just spew it back into the system? Here are four practices that can help.

First, develop the habit of regularly tuning into your emotions. When you notice you have some sort of bad gut level feeling, try to name it-do you feel sad, angry, overwhelmed, helpless, irked, betrayed, bitter, shocked, confused, etc.? To be an effective leader in any sphere, you have to discipline yourself to regularly create space to tune into your emotional state. This is especially difficult for Type-A, driven personalities. But you have to do it nonetheless. If you can’t do it on your own, find someone who can help you do this.

Second, try to name the sources of the negative emotions. Spend some time reflecting on where the bad feelings come from. Don’t worry about trying to solve anything at this point. The goal is to take an accepting and compassionate stance toward yourself. You’re just trying to describe your feelings with an attitude that says, “whatever you are feeling is understandable and OK.” There are reasons for your emotions. Some of the reasons will be due to the current situation, and some of the reasons will inevitably be due to your connection filters (see the first entry in this series on connection strategies). The very act of naming the negative emotions and source events begins to transform them.

What you are doing here is integrating two ways of knowing: gut level knowledge and head knowledge. When you translate gut level knowledge into words, it transforms the gut level knowledge.

Third, talk to someone outside the system who will listen and not try to fix the problem. Often times it helps to solidify this translation process by talking through your feelings and experiences with someone you trust. They can help you see things you can’t see, and validate your experiences. Even if they see where your filters are operating, if they point this out to you in a compassionate way, this can be tremendously helpful. It can sting, to be sure, but if you can handle the sting, you will learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t otherwise.

Fourth, don’t respond until you no longer feel anxiously compelled to respond. What do I mean by “anxiously compelled?” Well, there’s a negative sense of being compelled and a positive sense, and they feel different internally. You may be compelled by love, or gratitude or generativity to help someone, or to move the dysfunctional system toward health. But you also may feel compelled to respond out of anger, frustration, bitterness, anxiety, and the list could go on. If you feel compelled to act based on negative emotions, don’t do it. Put it on the shelf and don’t respond for awhile. If you don’t have the space internally to respond in a positive manner, then you have to create the space externally first.

Give yourself enough time and space until your negative emotions decrease and then start to focus on positive solutions. How can you model the health you want to create in the system by the way you respond? And it’s important to remember it’s not just the content of your response that matters; it’s also the emotional tone with which you respond. In fact, your emotional tone is more important, because that is what others in the system will catch.

Stay tuned for practical strategy #3: Move toward your strengths and create value.

Reflection: What are ways that work for you to create space to tune in to your emotions?

Chances are you have experienced working in some capacity in a dysfunctional system. After all, every system is dysfunctional to some extent. I have worked in systems like this and have worked with many leaders trying to survive chaotic systems. Leading in a system like this can start to eat away at your soul.

While there are many things outside of our control, there are six practical strategies (among others) you can focus on to make a positive impact and prevent burnout. In this blog, I’ll discuss the first practical strategy. In the next five entries in this series, I’ll discuss the other five strategies.

Practical Strategy #1: Understand your own connection strategies. There are three common strategies most of us use to manage our sense of connection with others. These strategies stem from how we connected with important authority figures in our lives. These experiences become “connection filters” that influence our gut level perceptions of relational experiences, particularly with authority figures such as leaders, and groups. The challenging thing is that this filtering process happens outside our conscious awareness in real time. There is a substantial body of research suggesting that our connection filters operate with groups and leaders with whom we work. Understanding your typical connection strategies can help you navigate a dysfunctional system. The three most common connection strategies are:

– a secure strategy promotes: 1) a balance between connection and autonomy–or the ability to inhabit your true self, 2) perspective, and 3) flexibility in responding.

– an anxious strategy promotes fear and anxiety that groups and leaders will not be consistently available for connection. When this is operating, you expect and look for leaders and groups you work with to do a bait and switch. So you are always on guard, and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent.

– a distant strategy promotes a lack of awareness of your own and others’ emotions. When this is operating, leaders feel like they’re the only reliable people on the planet, and so they dismiss others in numerous ways. When people on your team feel dismissed, they will shut down to what you have to offer, and true dialogue comes to a screeching halt.

Which strategy kicks in for you when the system gets particularly crazy? (Keep in mind that you may use different strategies with different people). If it’s one of the insecure ones (anxious or distant), here are two practices you can do to help:

1. Reflect on what experiences contribute to your strategy, and spend some time trying to separate your filters (based on your past experiences) from the system’s dysfunction.

2. Then look for ways you can change the cycle of your perceptions by taking some risks. If you’re anxious, try to give others and yourself more space and seek out support outside of work to help you manage your anxiety. If you’re distant, try to tune into your own and others’ emotions, and focus on hearing others’ perspectives before responding.

Stay tuned for practical strategy #2: Stay above the fray and focus on positive solutions.

Reflect: What is your primary connection strategy and how do you see it operating in dysfunctional systems?

The ancient Church Fathers didn’t use the word mysticism. However, the adjective, mystikos, on which the word mysticism is based, was used frequently. The noun mysterion means, most simply, “a secret” and so the adjective mystikos essentially means “simple or hidden.” The word carried the idea of the secret life available in Christ because the depth of the gospel has unending implications for our lives.

Mystikos was also used in intimate connection with the sacraments and the Eucharist and so it was a communal experience. It didn’t emphasize an ecstatic experience of rapture, and it wasn’t disconnected from doctrine. Instead, the mystikos life in Christ was precisely the working out of the gospel in the lived experience of Christians.

Jesus’ death that we remember on Good Friday, and his resurrection that we celebrate on Easter Sunday, have such profound implications for the rest of our lives, that we cannot possibly see them all now. They are a secret to us now. We will spend the rest of our lives discovering the gratitude we will experience for the greatest gift we could have never imagined—undeserved life with God. Your secret life in Christ awaits you. Let it start this moment with gratitude for the Gift that made it possible—that Jesus died the death we should have died, and rose again, conquering death itself.

The top three growth facilitators were peer relationships, working through suffering, and Bible/theology classes. This, and numerous findings from both studies, highlight the centrality of relationships and a biblical worldview for spiritual development. This suggests that we need to communicate a theological framework for growing through relationships, and for the role of suffering in spiritual growth. In addition, we need to develop a relational environment that will help students process their suffering in a growth-producing way.

This is a stage when students begin put together the theological pieces of a Christian worldview. A junior I interviewed, who I’ll call Steve, talked about how he views his whole faith differently as a result of his Bible/theology classes at Biola.

“There were all these things that I guess I didn’t think about before and didn’t really know existed from my faith in middle school and high school, before Biola,” he said. “So I would get in the Word but there was no theological understanding of piecing things together from Scripture. … I just feel like there has been this whole transformation of the way I view God and Christ and even my relationship with him.”

A Christian worldview, however, must transcend our head knowledge and permeate our souls. Research clearly indicates that a biblical worldview, morality and character become real in one’s life through close relationships, one of which is our relationship with God. Close human relationships, particularly with authority figures, are also crucial to help students see what it looks like in real life to live out integrity, a biblical worldview and, most of all, love.

Processing suffering is another catalyst of spiritual growth, because it often gives us access to deep places in our soul that move us away from God — places we would not otherwise know existed. Trials shake up our negative gut-level expectations of God and other important people in our lives. Working through trials, however, always occurs in the context of relationships and community.

