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On Being Human at the Table for Everyone

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:30:54 +0000

The Table (Seating)

We stand in the doorway to a round room with walls lost in the shadows. Dim-warm light comes from a source unseen, illuminating the center of the room. Dust motes float languidly through the light with no place to go.

And in the middle of the room—in the middle of the caress of light—a table. Round. Roughly hewn. Solid. Inviting.

The air sizzles and cracks with the sound of cooking food. Aromas waft in from doors unseen and the smell makes the mouth flood.

A crowd of people stands in the doorway and lines the walls, at the edges of the light.

And then the mad rush begins. Because the table invites, and everyone is desperate for a seat and space looks limited. The mass begins to shove and scramble as people claw for a spot at the table.

The big, round table begins to fill as people claim seats. Eyes are desperate and searching as the mass collides upon the center—everyone afraid to be left out of this game of musical chairs.

And the table fills with people.

And fills.

And everyone is getting seated and it’s magic and eyes get wide and wonder at the mystery, and the table expands without growing and everyone has a place.

The guests settle in and the food appears and the food is everything promised by the aroma and more. The food is Grace and it is endless and there is always enough to go around and the reality of it all begins to descend upon the jostling crowd:

At the table of life—at the Table for Everyone—the seats are limitless and no one is excluded and the food is Grace and breaking bread there is like coming home and coming together.

When Everyone Unsubscribed

Several weeks ago, I published a post about honoring the dignity and humanity in everyone, including people with different sexual orientations. And within minutes of the mailing, I received an avalanche of people unsubscribing from the mailing list. For the first time ever, a slew of readers told me directly in comments and by email they were unsubscribing because they were disappointed at the questionable and undesirable content.

The next day, due to a glitch in the delivery system, the email went out again. The response made the previous day’s reaction seem benign. Readers were concerned I was prescribing a belief, advocating for a political platform, or morally undermining our culture.

I wasn’t.

I was inviting everyone to the table.

Because I think we are desperate for spaces in this world where we can begin to put down all of our competitive identities—including sexual, racial, ethnic, religious, political, economic—and encounter each other with grace, as members of a human community who have more in common than in conflict.

I think we are desperately in need of a Table for Everyone.

The Table (Eating)

The table is full, yet there is elbow space for everyone and always space for more. The food has descended before each person and everyone gets the same amount because bottomless Grace is immeasurable. And the meal begins.

Except, for some people, it doesn’t.

For some people, arms are crossed. Scared and protective? Angry and aggressive? Both? They never expected a Table like this. They are wondering who put together the guest list, and who invited these people? These people who are wrong, who need to be corrected.

They try to be tolerant for a while, but eventually arms uncross as they push themselves away from the table. They get up. They walk away into the shadows.

Do the people at the Table revel in their departure? No. Because at the Table for Everyone, a loss is felt and people call out, begging them to return and to stay and to join. Some may return. Many won’t.

Meanwhile, there’s a second group of people at the table who aren’t eating. They’re like giddy schoolchildren. They’d dreamed of a Table for Everyone, but in the midst of their shame, they had decided “Everyone” didn’t include them. They aren’t hungry, because they are being fed simply by their belonging. They are too grateful to eat. All they want to do is call their friends—their companions in shame—and to spread the good news.

To let everyone know the Table is full but there is always room for more and everyone is invited.

Everyone else is eating. Talking is sporadic and it comes in murmurs and giggles. Because when you are consuming Grace—and it is consuming you—you’re mouth is too full to talk about who belongs and who doesn’t. You just sit. Together. And partake.

When I Apologized

Several weeks ago, after the second email went out, I sent out a third email, apologizing for the duplicate messages. I asked for grace in my messiness. And Dear Reader, you gave it to me. You sent me a bunch of emails thanking me for writing and giving it away. Dear Reader, you told me I had a place at your table and you fed me with grace, and for that I am deeply grateful.

And it made me realize, we are in relationship across the miles, aren’t we?

Despite the vastness of cyberspace and the actual geography separating us, on this increasingly interconnected globe, we are all in relationship. We are a mass of messy, broken humanity with a diversity of beliefs and histories and backgrounds. Yet when we truly encounter each other, when we let each other in, those distinctions begin to bleed away and the space between us shrinks and we get to be fully human together.

So, here in this space, I want to build a Table for Everyone—a big, round, rough-hewn table with a place for everybody.

I will keep writing about grace.

I will invite everyone.

I will hope you join me.

And I will hope we can partake together in the Grace raining down upon us—the Grace that is filling the Table for Everyone like an endless feast for all of humanity.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: On Being Human at the Table for Everyone-Audio [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook.

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “How a Chocolate Chip Bagel Almost Destroyed My Marriage.”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

A Father’s Letter of Apology to His Boys (For Father’s Day)

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:30:54 +0000

Dear Boys,

Today, I arrived at my office door, my mind spinning with countless concerns—house repairs and my therapy clients and blog comments and how to convince your mother I was right about something completely inconsequential. I found myself lost in the crowd of my various identities—homeowner, psychologist, writer, vindicated husband.

But then I found my office keys and the keychain you made me for Father’s Day and the three big, brightly-colored letters you inscribed upon it:

D-A-D.

I got ambushed by my most important identity—Father. And I realized for an entire morning, like so many mornings before it, I had gotten distracted from my most sacred role by all of my perfectionism and sense of duty and fear of rejection and desire for affirmation.

And something inside of me cracked.

I think it was my ego—the voice inside telling me if I want to be good enough I have to look perfect, take care of everyone, win everybody over, and be right all the time.

Boys, I want to apologize for my fierce but fragile ego.

Boys, I want to apologize for all of the ways I let my ego prevent me from being the kind of father of which you are completely worthy:

I’m sorry for every time you’ve needed an embrace and I gave you something less because affection requires time and presence and vulnerability.

I’m sorry for every time the projects in my life have been more important than the people in my world.

I’m sorry for every time I’ve demanded respect, instead of earning it.

I’m sorry for every time I’ve said, “No,” simply because I can.

I’m sorry for every time I’ve told you to be humble and then turned around and acted like losing was the end of the world.

And I’m sorry for every time I didn’t say, “I’m sorry,” because they are, I’m learning, two of the most important words a father can say.

But mostly, Boys, I’m sorry for all the times I have communicated in subtle and not so subtle ways that your worth is conditional upon my approval or my mood or the consent of my fragile ego.

Boys, don’t let anyone—including me—convince you that your worth is rooted in anything so transient as another person’s opinion of you.

Your worth is conditional upon nothing.

You came into the world with infinite value and you will leave it in the same way, regardless of what you do or don’t do in this life. I know this seems too good to be true—in fact, many people will tell you it is a recipe for entitlement and narcissism—but if you can learn to trust it, you will be free.

Free from the game of ego inflation in which so many of us are constantly embroiled.

Free to live what is written on your souls, rather than what other people have written upon you with their own brokenness and wounds.

Free to love yourself—and therefore others, as well—without condition and without limit in a world that places every kind of condition upon love and belonging.

Free to create beauty and abundance in a world that seems to be threatened by both.

Free to become portals of grace in a world that thrives on shame and condemnation.

Boys, instead of placing conditions of worth upon you, I want to become a reflection of your worth—I want to mirror the awesome beauty I see in both of you, so you can begin to see it in yourselves.

In the end, Boys, I hope you can spend your lives knowing who you are, instead of constantly proving who you are.

With deep admiration for who you are, all the time, wherever you go, whatever you do,

Dad

———

After my last letter, an interviewer asked me what words I would have for my boys. My first thought was, “Just two words: I’m sorry.” Because those two words have the power to undermine the ego game in which boys and men are so often encouraged to compete.

So, I wrote this for my boys—because I want them to be free of the game.

And I wrote it for the men who have had the courage to sit in my office, to feel broken, to let their egos die, and to discover who they really are.

And I wrote it as a permission slip to a world of fathers who have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way our world works, by freeing the next generation from the game we play, one father and one son at a time.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: A Father’s Letter of Apology to His Boys-Audio [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “On Being Human at the Table for Everyone.”

Are We Damaged Human Beings or Luminous Creatures Made of Stardust?

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:30:13 +0000

And what if the answer is, “Both?”

Photo Credit: vtooky via Compfight cc

Rural Iowa. A family wedding. Late night dancing. Children with sore feet. An isolated stretch of highway carries us back to our motel through cornfields and darkness.

Suddenly my wife asks me to pull over, tells the kids to get out of the car, and whispers, “You have to see the sky.” Raised within reach of Chicago’s light pollution, my kids had never seen the night sky unveiled.

We get out of the car. We stand beneath a canopy of diamonds.

Have you ever stared up into the black, star-pregnant expanse? Have you ever looked up into the vastness of a universe hurtling away from you at an unfathomable speed? Have you ever gazed upon the light of stars a billion years old?

In a cornfield in Iowa, I look up. And I feel inconsequential, unanchored, like pollen in the breeze.

I feel small.

My oldest son stands next to me, unusually silent. I wonder if he is feeling small, too. But then he looks up, and with awe in his voice he says, “Daddy, did you know humans are made of molecules from the first stars? Daddy, did you know we are stardust?”

Why Small is Only the Beginning

I think the heavens give us what we need.

As adults, we need to feel small again—it is a good and necessary experience. When we swell up with ego, feeling small shrinks us down to our actual size. When we think the world revolves around us, feeling small puts us in our proper orbit. Humility is a good thing—perhaps the best of things—and a night sky can humble an adult in a heartbeat.

But for children, who exist in a perpetual state of smallness and humility, a night sky is an entirely different kind of reminder: we are creatures composed of a brilliant light.