A group of scholars recently developed the idea of “authoritative communities” as the kind of community that is necessary for human development. These are communities that provide structure (e.g., morality is embedded in the community) and love and warmth. These communities have an idea, even if implicit, of what it means to be a good person, and the leaders provide love to the younger members in order to help them become good people. I hope and pray that Biola and all Christian colleges are becoming this kind of community for our students.

We found five different types or groups in terms of their pattern of scores on the 22 scales. This suggests that we need to identify these groups so that we can tailor spiritual formation plans to their needs.

• Type 1 (21.4 percent of the sample) is secure and engaged; in other words, quite spiritually mature for this stage. This group was highly secure in their sense of connection to God and highly spiritually engaged in practices and community. We need to further strengthen these mature students and encourage them toward leadership.

• Type 2 (15.2 percent) can be described as distant yet engaged. They reported a distant connection with God, and were moderately engaged in spiritual practices and community. We need to help this group develop relationships in which they feel seen and known to address their distant connection to God.

• Type 3 (25 percent) has average security and engagement. This group reported an average degree of security with God and spiritual engagement. We need to help these students find their strengths.

• Type 4 (27.2 percent) can be described as anxious and disengaged. This group was highly insecure in their connection to God (mainly anxious) and moderately low in their spiritual engagement. This group needs help with developing what attachment theory calls a “secure base”; that is, a deep, gut-level sense that caregivers are consistently responsive to their emotional and relational needs.

• Type 5 (11.2 percent) is insecure and disengaged. This group was highly insecure (both distant and anxious connection to God) and very low in their engagement in practices and community. This group is the most spiritually immature, and represents a high-risk group for emotional problems and dropout. We need to proactively identify these students and begin mentoring them at the beginning of their freshman year.

The Five Spirituality Types
I used a statistical technique called “cluster analysis” to put students into groups based on similar patterns in their answers about their spiritual practices and relationship with God.

Secure and engaged: 21.4%
Distant yet engaged: 15.2%
Average security and engagement: 25%
Anxious and disengaged: 27.2%.
Insecure and disengaged: 11.2%

Stay tuned for the last reflection from this research project on the spirituality of college students at Christian colleges…

These open-ended responses all suggest that emerging adulthood is a time of relational difficulties and this affects every aspect of students’ spirituality. Relational loss, stress, and conflict is the norm for college students, which stems from their identity exploration and instability that is an intrinsic part of this stage of life.

The challenge for this stage is to navigate relationships with God and others in the process of solidifying one’s identity and learning how to love. The students I’ve interviewed who seem to be mature for their stage are the ones who are transitioning from more superficial relationships at the beginning of college to a handful of deeper relationships toward the end of college. Having many relationships can still be good, but not when it’s at the expense of truly being known by others. We learn about ourselves in close relationships, and peer relationships significantly shape students’ identity during this stage. Core patterns of relating will start to emerge during this stage and it’s important to explore these during this phase. For those of us mentoring students who are in this stage, we need to provide the grace and emotional/spiritual space for our students to explore and model for them how we are increasingly finding our identity in Christ.

Stay tuned for the next reflection…..

How do we make sense of this? When we look at this in the context of brain development and “emerging adulthood,” I think this is probably a normal developmental trajectory. The brain goes through a massive reorganization between the ages of 12 and 18, and this continues into the early 20s. Parallel to these brain changes, students’ identity, sense of self, and worldview all go through an extensive reorganization during this period as well. With all this brain and identity reorganization, it makes sense that this is a time of spiritual instability.

Jeffrey Arnett captured a developmental phenomenon that has been growing for the past 50 years with the concept of “emerging adulthood,” roughly the age span of 18 to 29. Emerging adults tend to feel somewhat like a kid, and somewhat like an adult, but not fully like either one.
In this stage, students are at a spiritual crossroads: They are figuring out what kind of person they want to be, what kind of people they want to travel life with and what kind of work they want to do. They are also figuring out what role they want God to play in their lives. This leads them to travel many pathways in a short period of time. This means that manifestations of their spirituality will often go down.

It may be, however, that decreases on some indicators of spiritual development during the college years actually reflect a deepening of one’s faith. This is a period that often requires a certain deconstruction of one’s identity, sense of self, and worldview in order to build the foundation for an adult identity and a more mature spirituality.

In light of this, I suspect that as we interview seniors in the current study we are conducting, we will find evidence that their spirituality is deeper than that of freshmen, even though they report lower scores than freshmen on self-report measures. This will help us better understand spiritual development during emerging adulthood.

Stay tuned for the next blog in this series….

First, I think the secure connection to God, sense of meaning and Christian perspective is noteworthy good news. Despite the instability and struggles of this stage, the breakdown of the family and increasing rates of emotional problems among children and college students, students attending Christian colleges have a secure connection with God, which is the foundation for spiritual development.

Despite this good news, students at Christian colleges are generally not practicing their faith in a substantial way. Why might this be? It may be partly due to busyness, which was the most frequently reported struggle. It may also be that students feel that spiritual input is built into their environment so they don’t need to be intentional about it — as one student, who I’ll call Jim, described to me in an interview.

“Even when you have a bad day, you are going to Bible classes, you’re going to chapel, you’re all around your Christian friends and your days look so similar,” he said. “It just seems like it’s easier to kind of coast internally, spiritually, and in my heart. Whereas being at home or being out of the environment, I have to get into the Word for the strength of the Word and that is why I have to go and be with the Lord every morning.”

In general, I think we need a better understanding of how to (1) help students be intentional about their spiritual growth and (2) continue the process of owning their faith. This characteristic may also relate to the second reflection: students’ developmental stage and how that impacts spiritual transformation over time. To the extent that students are focused on trying on new identities in love, work and faith, spiritual practices may go by the wayside.

Stay tuned for the next reflection….

“The authors of Psychology in the Spirit, John Coe and Todd Hall, represent the very integration of disciplines that they argue for in their new text. Coe’s background in philosophy and theology merges quite well with Hall’s practitioner background in clinical work and research, making them the perfect team to write a book on the transformational integration of psychology, theology, and philosophy. This is the hallmark of this text, which is a part of the Christian Worldview Integration Series.”
Read the full review by Dr. Ronald Welch from Denver Seminary

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One of the most important goals of Christian colleges and universities is to help students grow spiritually and develop their character. Likewise, one of the biggest challenges universities like Biola face is evaluating how we are doing in this area. In fact, secular accrediting agencies have begun asking such schools for evidence that they are assessing and improving student spiritual development, since it is a core part of our mission.

Spirituality can never be evaluated perfectly, but I believe we can obtain useful indicators of where people are in their spiritual development process. The whole issue of measuring spirituality is a complex one beyond the focus of this blog series, but I will address this in another blog post. Before we start measuring anything, however, we need a theologically and psychologically informed theory of spiritual maturity and development.

For the past 15 years, I have been working on such a model of spiritual development. The Reader’s Digest version is that theology, psychology and brain science are converging in suggesting that spiritual development is about loving relationships with God and others, and that relationships change our brain, soul, and ability to love. As author Robert Karen eloquently put it: “We are loved into loving.” I call this model “relational spirituality” (see articles on my relational spirituality model here).