I think all of us need to stand in the middle of a cornfield in rural Iowa with a third grader and be reminded we are small-messy creatures and transcendent beings with the heavens in our blood.

I think we need it, because for most of us, the voice of shame has been whispering its pious rebuke at the edge of our tattered hearts for years. And it goes something like this:

“You are small and broken. Be aware of that alone. Stardust in your bones? Don’t be ridiculous—that’s a bunch of poetic nonsense, the fanciful musings of a child, romantic naiveté, the magical calculations of a bunch of physicists. Quit being arrogant and start getting real—who do you think you are to imagine you are more than small and damaged?”

When shame has convinced us that our smallness and brokenness is incompatible with our goodness and beauty and transcendence, we need more than a night sky to embrace the full, wondrous reality of who we are.

We need proof.

Which is why I’m going to tell you about my neighborhood.

Where Small and Magnificent Meet

In my neighborhood, I know a young boy who loves to read. He’s putting down his books this summer and strapping on a pair of running shoes. Instead of racking up pages, he’s going to rack up miles and raise money for his favorite charity.

That is smallness.

And stardust.

In my neighborhood, I know a family who annually hosts a lemonade stand one week a year to raise money for Blood:Water Mission. Last week, they raised thousands of dollars to give clean drinking water to people they have never met.

That is smallness.

And stardust.

In my neighborhood, I know a couple who had their hearts cracked open by orphans on the other side of the globe. They quit thinking of the orphans as “those kids,” and they decided to think of one of them as “my kid.” They will adopt him this summer.

That is smallness.

And stardust.

In my neighborhood, I know a woman with three children and a busy family. For the last decade, one night a week, she has sat up through the dark hours attending to a disabled boy who is not her own, so his parents could get some rest.

That is smallness.

And stardust.

In my neighborhood, I know a young girl who shouldn’t be alive. In infancy, she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and for months her parents were more familiar with the hospital than their own home. Last autumn, her family organized their annual 5K race to raise funds for research into the disease. Hundreds of people ran. One of the runners was their daughter.

That is smallness.

And stardust.

My neighborhood is just an ordinary neighborhood filled with ordinary people. Yet, at the same time, I live in a neighborhood that is, quite simply, a constellation of stars. A neighborhood of people who know they are small. And who act like they are made of stardust.

To put it simply, I live in a neighborhood of people who have been animated by grace.

Animated by Grace

Grace is ridiculous.

In one breath, it gives us a vision of our smallness and our brokenness. It gives us the freedom and courage to touch all the ways we are so fallibly human.

While in the very next breath, it gives us a vision of our magnificence and our transcendence. It gives us the freedom to know we are glorious and good and beautiful.

People who live within the freedom of this kind of grace become free to love themselves, to love each other, and to bear witness to a world that is both broken and absolutely radiant with beauty.

And you don’t have to travel to rural Iowa or to my neighborhood to be touched by grace and to become aware of your smallness and your stardust.

Because you, too, live in a neighborhood of shooting stars.

Because you, too, are both messy smallness and brilliant stardust.

Because you, too, can be animated by grace, right where you are.

I think we live in a world in which the whisper of grace is getting louder and our shame cannot withstand it and it is transforming everything within its embrace.

I think the whisper of grace is getting louder and I think it’s coming for you. And when it finds you, I think you will be the adult stargazer and the child stargazer, all at the same time.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: Are We Damaged Human Beings or Luminous Creatures Made of Stardust?-Audio [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “A Father’s Letter of Apology to His Boys (For Father’s Day).”

Breaking News: Celebrity Divorce Causes Global Uprising

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 29 May 2013 08:30:32 +0000

Photo Credit: Janrito Karamazov via Compfight cc

(UnTangled News)—The world was rocked yesterday by a cataclysmic event—a divorce—that will alter the course of humanity and the future of the planet.

Although details of the event are still being sorted out, we can confirm some basic facts:

For millennia, Love has been married to Power, clinging to Power and riding on his coattails, relying on Power to transform people and the world. Love had low self-esteem—she was afraid to exist on her own in the world, afraid of what people would do to her and say about her.

But yesterday, something changed. In hearts and homes and villages and cities and nations, Love finally gave up on the relationship. Love just up and walked out on Power, ending their partnership for good.

One close friend of the couple, who goes by the name of Inertia, was quoted as saying, “They were always at odds with each other. They kept each other in check. While they were together, you got the sense nothing would ever change. And I kind of liked that.” Inertia went on to add, “Now that Love is free of Power, I’m afraid she’s going to change everything.” Inertia refused to comment further, saying he needed to go take his Pepto-Bismol.

Reports from Around the Globe

Reports pouring in from around the globe suggest Inertia’s worst fear may be coming true—now that Love and Power are divorced, Love has been free to sacrifice and to lose and to be vulnerable and to invite and to release and to honor:

An older brother quit beating on his younger brother, picked him up, dusted him off, and offered to be his friend and his mentor.