This journey has led me to develop ways of measuring and assessing relational spirituality, which in turn led to the pursuit of research on the spirituality of students attending Christian colleges in the hopes of helping these colleges answer the crucial question: Are our students growing spiritually?

In 2003, I headed up a talented research team in launching of a large study designed to track the spiritual development of 500 Christian college students from freshman to senior year. Funded by The John Templeton Foundation and Biola, the research involved in depth interviews and twice-a-year surveys about each student’s spiritual practices and relationship with God.
A year later, I began a second research project that allowed Christian colleges to measure 22 indicators of students’ spiritual lives using the Spiritual Transformation Inventory (STI) that I developed in the early stages of the longitudinal study. To date, more than 3,000 students from nearly 40 Christian colleges across the United States and Canada have participated. Together, the studies provide a fascinating snapshot of how students at Christian colleges are doing spiritually. And some of the results might surprise you.

Stay tuned for the next blog in the series as I offer the first of five brief reflections synthesized from five years of national data and the four-year longitudinal study.

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Often times, these moments happen when someone important in your life shares in very personal way a positive feeling about you and the relationship. It is a moment of very human connection that infant psychiatrist Daniel Stern and his colleagues call a “moment of meeting.”

Sometimes these moments happen when we expect a negative reaction from someone, and instead, we are surprised to receive empathy and care. One of my psychology graduate students, who I’ll call Julie, told me about a moment of meeting she experienced with a supervisor. She was working in a state psychiatric facility as a clerk (doing mainly psychological testing). As Julie was waiting for a patient to come to the nurses station, she overhead another patient telling one of the staff that she (the patient) was thinking of hanging herself, and didn’t think she could stop herself. The staff told her to do one of her therapeutic exercises, essentially telling her, “go deal with it yourself.” They didn’t seem to have time to help her, or to care. Overhearing this, Julie felt frustrated and sad for this patient and decided to intervene, even though this was outside the scope of her normal duties. She ended up spending several hours talking with the patient, and helped relieve the intensity of her suicidal thoughts. She informed her supervisor, who came to the unit, and told my student he wanted to talk with her in person. Julie expected, based to some extent on her previous experiences with male authority figures, that her supervisor was either going to reprimand her or correct her. Instead, what he did totally surprised her. He thanked her for intervening and asked her how the whole situation unfolded. As she shared the story, she began to cry. Julie told me that she felt like her supervisor knew she needed to process this. Instead of criticizing her (which she expected male authority figures to do), he was warm, supportive, and interested in her experience. She cried most of the way on her drive home. This was a moment of meeting that shifted Julie’s sense of herself and how important people feel toward her.

As you continue in your own spiritual journey, I would encourage you to attend to your own mind and to God, to be present in the moment, and to look for opportunities for moments of meeting. You can’t manufacture spiritual transformation, but you can prepare the way for it through relational connections.

Question: What are some moments of meeting you have experienced that led to deep transformation?

One of the discussions that comes up with all my clients at some point is that I do not have a specific agenda for each session. Many clients often come to therapy with the medical model as their schema for how therapy works. So, they expect that I will have an agenda for each session; that there are series of clear and objective steps to “fix” their problems. Usually, there is some level of anxiety and discomfort as clients learn that I don’t have an agenda in the sense of specific things that should be discussed. The reason I don’t have an agenda is precisely because I am trying to be present with my clients in the moment. And being present is how love works. Love does not coerce.

On one occasion, a client I’ll call Tanya came to session and sat down in her usual chair—so far so good. I customarily allow my clients to begin with whatever is on their minds, again, in an effort to be present with them and not push an agenda onto them. In this case, Tanya said nothing. I sat there in silence with her. She continued to say nothing but looked at me intently. I continued to say nothing back; I tried to just be with her in the midst of the silence. She didn’t say anything the entire session—sixty minutes of silence. It would be easy to think that the thing to do in such a situation is to try to get her to talk. That seems like a reasonable agenda; after all, therapy is called the “talking cure.” But Tanya was free to talk at any time. I respected her choice, however ambivalent it was, to not speak. I had no agenda for that session, including any agenda for her to talk. My only “agenda” so to speak was to be with her. Interestingly, that experience turned out to be a tipping point for Tanya. She needed to be with me and yet not have to talk, and she experienced my allowing her to not speak and being with her in the silence as caring and respectful.

I believe that being present in the moment is a core part of what it means to find our identity in Christ and to express this identity through service, rather than finding our identity in the “doing” of our service. In other words, mindful awareness is central to help our doing flow from our being-in-Christ, and ultimately from love. Only when I am present in the moment can my doing flow from my being. If I am not present in the moment, I am operating on automatic pilot, and there is no sense of being. Doing is operating on its own, apart from any conscious, attending “me,” and apart from the Holy Spirit. When this happens, I live in the past or the future. When I am present, however, I begin to break the top-down patterns of brain activation that keep me on autopilot. I begin to rewire these circuits in a way that frees me up to receive new information, to be surprised by new perceptions that were ruled out by my previous top-down patterns.

Perhaps this allows us to gain a greater glimpse of the God who is. Our experience of God is colored by our experiences of important people in our lives, and these relationships always bring some negative experiences with them. The most profound tipping points occur when we see God more for who he really is, which changes how we see ourselves. But God does not force us to be with him in a way that restructures our gut level knowledge of him. He invites us to be present in the moment with him and to receive his love into the core of who we are. Being present also helps us to receive and create moments of meeting—another type of experience that paves the way for spiritual tipping points.

Question: When do you feel most present in the moment?

The practice of mindful awareness has to do with focusing your attention on your direct experience in the present moment, and fostering a certain orientation to your experience characterized by curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love. It is a core component of centering, or contemplative prayer within the Christian tradition. Mindful awareness isn’t just being aware in a general sense. It has to do with being aware of aspects of your mind, and this can be done in the context of prayer. So it is being aware of your mind and soul, which is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. These kinds of practices have been difficult for me, but they have also been tremendously helpful. When I think of mindfulness and contemplative prayer, I think of some of the teachings of the ancient spiritual directors.

One interesting teaching, for example, is that the Desert Fathers believed that their spiritual advice took full effect only after the novice returned home and pondered the “father’s” words in silence without distractions. I think the emphasis on silence (and solitude) here is very instructive and ties in with the idea of mindfulness. Daniel Siegel, in his book The Mindful Brain, notes that there are six aspects of mindfulness: awareness of multiple perspectives, non-reactivity to experience, observing sensation, acting with awareness, labeling, and being nonjudgmental of one’s experience.

These experiences are difficult to maintain, but I think they unfold primarily through silence and solitude. Many of us in contemporary society have the experience of being “always on”—constantly bombarded with some kind of stimuli or with demands on us. I have come to see that if I don’t make an intentional effort, it is easy to never be alone with my thoughts and with God. Attending to the stimuli that bombard us from the outside is precisely the opposite of mindfulness. We give up control over what we focus our attention on, and the result is that we don’t attend to our own mind or to God. In addition, our attention is scattered in such a state, making it difficult for new thoughts, new information, and new perspectives to emerge.

Silence and solitude help us to focus our attention on our mind-in-Christ, and to allow new things to emerge. As we practice silence, we develop the capacity to be present in the moment. The present moment is the only place we begin to be aware of our sensations, our observations of our own mind, and of a knowing that has a more direct quality to it. This is a gradual process that takes a lot of intentionality, but as we develop the capacity to be mindfully aware—to be present in the moment—we come to more easily hold multiple perspectives; we become less reactive to our experiences; we observe our sensations; we act with a deep awareness of our own mind; we label and translate our experiences in a way that doesn’t remove them from their experiential nature; and we don’t judge our experience automatically in an autopilot mode. All of these aspects of mindful awareness prepare the way for tipping points—for deep shifts in our soul and our ability to love others.

Stayed tuned!
More on mindfulness and contemplative prayer in the next blog in this series.

Question: What has helped you to be mindful of yourself and God?

Two of the most common questions my clients ask early on in therapy are: “how does this process work?”; and “how long will it take?” Often times, these questions betray an overwhelming fear that the process won’t work; that there is no hope for them to change. I think of a client I’ll call Jessica who was plagued by a deep sense of loss that impacted all her relationships, including her relationship with God. Her gut level belief was that everyone, including God, would eventually leave her. The overwhelming anxiety from this expectation contributed to a painful relational pattern in which Jessica relied heavily on others to manage her emotions and comfort her, causing them to pull away and leave her, yet again. Sadly, she helped create the very experience she most feared: abandonment. Despite constant effort, Jessica couldn’t seem to change this pattern, and it continued for quite awhile in therapy. I can remember many sessions well into the therapy in which Jessica would tearfully ask me, “Do you think this will ever change for me?” She didn’t know how to have a different kind of relationship. And she was scared to give up the only thing she knew about how relationships worked for her.

Just as it was for Jessica, change can be scary and confusing for all of us. But understanding some key principles of change can help you stick with the process and prepare the way for change. The visible effects of deep change (when your sense of self and ways of relating to others shift in a fundamental way) seem spontaneous, but they are the result of a certain structure. That structure is emotional security that stems from experiencing love and connection from God and other important people in your life. These relationships prepare the way for “spiritual tipping points” in which deep change occurs. In this blog, I will briefly outline the characteristics of spiritual tipping points, and then turn in the next few blog posts to ways we can facilitate them.

Malcolm Gladwell adapted the concept of “tipping points” from sociology to help us makes sense of how ideas, trends, and products spread through our society like an epidemic. What happens is that an idea or product gradually gains momentum, and then at some point, a few small events cause the phenomenon to “tip,” or take off. Gladwell gives the example of Hush Puppies shoes. They had all but died out until, in the early 1990s, young adults in Manhattan started wearing them, which led to fashion designers putting them in their shows. They went from selling 30,000 pairs a year to 430,000 pairs just a few year later in 1995, to quadruple that number in 1996—they tipped. You may be thinking, “What do hush puppies have to do with change and transformation?”

Well, I think the kind of change illustrated by this story is the kind we most long for (and fear at the same time). It’s not superficial change—it’s deep change at the core of your soul and sense of self. The essence of the deep change process is that little changes combine to produce big changes because they lay down new pathways. The “effects” that are visible seem to happen dramatically and quickly because we don’t see all the work going on behind the scenes. Deep change doesn’t happen without a lot of small changes that are always taking place behind the scenes, but the moment the visible change takes off in a certain direction is the “tipping point.” When this happens in the spiritual and emotional core of our soul, I think of it as a “spiritual tipping point.” So even when you feel like nothing is changing despite a lot of effort, there is a lot of processing going on behind the scenes paving the way for spiritual tipping points.

Now, just because we have a concept to describe some small part of how this kind of change works doesn’t mean we can manufacture it or predict it. However, there are several kinds of experiences that can facilitate spiritual tipping points. These agents of change are all interrelated, like different facets of a diamond, and they all have to do with connection. Certain types of relational connections change the neural connections in our brains, which is the way our brains record new, gut level relational experiences with God and others. These brain changes correspond to changes in the soul. Transformation, then, always happens in the context of relationships.

More to Come

There are several different types of experiences that seem to be associated with tipping points, and in the next few blog posts, I will discuss two: mindfulness and contemplative prayer, and moments of meeting.

Question: What experiences have facilitated spiritual tipping points for you?

In an amazing letter to the church at Philippi, Paul mentions the words joy and rejoice sixteen times even though he was writing from prison. He tells us to “Rejoice in the Lord always…” (4:1), and to present our requests to God with thanksgiving (4:6). Paul had learned to be grateful in any circumstance and he experienced a lot of suffering. I don’t think those two things are coincidental. Somehow, suffering shaped Paul to know Christ in a deeper way, and his intimate relationship with Christ was where he found his contentment and gratitude. I wasn’t even in prison, but I wasn’t very grateful for anything in my life when I had no job in sight. So, how do we find gratitude in the midst of suffering?

When things are moving along without bumps in the road, we don’t tend to be aware of our core beliefs about ourselves, our relationships, and how we find meaning in life. When the bumps come, we are suddenly faced with our core assumptions. When it didn’t look like I would be able to find a job in psychology, I was faced with some stark realities about my core beliefs. At first, I was depressed and bitter. Gradually over a period of time, however, God used this time in my life to show me how I emotionally banked on my own abilities and knowledge to make life work. I realized that I wasn’t trusting God. I gave lip service to trusting God with the future, but in reality, I was doing life on my own power. This was one experience of many that God has used to help me connect to him in the truth of who I am. I am profoundly grateful, not for the pain itself, but for the way God used this experience to help me grow. I was stripped of the false things I relied on to make life work in my own estimation, and enabled to see what was in my heart. That was the gift—the gift of seeing the dark places in my heart. I don’t think I would have seen what was in my heart, or experienced this deeper connection with God, had I not gone through this process. And for that I am deeply grateful.

It sounds strange to say I am grateful for coming to the end of myself. And yet, in a paradoxical way, I think these types of experiences have the potential to cultivate a more robust form of gratitude than when I receive good things and I’m not at the end of myself, because most of the time, this means I’m not growing to know Christ better. The most profound gift I can receive from God—next to entering into a relationship with him—is for him to allow me to see my heart, and to transform it so that I am closer to him.

Question: How have you found gratitude during trials?

Imagine showing up for a visit to someone who has deeply impacted your life for good and, unbeknownst to them, you hand them a letter expressing your gratitude and they read it in front of you. Who would it be? What would the letter say? They read the letter, and they are overwhelmed with gratitude at your expression of gratitude. Tears of joy start to flow. Your connection deepens, and you are suddenly focused on the present moment. This (the receiving end) is how I feel when a client gives me a card expressing their gratitude, or verbally expresses their gratitude to me.
During one session with a client I’ll call Jane, after she had experienced a healing tipping point, she was describing to me how she felt different; how she felt God’s presence in her life, even during the abuse she experienced as a child, and how she felt grateful for everything. She thanked me for everything I had done for her. I was utterly amazed at the transformation that I was witnessing before my very eyes, and I became tearful. She noticed and asked me about it. I told her how I felt—that I felt profound sense of joy over the transformation and growth that she was experiencing, and gratitude for being a part of it. She began to cry. Moments later, after she collected herself, she told me she had never experienced a man in her life who had felt joy for her. Jane’s expression of gratitude led to a moment of gratitude connection that changed us both for good.