A father quit screaming at his children—quit demanding obedience and respect—and instead began to whisper, coaxing them into love and respect by honoring their dignity.

A mother relinquished control over her children—she just gave up on perfecting them. She decided to let them be kids, to love them, and to accept whatever judgment comes her way from other parents about her messy children.

A wife quit wielding power through silence and isolation and withdrawal. She crumbled and confessed her broken-terrified heart to her husband.

A husband stopped acting as if sex was his daily right, looked his wife in the eye, and told her he would love her to the end, no matter what their marriage bed looked like.

A standoff over a parking spot dissolved into a friendship when one man freely offered the spot to his competitor and then volunteered to take him to lunch.

Violence, anger, and aggression have decreased precipitously in the last twenty-four hours. Road rage has evaporated, school cliques are dissolving, political debate has quieted to a murmur, churches are talking with each other instead of competing against each other, and the NFL is considering cancelling next season as it explores ways to revamp its game around something besides power and dominance.

Love and Power Hold Press Conferences

Sources close to Love say she is not interested in speaking with the media. Since the divorce, she has become much more quiet and contemplative. Although many are suggesting she will have no strength to bind the world together on her own, she is not interested in defending herself.

Her best friend, Grace, issued a final statement on her behalf: “My good friend Love is thrilled to be free and unfettered again. She is excited to go quietly about her business with little fanfare. She’s eager to spend her days becoming more intimately familiar with the hearts and minds of people everywhere. She’s a little rusty, so at first I’ll be reminding her how to invite people, instead of ordering them around.”

In contrast, Power immediately held a press conference. Reports suggest it was difficult to record his tirade, because the seating chart was incredibly stringent, most reporters couldn’t find their seats, and anyone left standing was thrown out. Those who did remain say Power was essentially incoherent with anger.

Power’s best friend, Shame, apologized on Power’s behalf, admitting, “Power and I have gotten away with some heinous things because, with Love by our side, we could convince people of our benevolence. I guess now we’ll have to find other ways to appear benign.” Then Shame, horrified at its own honesty, turned to reporters, looked them in the eye, and said, “None of you are good enough, either. At your core, each of you is rotten and horrible and depraved. Admit it to yourselves. Embrace what you are. And then join us. We’re about to go on quite a rampage.”

Public Reaction

An official spokesperson for the Government responded calmly to the upheaval, suggesting the story was hearsay and rumors. He stated, “This is ridiculous. Love and Power will never break up. They wouldn’t risk that kind of instability.” Reporters noted, however, that despite his calm demeanor, his eye was twitching and his collar was wet with sweat.

Another government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated, “Government is terrified. If Love is free to do her work, then Government won’t be the most valued person in the room. And that makes Government very nervous—it needs to be the most needed thing around.”

Religion was divided over the events. In part because that’s what Religion likes to do—divide itself—but also because it has been such a strong public supporter of Love, while quietly relying on Power to grow its numbers. One ecstatic pastor was heard to say, “We’ve been waiting for Love to come home. Faith and Hope have been missing their sibling.” In contrast, another prominent pastor lamented, “We can’t run our business without Power and his buddy Shame. Love should reconcile with them immediately.”

The recording industry was also abuzz with the news. Kanye West tweeted: “When I rapped ‘Do you have the power to let power go?’ I had no idea I was talking about Love.” Minutes later he issued another tweet: “Then again, I’ve always said I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Huey Lewis got wind of Kanye’s “prophecy” and immediately took umbrage. He stated, “Man, I’ve been singing about the Power of Love since Marty McFly went back in time. This isn’t news. We’re the News.

Finally, psychologist Kelly Flanagan issued his analysis, “When you live with Power long enough, you become ashamed. You just stop trusting in your own goodness and strength. Yesterday, it appears, Love simply quit being ashamed of herself. She got confident, quit clinging to Power, and became fully herself.”

He smiled, “And that’s all we’ve ever needed her to be. I don’t think anything or anyone is beyond her reach now.”

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this link: Breaking News Celebrity Divorce Causes Global Uprising-Audio [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “Why Alcoholics are the Luckiest People I Know.”

How Smartphones Paved the Way for Same-Sex Marriage

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:30:57 +0000

In the 1980s, anti-gay hysteria reached a fever pitch. By 1996, attitudes toward homosexuality had changed little, with only 27% of Americans in support of same-sex marriage. But by 2011, the majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage, with young people overwhelmingly supportive.

How does a culture transform at such an unprecedented rate?

Perhaps we hold the answer in the palm of our hands…

Photo Credit: gailjadehamilton via Compfight cc

I grew up in a rural town in the heart of Illinois. Black people were an oddity, homosexuality was a locker room joke, and an immigrant was someone who moved in from one town over. Now, my sister is married to a Black man who is both a brother and a friend, and two of the most trustworthy and caring men in my life have been gay.