Something in me is transformed when I express gratitude to God as well. We are encouraged in many passages to give thanks to God. In I Thessalonians 5: 18 Paul says, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” The word thanks in its various forms shows up over 150 times in the Bible. We are instructed to give thanks thirty-three times. Remembering God’s goodness is the starting point for cultivating a life of gratitude, and paying a gratitude visit to God brings us full circle. In expressing our gratitude to God, we acknowledge our dependence on him in all things, and his goodness. We bring our general sense of gratitude to God into relationship with him. It helps us to see God’s goodness to us in deeper ways and from different angles. It seems to me that when I give thanks to God, I sense his presence in a palpable way. The Holy Spirit opens new aspects of connection to God as I bring an offering of gratitude to God.

Question to ponder: Whom would you pay a gratitude visit to? What would your letter say?

I experience the other side of this coin when I express my gratitude to others. In a weird way, it’s harder to express gratitude to those I’m closest to, because it brings on such strong emotion. It’s a positive experience of connection, but it’s still an intense experience. If a friend or acquaintance gives me a ride to pick up my car from the mechanic, I can say thank you and mean it, but it’s not all that intense. It probably has to do with the magnitude of what the gift meant to me and what the giver sacrificed to give it.

For years, I have often thought about writing notes to my wife to express to her the things about her and our relationship for which I’m thankful. I just don’t express my gratitude directly to her far often enough. I take her for granted, and I rationalize it by telling myself I’m probably close to the national average of gratitude expression for husbands! When I really start to think about it, though, I sense that I would be overwhelmed with the fullness-gratitude feeling if I even started this task. Again, it’s a positive experience of connection, but the intensity of it often causes me to shy away from it. I think, “She knows how I feel.” After all, I told her the day we got married right before she laughed and cried at the same time when we walked out of the church.

I think part of what makes the experience intense is that, if you’re open to it, it brings you into the present moment immediately. To meaningfully express my gratitude to my wife means that I have to translate this deep, gut level sense of gratefulness into an interpersonal experience between the two of us. I have to capture my gratitude in words and express them to her. I can write her a letter or note and give this to her, or I can look her in the eyes and tell her how grateful I am for her. So, for example, I might tell her that I am very thankful that she is deeply committed to God and our family; that she continues to grow in her walk with God; that she is compassionate; that she is making a great contribution to her field as she pursues her multiple callings with grace, wisdom, and focus.

But when I do this—when I bring my gratitude for my wife from the backdrop of my life to a focused expression directly to her—something happens. In an instant, I am catapulted from living in the past or future into the now. Instead of thinking about “what’s next,” I am focused on the rich blessings of “what’s now.” And, I am catapulted into an experience of connection. There is something about expressing this deep and complex thing we call gratitude that fosters connection to others, and leads us to a place of joy. It’s hard to imagine a more joyous moment in my life than those when my wife and I have connected in the midst of gratitude for each other. Expressing gratitude doesn’t make it any more real than when you don’t express it, but it deepens the experience and meaning of it by creating a gratitude connection. When we “do thanks,” we connect, and when we connect, we become more loving.

Question to ponder: How can you better express your gratitude to others?

People in the gratitude condition felt better about their lives as a whole and were more optimistic about the future than those in either of the other two groups. The gratitude folks were, in fact, 25 percent happier than the other participants on the measures used in the study. In addition, those in the gratitude group reported fewer health complaints than the neutral group, and they experienced fewer symptoms of physical illness than either of the other two groups. They also spent about 1.5 more hours per week exercising than those in the hassles condition, which is a huge difference.

In a follow up study, they increased the gratitude intervention to a daily practice over the course of three weeks. In this study, they changed the events condition to a comparison condition. They asked people in this group to think about ways they were better off than others. People in the gratitude condition felt more joyful, enthusiastic, interested, attentive, energetic, excited, determined, and strong than those in the hassles condition. A particularly revealing finding was that those in the gratitude group felt more connected to others, and reported offering more emotional support or help to others with a personal problem. This finding wasn’t just limited to what study participants said about themselves. The researchers also sent surveys to people who knew the participants well. Those in the gratitude group were rated by their significant others as more helpful than those in the other groups.

The simple act of consciously focusing on our blessings, then, appears to foster not only an overall sense of well-being, but also a higher capacity to connect with others and to focus on their needs. In short, counting our blessings transforms us to be more loving individuals. It’s easy for me to focus on reasons why it’s difficult for me to engage in certain spiritual disciplines like this one. I’m too busy. Life is busy because I have kids—I get a lot of mileage out of that one. “When the kids go off to college I’ll work on that,” I say to myself. But this is something I know I can do now. I know I can focus, each day, a little more on the things I’m grateful for; a little more on the goodness of God. One simple way to do this is to take time at the end of each day to reflect on how God was present with you throughout the day, and on the gifts and blessings that occurred throughout the day. You can also start each morning off by simply reflecting on, or writing down several things you are grateful for.

Question: How has counting your blessings impacted you?

I think there has to be a pretty deep foundation for approaching my entire life with gratitude. To be thankful for everything—everything from my family to my health, to the ability to watch a beautiful sunset, to hearing my sons laugh with delight, to playing basketball with my sons, to having a meaningful conversation with my wife, to connecting with a client or friend in the midst of pain, to experiencing God’s presence, to somehow knowing God is there even when I don’t sense him, to believing that God will redeem my own pain, and the pain of my family, friends, and clients—I have to know in the deepest places of my soul that God is good with a capital G. All the “little” things in life that I am thankful for—the stuff of daily life—point to the extravagant goodness of God. As Psalm 107:1 says: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.” That is ultimately what I’m thankful for. I’m thankful to the Good and Loving God who is behind everything, the God who is my breath, and who makes my heart beat.

G.K. Chesterton, the great writer from the last century, was a man filled with gratitude, wonder, and awe for life. He was so filled with gratitude that he felt the need for someone to thank for the goodness of life itself. He wondered, “How can a person can be thankful unless there is someone to thank?” This driving question ultimately led to his conversion to Catholicism at the age of 48. We are thankful for the little things in life, the big things, and everything in between, because there is Someone behind it all who is worthy of our gratitude on the grandest scale.
We love because God first loved us. As Robert Karen put it in his book Becoming Attached, we are “loved into loving.” It is the only fitting response to so great a gift. The more God’s gift of relationship with him sinks in to our souls, the more thankful we will become. To really “get” what God has done for us, is to be thankful. And this leads to a life of joy. Chesterton said gratitude produces the most joyful moments we experience. If I think back on my most joyous moments in life, every single one of them involves a profound sense of gratitude. Recognizing God’s goodness is the first step toward developing a life of gratitude. Pioneering research in recent years has revealed that counting our blessings is a next step in helping us cultivate a grateful life, the topic to which we’ll return in the next blog.

Question: What has helped you to recognize God’s blessings in your life?