And in 2004, I met an immigration attorney.

I was completing my post-doc residency, a young psychologist eager to debate anything including immigration and foreign policy. Meanwhile, the small immigration law office down the street needed someone to provide psychological evaluations.

Someone cheap.

Like an unlicensed post-doc trying to feed a growing family.

Almost a decade later, I’ve completed over two hundred evaluations. And I don’t debate immigration anymore. Because immigration no longer exists for me as a concept to debate. Immigration is immigrants. Immigration is people. Immigration is a living, bleeding story.

Immigration is a man who came to our country legally. A man who works seventy hours a week to support a family in the U.S. and ailing parents back home. A man whose wife was brought to the country illegally when she was five years old. A man whose wife is now a legal resident but is being removed from the U.S. as a penalty for how she arrived. A man whose children will not be able to function without their mother. A man who is having panic attacks and lives his days powerless to hold his family together.

Immigration is no longer an issue I debate. Immigration is people I value.

And I think a generation of people is beginning to feel the same way about homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Homosexuality Isn’t an Issue, It’s People

Technology has begun to connect us in previously unimaginable ways. In my once isolated rural hometown, you can stand in the middle of main street with a smartphone and video chat with almost anyone in the world. Across the globe, our lives are becoming deeply intertwined and the cast of characters in each of our stories is expanding exponentially.

And it’s changing everything.

For many of us, our stories have become inseparable from the stories of our gay relative, lesbian friend, or our questioning co-worker or barista or Facebook friend or blog subscriber or Twitter follower or son or daughter.

When we let people from other “groups” into our lives—and even more importantly into our hearts—politics begins to fade, and we experience humanity in a whole new way.

As one.

This sense of unity was described by astronaut Frank White as the overview effect:

“I was looking out the window, and as I was looking down at the planet, the thought came to me, ‘Anyone living…on the moon would always have an overview. They would see things that we know but don’t experience, which is that the earth is one system, we’re all a part of that system, and that there is a certain unity and coherence to it all.’ And I immediately called it ‘the overview effect’.”

But I don’t think we need to orbit the earth to experience the overview effect. We merely need to enter into the cosmos of another person’s heart.

A generation of people has launched itself into the hearts of others, and there is a growing sense of unity and coherence amongst people. And as a result, for many people, homosexuality is no longer an intellectual or theological concept to debate.

Homosexuality is people we know and love and cherish.

Trading in Our Egos for Unity

In the next month, the Supreme Court is likely to announce its decision regarding the definition of marriage. The debates will be, I’m afraid, increasingly vicious and dehumanizing, because violent debate is the only kind of debate that exists between egos.

Our egos tell us our worth exists in comparison to other people. So our egos have a huge stake in maintaining a sense of division. Our egos will cling to our differences and strip others of their dignity, in order to clutch on to a fabricated sense of superiority. Our egos will relish the bitter debate.

But I hope.

I hope a generation of people who have experienced a sense of connection and unity and coherence will give birth to an entirely different kind of conversation.

I hope a generation of people will zip the lips of their egos and speak with the tongue of their hearts.

I hope a generation of people will speak out from the calm, quiet place within where fear is wilting, egos are withering, and grace is blooming.

I hope a generation of people will reach out to each other with grace.

Because grace is always an invitation.

Grace pulls us together, instead of driving us apart. Grace transforms our dialogue from a battle into a homecoming. Grace turns our most contentious debates into subversive acts of love and belonging:

They become an opportunity to love,

to joyfully enter into the story of another,

to make peace,

to listen with patience,

to reach out in kindness,

to give create something good,

to be faithful in relationship,

to be gentle in our differences,

and to control ourselves instead of everyone else.

Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality and marriage, I hope we will trade in our egos for that kind of unity.

I hope.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this link: How Smartphones Paved the Way for Same-Sex Marriage (Audio) [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “Breaking News: Global Uprising, No Going Back.”

What Good is Gratitude When the World is Tearing Apart?

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:30:35 +0000

For millennia, the world has been torn apart and patched together again. A month ago, it felt like something tugged hard at the world and the stitches began to pop. One after another. After another…

Photo Credit: Edward Allen L. Lim via Compfight cc

The Week the Stitches Popped

On a Sunday night, I read about Kermit Gosnell, a licensed physician in Philadelphia who is on trial for delivering live babies and then cutting their spinal cords with scissors.

On Monday afternoon, the Boston Marathon was bombed. Three people died. Legs were amputated.

On Wednesday morning, I was brought to a standstill on the highway. A massive accident shut down all six lanes of the interstate in front of me. For hours.

That evening, a fertilizer plant in west Texas exploded. On an ordinary night, it just blew up. Fourteen people were killed. Two hundred were injured.

Around the same time, the rains in Chicago began in earnest. When the sun rose on Thursday morning, Chicagoland was submerged in a historic flood. Our basement and garage were no exception.