Two Deadly C’s for Gratitude: Consumerism and Comparison

One day when my wife and I we were visiting my dad in his affluent neighborhood, the parent of one of my niece’s friends came to pick up his daughter. He started telling us about how his daughter had recently fallen on the playground and gotten a small cut on her forehead. Then he said, “my wife and I both tried to contact our plastic surgeon, but he was out of town, and we didn’t know what we’re going to do. Luckily, we found another plastic surgeon who we knew was good and was able to see Maggie right away.” My wife and I, sitting on the couch, looked at each other. We were both thinking, “Plastic surgeon?? It was a little cut on her forehead!” (We didn’t say this out loud). Now, it’s important to know that he said this very matter-of-factly as if everyone in the neighborhood calls his or her plastic surgeon the second Johnny gets a scrape. And he said it this way, I later learned from my dad, because everyone in the neighborhood does call their plastic surgeon in such instances. My wife and I experienced a little bit of subculture shock. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want my kids to have life-long scars on their faces from playground trauma, but this seems a little over the top. I think this is a reflection of the consumerism and comparison mentality that our culture pushes.

Billboards, TV commercials, magazine ads, and consumerism in general bombard us with the message that in order to have a fulfilling life, we need more and better stuff, and we need to look better. Consider these startling statistics:

- Adults spend an average of 3 hours and 39 minutes watching TV each day.

- By the age of twenty-one, the average adult will have seen one million TV commercials.

That’s one million messages encouraging you not to be happy with who you are or what you have—one million messages encouraging you to be ungrateful. Our culture pushes us to constantly compare ourselves to others to purposely promote feelings of discontentment and deprivation. It’s pretty hard to feel grateful when you are constantly feeling discontent with your stuff, your body, your smile, and even your personality. Think about what that does to our souls with respect to gratitude.

Research has shown that comparing yourself with people who have more and better stuff (what social psychologists call “upward social comparison”) leads to:

- less positive emotions

- higher levels of depression

- higher levels of resentment

If you’re constantly focusing on what you don’t have, you’re not very likely to be grateful for the blessings you do have. In contrast, research has shown that grateful people are:

- less likely to base their happiness on material possessions

- less envious of others

- less likely to define success in terms of material things

In his wonderful book, Thanks!, Bob Emmons suggests that, instead of focusing on what you don’t have and what is just out of reach, you should try to “want what you have.” Try that as a thought experiment.

Question: What would your life be like if you wanted what you have?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[podcast]http://www.alidaderesearch.com/blog/podcasts/Blog_5_Barriers2.mp3[/podcast]

Expressing Positive Emotions of Intimacy

When I was growing up, I wasn’t very comfortable expressing positive emotions of intimacy growing up. My family just didn’t do that. At thanksgiving, or birthdays, we never really expressed what we meant to each other. We never really expressed gratitude. When you do that, people get emotional. And if you’re not used to that, it’s really uncomfortable. I am much more comfortable with this now, but when we first had thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family, it was a bit of an adjustment. You see, their tradition is to go around and have everyone express something they are thankful for. My wife’s family would get all mushy and emotional as they expressed gratitude to each other. One of them would start crying tears of gratitude, and that would set everyone else off. Then they would start laughing, because they were crying. They would be laughing and crying at the same time (which is what my wife did right after we walked down the aisle after getting married-I’m still not sure what that means). I wasn’t sure what planet I was on at first. But they did this because they were comfortable expressing positive emotions that are an inherent part of feeling connected to others. So it was easy for them to express gratitude. This is one of the reasons it has been a great blessing to be part of my wife’s family. If you can’t express positive emotions of intimacy, it’s pretty hard to feel grateful.

Gifts with Strings

One of the things a client I’ll call Jane struggles with is gifts from her father. Her father would often stop by unannounced, and bring in a car full of gifts and stuff. Jane usually didn’t need or want most of the stuff, and it cluttered her house up. And to add insult to injury, there were things she and her family needed help with, but her dad never seemed to figure out what those things were, and never helped her with them. So Jane didn’t get help with some important needs, but she did get all kinds of stuff she didn’t want or need. We have spent many a session talking about what she should do about this. Should she ask her dad to take the things back? To not bring gifts at all? Or not say anything and allow her house to become more and more cluttered with stuff she doesn’t need? When she has explained to her dad that she doesn’t need certain things, and asked him to take them back, she would get the “you’re an ungrateful daughter” treatment. Even if she didn’t say thank you profusely, she would get the same treatment. Clearly this a painful dilemma. One of the most painful things about it is that her dad’s gifts demonstrate that he doesn’t know Jane well, and that he’s not even remotely attuned to her needs.

Recently, she had a conversation with her father in which she gently confronted him on some things. The next day, her dad brought her hundreds of dollars worth of clothes. The last time she called her dad on some things, he showed up the next week with some new furniture for her. Clearly, there are some ulterior motives going on here. Jane’s dad uses gifts and money as a way to maintain some semblance of connection to his daughter. And he uses them to make confrontations go away. He expects gratitude. Is it any wonder that Jane doesn’t feel particularly grateful for these gifts? I think it’s pretty understandable. These gifts are not given freely, with the main purpose of benefiting Jane. They are used to control, manipulate, and engender a sense of obligation. When we feel a gift is given with strings—when we feel gratitude is expected—it’s hard to feel grateful. The gift becomes about the giver, and not the recipient.

In his book, Thanks!, Bob Emmons reflects on the question of whether physicians expect gratitude from their patients. If you expect gratitude, that seems to work against the entire gratitude dynamic. I recently read an interview with the head concierge at a very expensive hotel in Beverly Hills. The interviewer asked him a number of interesting questions such as what is the most outrageous request he has ever received. But the main thing that stuck out to me was when they asked him about tips, or “gratuity.” Interestingly, the word gratuity connotes the idea of something being given for the sole purpose of benefiting the receiver. This concierge understood that. He said he just tries to help the people who come to him the best he can, without expecting gratuities. “If you expect gratuities, they don’t come,” he said. In fact, he lamented about an incident in which his server at a restaurant counted his gratuities in front of him and his friend. This concierge tries to genuinely help people for the sole purpose of benefiting them, regardless of whether he gets a tip. This engenders a sense of gratitude among his customers, which fuels their desire to “do thanks” by giving a tip, a “gratuity”—not out of obligation, but out of a desire to express gratitude for the gift of service he has given them.

In discussing this issue, Bob notes that psychoanalysts have suggested that a longing for something in return from clients is understandable and may be related to unconscious motivations for choosing a career as an analyst. Hmmm…… Of course, this made me reflect on my own experience working with clients in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I think this desire to receive something in return in our relationships lurks in the background of all of our relationships, including psychotherapist-client relationships. Maybe this is part of what works against a true agape, other-centered love. It seems like the more deeply I reflect on gratitude, the more I see how it is intimately connected to love. However, I think we have to make a distinction between expecting or demanding gratitude on the one hand, and deriving a sense of meaning and connection in our relationships, and needing support in appropriate relational contexts on the other hand. Needing support throughout our entire lives is healthy; demanding or expecting gratitude isn’t.

When someone expects gratitude from others, it reveals a psychological hole in the self that can never be filled by gratitude. I imagine Jane’s father has a deep-seated sense of inadequacy he is trying to cover over by eliciting gratitude from his daughter. Others might have this motive in the work they do. I might help someone at work to get gratitude out of the deal, hoping it will keep my ego afloat for a while. The problem is that it’s a temporary fix. Jane’s dad might feel good in a superficial way when his daughter or someone else expresses gratitude to him. But when the scaffolding for his sense of self is taken away, he will deflate again, and need more gratitude to bolster his painful sense of inadequacy. And, the more he expects gratitude, the less likely it is that he’ll get it. It’s one of those unforgiving paradoxes of human nature.

So what do you do when someone gives you a gift with strings attached, or it’s from a person with whom you have a conflictual relationship? When I think of situations when this has happened to me, I don’t pretend to be grateful if I don’t feel that way. That wouldn’t be genuine. But I think it’s important for me to look at my own heart. Maybe the gift was given out of genuine care, but I’m bitter about something else, so I hold it against the person by maligning their motives. If that’s not the case, then I think I need to try to give the person grace and try to understand why it is they may need to attach strings to the gift. There is always some emotional reason, and if I’m honest with myself, when I look at their heart, I will say “there go I.” And, I can try to be grateful for the good in the relationship, and not focus only on the negative. That doesn’t mean I ignore the reality of the painful aspects of the relationship. But I can find good things to be grateful for in the midst of the pain. They can co-exist. It takes work to carve out the spiritual and emotional space for this, but I think this helps keep the gratitude cycle going.

This is also a reminder for me to examine my own heart when it comes to the gifts I give others, whether those be relational gifts, or material things. Am I trying to manipulate some outcome by giving this gift? Am I trying to smooth some conflict over to make it go away? I need to be intentional about asking the Holy Spirit to help us be discerning in giving gifts so I give them freely for the benefit of the other person. I need to be open to giving of myself to others, and sacrificing for the sake of others. That is my role in the gratitude cycle—it’s really to love others with an other-regarding love that doesn’t seek my own interests. I need to strive to create reasons for others to be grateful, to do thanks. I don’t do this to manipulate others to return thanks to me. That doesn’t work anyway. If that is my motive, others won’t feel thankful. More importantly, that’s not how God wants me to live. He wants me to live in his Kingdom, and part of that means helping others to feel full of thanks for feeling God’s pleasure in relationships that he designed us for. This contributes to the cycle of gratitude, and incarnates God in our communities. If we are a loving community, we will also be a thankful community.

I would encourage you to reflect on how you deal with the positive emotions of intimacy in your relationships with others, and with God. And how do tend to respond to gifts with strings? These are both difficult barriers to living a grateful life. It will only be through surrender to God’s grace that we will develop more intimate relationships of love and gratitude, and be able to extend grace to others when we feel we have been given a gift with strings.

I hope you’ll join me in the next blog as I wrap up our discussion of barriers to gratitude. I’ll talk about consumerism and upward social comparison, not being present, and holding grudges. I wish you blessings on your spiritual journey as you work toward living a life of gratitude.

[podcast]http://www.alidaderesearch.com/blog/podcasts/Blog_4_Barriers1.mp3[/podcast]

Ruminating about Negative Things

When I stop and reflect on my own life with respect to gratitude. I think I am more grateful in general than ten years ago, which is good, but I have a long way to go. Sometimes I’d rather ruminate about negative things. It feels better in a sick kind of way. I guess it makes me feel important if I’m on a soapbox, probably because I’m focusing on me. It’s just easier for me to focus on negative things and hassles. I don’t have to sit down and really think to come up with a list of hassles. It’s just right there—top of mind. For example, my family and I are going on vacation next week. Instead of being grateful to get away and be with my family, I’m annoyed that we’re driving and I’m going to have to take a second mortgage on the house to afford the gas for this trip. There are a few parts of my job that are a drag, not unlike the case for most people. Rather than focusing on the fact that I love most of what I do, it’s easy for me to ruminate about the stuff that’s a drag.

I have an office at home that’s a separate building in our backyard. It’s too small. I have books piling up so high that I’ll probably be killed or maimed if there’s an earthquake, and I can’t find anything anymore. Every time I go in my office I get frustrated trying to find things. Rarely do I think, “I am so grateful that I have an office at home.” I could go on, but you probably get the point. It’s just easier for most of us to keep the hassles in the forefront of our minds. Do you have a running list of hassles in your head?

In contrast, it’s much more difficult for me to pull up things for which I’m grateful. A few weeks ago, I decided to start a gratitude journal, and write down the things I’m grateful for. I got out a piece of paper and wrote “Things I’m Grateful For” at the top. And then I sat there and stared at the paper for an uncomfortably long time. I guess I thought my mind would just overflow with gratitude. It didn’t. I was able to write some things down, but I had to really consciously think about it. And that is the point. I realized that becoming a grateful person is going to take some real effort on my part. We have to really make a conscious effort to become habituated toward seeing life as a gift, and finding a reason for gratitude in everything.

Dependency and Vulnerability

Most people I know don’t like to be vulnerable and dependent on others. But as we talked about in chapter one, God hard wired us for connection and dependency. Why is it we have such a hard time being vulnerable? I think it’s partly a result of the fall. Every aspect of our relationships are messed up after the fall, and this is one of them. It seems to me that before the fall, dependency and vulnerability would have always been pleasurable, positive experiences. We get hurt the most when we depend on others, and most of us have been hurt or let down when we allowed ourselves to need others. Over time we learn to guard ourselves against being hurt again. We either keep others at arms length emotionally, or we manipulate others to meet out needs, but we don’t put our true self out there. If we are unable to acknowledge our dependency on others, it makes it very difficult to be grateful. For me to feel grateful to someone means I have to acknowledge my dependency on them.

I have a friend, Jerry, whose wife left him a number of years ago. Jerry and I spent a lot of time talking about how hurt and angry he is at his ex-wife for “tearing the family apart.” He allowed himself to be dependent on his ex-wife, and he feels like he got burned. As a result, he has closed up emotionally. When friends ask him if he will marry again, he would say he couldn’t imagine taking that risk again. To the extent his guardedness spills over and makes it difficult for him to be dependent on anyone, it will be difficult for Jerry to feel and express gratitude. The act of expressing gratitude to someone would remind him, and acknowledge to the other person, that he needs them in some way. Fostering dependency feels dangerous to Jerry right now, and understandably so.

It turns out that experiencing and expressing gratitude is difficult for a lot more Americans than just Jerry. A study of attitudes toward gratitude in several societies found that Americans rated gratitude comparatively low in desirability and constructiveness. American men, in particular, reported that gratitude is an unpleasant experience, and for some, even humiliating. One-third of the men reported that they prefer to conceal feelings of gratitude. Women, on average, reported an easier time openly expressing gratitude.

If we can’t feel or express gratitude to others because of our difficulty being dependent on others, this will likely play out in our relationship with God. We’ll look more closely at this in the third relational force, attachment filters. It seems obvious that we are dependent on God, but on an emotional level, sometimes we live as if we’re not. We keep God at arms length, because we don’t want to be let down yet again. And this makes it very difficult to be grateful to God.

I became a Christian when a friend, Ronnie, told me about Jesus, the summer before the fifth grade.  Every time I think about that, I feel a profound sense of gratitude.  When I think about God sacrificing his own son for me, I am expanded (not reduced) to tears of thankfulness.  It’s difficult to comprehend.  When I think about how God brought me the good news, through a 10 year-old kid, I have this profound experience that is difficult to translate into words.  But whatever is packaged in that experience, this is what we call “gratitude.”

Part of this experience is acknowledging the cost of the gift to God.  I think about this sometimes in relation to my two sons, Brennan and Aiden.  I can’t imagine the horrifying agony of deliberately offering one of my sons up to be tortured and killed as a sacrifice.  To think that God did that for me is stunning.  The cost of the gift makes it all the more valuable, and I feel all the more grateful because of it.