Late Thursday night, gunfire broke out on MIT’s campus. One bombing suspect was dead. Another was injured and on the run.

Friday. Chicago remained a town-under-water while from Watertown, Massachusetts, the television broadcast surreal scenes of door-to-door searches. The second suspect was caught around dinnertime and we went to bed with a sigh of relief.

But Saturday morning we awoke to news of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. Two hundred more people dead.

Just one week of a world tearing at it’s patched and mended seams. One stitch after another.

And those are just the stitches of which I’m aware. We all had stitches popping that week that will never make the CNN scroll.

What are we to do in the midst of such devastation and heartache? The psychologists and the theologians are both telling us we should be grateful.

Grateful?

What good is gratitude when the world is tearing apart?

Gratitude as a Balm?

For centuries, almost every faith tradition has emphasized the practice of gratitude. And around the turn of this century, in an ongoing effort to bolster human resilience, “positive psychologists” took notice of the ancient traditions and sought to harness the practice of gratitude for the benefit of psychological and emotional health.

In the last decade, psychological research has consistently shown individuals who experience higher levels of gratitude also report higher levels of “subjective well-being”— they are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their life and relationships.

This is good news, and the news is getting out. Countless books have been written, scores of “gratitude apps” can be downloaded to phones and tablets, and everyone seems to be talking about how much better they feel since they started their gratitude journal.

But I think there is bad news lurking beneath all the enthusiasm, because I’m hearing questions like, “I want to feel good, so how do I practice gratitude?”

The bad news is we’re turning gratitude into a tool to get what we want—to feel good. It’s tempting to use gratitude like a metal detector to hone in on comfort and satisfaction—it’s tempting to make it about us.

And when we do so, we strip gratitude of its ultimate power.

Gratitude Like Knee High Boots in Slop

On a flooded Thursday, my wife and I were faced with saturated carpet and warped furniture. Our basement was flooded with water, but even worse, my heart was flooded with despair.

Too many stitches were popping and it felt like a free fall without a net.

Then, around mid-morning, a friend texted me and simply asked, “What time am I coming over to help?” By mid-afternoon, he was hoisting rolls of carpet padding over his shoulders as it rained down dirty rainwater upon him.

On a flooded Thursday, my friend gave me something far more powerful than manpower. He gave me gratitude.

And the power of gratitude is this: it is the way we look outward instead of inward. It is the act by which we remember the world and forget ourselves. It puts our ego to sleep and awakens our sense of connection to everything and everyone else.

On a flooded Thursday, I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy—my toes were ice cubes and my fingers were shriveled prunes.

But on a flooded Thursday, I realized gratitude is like a pair of knee-high rain boots for the heart—when we put it on, we can wade right into the flood waters of sorrow and devastation this life and this world rain down upon us.

Gratitude Doesn’t Just Enjoy, It Joins

The storms-of-life are coming, aren’t they?

Or for some of us, they’ve already arrived and the waters are rising.

I don’t have any magic solutions for drying up the mess. But I do think, when we give ourselves over to a life of gratitude, we will be prepared to wade into the pain and suffering of our lives.

Yet I don’t think a life of authentic gratitude ends in self-preservation. Because when gratitude takes ahold of us, we begin to forget about ourselves altogether, and we start to remember a world that is tearing apart and in need of re-stitching.

You see, to a grateful heart:

The laughter of children is pure joy, and also a reminder of powerless women being taken advantage of by a corrupt doctor in Philadelphia.

A pair of running shoes and an open road is ecstasy, and also a reminder of bombs on a Monday afternoon and legs that will never run again.

Safe travels are a relief, and also a reminder that not everyone made it safely on a Wednesday morning.

A green lawn tipped with dew is suburban satisfaction, and also a reminder of a Wednesday night in a fiery fertilizer plant.

A clear dawn and the rays of a warm summer sun are a caress, and a reminder of a quaking earth in China held by the same Big Light.

I think gratitude might be the place where pain and peace meet. Because when our gratitude propels us into a torn-suffering world, we will be immersed in something other than ourselves.

And that, I think, is the definition of peace.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: What Good is Gratitude When the World is Tearing Apart [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “How My Smartphone Paved the Way for Same-Sex Marriage.”

The Safety and Danger of Certainty

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:30:58 +0000

“How many times is the truth that you take to be true, just truth falling apart at the same speed as you, until it all comes away in a million degrees, and you’re just a few pieces of falling debris?” —Josh Ritter, “Hopeful”

What if I told you certainty was a prison, and we lock our beliefs and our selves and our lives inside of it? What if I told you our one chance for redemption is rotting away within the prison cell of our certainty? Would you rattle the bars and clamor for a jailbreak?

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When I was a beginning therapist at Penn State University—back when I had as much cocky self-assurance as I had hair—I had all sorts of misconceptions about psychotherapy and people. Early on, I was handed a diagnostic manual and the assumption that everyone who comes to therapy is fragile, uncertain, and full of doubt.