The cost is just part of what creates this experience of gratitude.  It’s also the goodness of the gift.  Entering into a relationship with Jesus doesn’t just change things after my physical death, it changes the kind of life I now experience.  It brought me into an abundant life because of knowing Christ.  There couldn’t be a greater gift.  The good news couldn’t be any better.  To understand the nature of this gift is to be grateful.  But sometimes I lose sight of this gift, and I don’t approach life with gratitude.  I have to constantly remind myself of this great gift from God.

Part of my experience of gratitude is recognizing that this gift came from outside myself.  I recognize that someone else, in this case God, has provided a gift to me.  This gift and the gratitude it engenders fosters a connection with God.  I am now in relationship with the One from whom I have received.  It is not a feeling of obligation, because the gift was freely given for my benefit.  I have a desire to give back.  I am loved into loving through gratitude for the gift God has given me.

Part of my experience is a feeling of being “full.”  I don’t know how else to describe it.  It’s an overflowing kind of feeling.  I think part of this feeling comes from the fact that I didn’t do anything to deserve this gift.  It’s what we call unmerited favor, or grace, in theological terms.  Gratitude has to do with receiving a gift for no reason other than the giver cares about us.  God simply chose to send his son to die for me, and to bring me the good news, not because of something I did, but just because he loves me.  This full, overflowing feeling compels me to want to give back.  I John 4: 9-12 says “…..since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”  God’s love, demonstrated in sending his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, naturally leads us to love others out of gratitude for what he has done for us.  We are paying God’s love forward out of gratitude.

Elizabeth Bartlett, a professor of political science, required a heart transplant at the age of 42 due to a chronic irregular heartbeat.  In her book describing her journey, she captures this sense of overflowing fullness beautifully:

Yet I have found that it is not enough for me to be thankful.  I have a desire to do something in return.  To do thanks.  To give thanks.  Give things.  Give thoughts.  Give love.  So gratitude becomes the gift, creating a cycle of giving and receiving, the endless waterfall.  Filling up and spilling over.  To give from the fullness of my being.  This comes not from a feeling of obligation, like a child’s obligatory thank-you notes to grandmas and aunts and uncles after receiving presents.  Rather, it is a spontaneous charitableness, perhaps not even to the giver but to someone else, to whoever crosses one’s path.  It is the simple passing on of the gift.

There is something deep within us that yearns to acknowledge the good things we are given from those outside ourselves, and especially good things from God.

This response of gratitude seems to be built into our nature.   We are hard wired to “do thanks” and this fosters a transformative love for others.  In fact, some fascinating research suggests how central gratitude is to our connections.  Researchers have shown that gratitude is associated with a smooth, coherent pattern in the heart’s rhythmic activity. The heart actually generates an electromagnetic field, far greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain.  A person’s cardiac field is influenced by her emotional states, and there is evidence that this electromagnetic field generated by the heart can be received by others.  When two people are talking, one person’s heart-generated electromagnetic signal can impact the other person’s brain rhythms.  When a person’s heart rhythm is coherent, it is more likely that the other person’s brain waves become synchronized with the first person’s heartbeat.  This is a deep form of “in synch” communication that fosters a sense of connection and appreciation.  Feelings of gratitude, then, facilitate a deeply “in synch” form of communication that in turn fosters a sense of understanding and love.  It seems God designed us to connect deeply when we feel grateful to others.  May we do thanks this Christmas season as we celebrate the greatest gift of all-God with us.

This research is described in Bob Emmons’ book, Chapter 3, p. 88.  Bradley, R.T., McCraty, R. & Tomasino, D. (2004-2005).  “The Resonant Heart,”  Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, December 2004-February 2005: 15-19.

A few months ago, I began reflecting on and reading about gratitude. The more I wrestled with what it means to be a grateful person, and with my own gratitude-or lack thereof more often than not-the more it changed me. Thanksgiving naturally directs our thoughts toward gratitude, but Christmas also seems an appropriate time to reflect on gratitude. In fact, I think gratitude is worthy of our attention, and intention, all year long. So in this blog series, I want to reflect with you on the role of gratitude in our spiritual journey.

You may remember a national drama that unfolded on Nov 19, 1997, at the Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa. Bobbi McCaughey had completed 30 weeks of a high-risk pregnancy. Against all odds, the most amazing deliveries in the history of the world were about to take place. The McCaughey septuplets were being successfully delivered. There had never before been a set of seven babies delivered that had all survived.

At 12:48 PM, the first baby, Kenneth Robert, was born. A daughter, Alexis, followed one minute later. By 12:54, Joel, the seventh baby, was born just over six minutes after the first. Kenny McCaughey, the proud father of seven children (all at once!) came out from the delivery room and after sharing the good news with everyone who had gathered in the waiting room, he joined his family and friends in singing the Doxology, a hymn of thanksgiving and praise to God.

If you followed the news at all during that time, you’ll remember that the McCaughey’s became instant celebrities. Everyone wanted to know the their story. They endured countless interviews. What was particularly noteworthy to me was that their interviews were filled with the language of blessings, gifts, thankfulness, and gratitude.

I remember thinking how overwhelmed we were with our one child, born 3 days after the McCoughey septuplets, and wondering in amazement how they coped with their new parental responsibilities. And what struck me as the McCoughey’s story unfolded is how joyously dependent they were on so many people, and how committed they were to expressing their gratitude to the many people who helped them. Hundreds of people volunteered to change diapers, bring meals, and drive the McCoughey’s back and forth to the neonatal intensive care unit.

How did they possibly find time to thank all these people? Their church formed a “thank you note” committee and helped them send out more than four thousand notes of gratitude acknowledging the gifts and help they had received. That’s a lot of thank you notes.

What an incredible testimony and model for us. And not just that they felt gratitude. Their gratitude was more than a privately felt emotion. It was a public proclamation of thanksgiving to God for his love and faithfulness. And at the same time, this public expression of gratitude was a reflection of their heart of gratitude–an orientation toward life that views all of life as a gift from God.

When you stop and think about it, gratitude should be the central motive of the Christian life. Martin Luther called gratitude “the basic Christian attitude.” In 1 Thessalonians 5:18, Paul says, “No matter what happens, always be thankful.” The more I have reflected on this, the more clear it has become that gratitude is at the very heart of the Christian life. Gratitude to God should fill us up to the point that love oozes out of us. It should be a central motive behind everything I do. I know this doesn’t reflect my life now. But it’s something I know I need to foster in my life every single day. How about you? Have you reflected lately on what you are grateful for, especially during this Christmas season? About how grateful you are in general? What about your own life came to mind as you read this? I would encourage you to take some time this Christmas, individually and with your loved ones, to reflect on and express your gratitude to God for the gift of our Savior-Jesus Christ. And if you sense God speaking to you through this, take some time to think about how grateful you are in general. If you want to do one thing right now to work on gratitude, start a gratitude journal, and start it by writing down everything in your life you are grateful for.

I will continue in the next several blogs to explore gratitude more in depth. In the next blog, I’ll explore the anatomy of gratitude, which has to do with acknowledging and recognizing. Then we’ll look at attachment dynamics (I’ll explain “attachment”) and gratitude, barriers to gratitude, and ways to cultivate a grateful life.