That assumption is gone (along with my hair).

Over the years, I’ve discovered many of us end up in therapy because we don’t doubt anything. Over the years, I’ve realized certainty can be awfully dysfunctional. Safe, yes. Secure, yes. But it can tear up a life—and a world—one dogmatic belief at a time.

The Need for Uncertainty

To be human is to hold belief. We all hold beliefs about ourselves, about others, about the world, about the universe and God and every wondrous and horrible thing.

But we also tend to organize our lives around avoiding conflict and danger and discomfort. And existing within unquestionable beliefs makes everything feel quite safe, orderly, and stable: I know who I am, I know who you are, I know how this world works, and I understand what existence is all about.

Certainty feels so good.

Until it doesn’t.

Until our beliefs stop resonating with the reality we encounter. Until they leave us unprepared for the vicissitudes of life. Until they begin to crumble and the panic sets in or the depression swallows us. Until we realize our certainty has left us isolated and alone. Until we realize certainty is about not budging an inch, but life is about growth and transformation and redemption.

Over the years, as a therapist, you realize sometimes we don’t need more answers—sometimes we need to be asking more questions:

Like, maybe my family wasn’t as perfect as I was always led to believe—or, maybe my family isn’t as bad as I’ve always made them out to be?

Maybe I’m not as broken as I thought—or, maybe I’m more broken than I thought?

Maybe I shouldn’t trust everyone—or, maybe I have to trust someone?

Maybe I need to forgive more quickly—or, maybe I need to set some boundaries and quit giving my worth away to everyone with instant reconciliation?

Over the years, you discover definitely is a place of safety and suffocation, while maybe is the place of possibility and redemption and connection.

Why Belief is Like a Bird

On a recent rainy spring morning, my son and I were looking out the window and marveling at the ability of birds to fly through rain-riddled air. I wondered aloud, “How do birds stay afloat?”

It turns out I’m not smarter than a third grader.

He told me a bird’s bones are adapted for flight—lightweight and hollow with air sacs to increase buoyancy. The bones are fragile and can withstand the stress of taking off, flying, and landing, but little else.

Therefore, to hold a Dove for instance, you must hold it incredibly gently and with great care. You must hold it tightly enough to keep it grounded. But if you try to hold it too tightly, you will crush it and destroy it. Because it was never intended to be held. A Dove exists to fly.

I think our beliefs are like a Dove.

Gentle Beliefs and Gentle People

We must hold our beliefs gently.

We must believe. And we must embrace uncertainty. All at the same time.

Because although we hold beliefs, they were not designed to be held.

We were designed for the ground but, like birds, our beliefs were designed for the air—to flit from treetop to treetop as we chase them from below.

The most beautiful beliefs are rarely caught and grasped, constantly chased, and in the chasing they draw us into new and better places we never would have discovered while clutching them tightly in the safety of our homes.

I think this might be what many of us call faith—the chasing of beliefs through the treetops, eyes raised, looking up into a big-unfettered sky. Stumbling and tumbling into a bigger and more beautiful world than we ever imagined was possible. Tripping and falling and skinning our knees and getting back up again, because the chasing is even more important than the catching.

A people with belief like this—a people holding it gently and releasing it again into the wild—becomes a gentle people.

Because when we can hold our beliefs gently, we can hold ourselves and other people gently, as well.

A people like this become a people breathlessly chasing belief together.

Over the years, I guess I’ve decided the work of psychotherapy is complete when a client has traded in their unshakeable beliefs for a chasing-faith. When certainty about existence has given way to a chasing-faith in themselves, faith in other people, and faith in a world and a universe that is broken and beautiful and bigger than they ever could have imagined.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version, click this post title—The Safety and Danger of Certainty [If you would like to save the audio to your device for later listening, right click on the title and choose 'save.']

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “What Good is Gratitude When the World is Tearing Apart?”

The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Life Partner

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:30:46 +0000

We may fall in love with any kind of person, but the person we choose to marry ourselves to must embody one particular quality: they must be committed to constant change and transformation.

We should not choose someone who is perfect.

We should choose someone who is perfectly aware they aren’t perfect, and who wants to get better with every rising sun…

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For most couples, my psychotherapy office is a last resort. It takes the deepest courage to make that first phone call to a therapist, and couples often wait until they feel almost hopeless. And I am truly blessed to walk through the valleys with such courageous people.

Yet, I must admit, I take a special delight in couples who call earlier. On a rare occasion, I will get a call from a young couple who is planning to marry and would like premarital counseling.

They come into the office and they usually sit next to each other and hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes and sometimes I feel a little awkward—like I’ve stumbled into their date and should give them some privacy. And quite often, they will say things like “There’s nothing wrong with him; he’s amazing.” Or, “She’s absolutely perfect.” Or, “We get along all the time—we never fight.”

And my alarm bells go off.

Because when I’m looking for the building blocks of a lifelong partnership, I’m not looking for two perfect people. (Mainly because two perfect people don’t exist—we’re all a glorious mess of one kind or another.)

No, I’m looking for two people who know their brokenness, who know they fall short of the best ways to love, and who want to get better at it—one day at a time, year after year, decade upon decade.

When Everyone Got Divorced

In 1970, everyone got divorced.

Okay, not everyone got divorced, but the divorce rate skyrocketed in a startling way. In response, psychologists developed Behavioral Marital Therapy, which included a “caring activities contract.”

It was a bit of a disaster.

Essentially, spouses listed the ways they wanted their partner to change, signed a contract committing the other to doing so, and then each spouse kept a running tally of how often they were holding up their end of the bargain.

The caring activities contract often led to greater conflict, and therapists no longer use it. Because the truth is, as spouses, we are ultimately and utterly powerless over our partners. If our partner truly does not want to change, there is fundamentally nothing we can do to make them change. In fact, our very efforts to coerce change will further entrench our loved ones in their existing behaviors.

In marriage—and in life—you control you. No one else.

Which means the person you choose to spend the rest of your life with had better be eternally interested in taking a look at their own issues, increasingly willing to be vulnerable about their own brokenness, and absolutely determined to figure out what it means to love more deeply and purely.

How I Got Lucky

I remember the night my wife told me her story.

We had known each other for only three weeks, and through the quiet hours of the night she told me about her journey—it was marked by resilience and tenacity and determination. She had plenty of reasons to be angry, but instead she was investing her energy into learning how to love.

And by the time the sun rose, something new had risen in me—I didn’t know what it was then, but I did know I wasn’t going to let this woman go. Only recently have I realized what rose up in me that night:

I’m attracted to people who like to fight—not with other people, but with themselves.

I’ve admitted here on the blog I can be a bit of a mess at times. So, I’ve often wondered how I didn’t screw up my choice of a lifelong companion.

And I’m thinking the answer is this: for all my mess, somehow I must have one thing going right within me—I want people in my life who know they are broken and have decided every day is another opportunity to redeem it. People who fight with themselves first—not in a shaming, self-destructive way, but in a resilient, grace-filled effort to be transformed into a more loving person.

And I guess I lucked out when my wife had the courage to let me see her brokenness and her love.

Choosing Broken, Resilient Hearts

I think the most important question we must ask ourselves—both when contemplating the decision to marry ourselves to one person, and when deciding how much of ourselves to invest in healing a relationship that has gone awry—is, “Do I trust the heart of the person I love?”

“Are they aware of their brokenness? Can they give grace to themselves and to others in the middle of their mess? Are they able acknowledge their mistakes and apologize when necessary? And do they have a deep desire to redeem it all?”

Or is the heart of the person I love organized around ego and self-preservation and power and competition and self-righteousness?

Every relationship hinges upon the answers to these questions.

May we all be asking the right questions.

May each of us be patient, as we wait for that one quiet night when that one person reveals to us a heart of brokenness, and a heart of grace and sacrifice and love.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Life Partner [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.].

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “Belief is Fragile (Hold It Gently).”

Why Shame is Destructive But Guilt is Creative

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:30:37 +0000

The difference between shame and guilt may be the difference between never really living and using this one life to draw beautiful, redemptive pictures of love and belonging…

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On a Friday morning, my three-year-old daughter was drawing me a picture with a colored pencil. Her face was screwed up with concentration, nose crinkled, dimples lopsided. She let out a big-dramatic sigh and said, “I made a mistake; I need to erase it.”

I tried not to laugh as I looked at the random loops and swirls of abstract toddlerhood and wondered to myself, “Honey, how can chaos contain mistakes?”

But I fetched an eraser anyway, and she started to rub. However, colored pencil doesn’t erase—it smudges. So she rubbed harder. And the “mistake” got worse and worse.

And worse.

She flung down her pencil and began to tear the paper to shreds.

I don’t think my daughter was feeling ashamed about her drawing—I think she was being a three-year-old. Yet, on a Friday morning, I think she gave me an image of the way shame destroys us:

Shame is like the crummy pencil eraser of life—it mires us in an endless, hopeless effort to erase our mistakes. And it tears up our lives in the process.

Destructive Shame…

Shame is the “you’re not good enough” lie seductively whispering at the edge of our fragile souls. It convinces us our mistakes and shortcomings and failures and faults are who we are. It convinces us we need to erase our mistakes and our mess if we are to be worthy of love and belonging.

So we spend our life mired in depressive regrets about words and actions and days and years we wish we could take back. Or we spend our nights in anxious rumination about how everyone reacted when we said this or did that. We quietly beat ourselves up and wish for a do-over.

But the truth is, our mistakes are written in the colored pencil of time—time can’t be reversed and our mistakes can’t be erased.

There are no do-overs.

Yet shame keeps us stuck in this endless cycle of hopeless attempts to erase or hide our history and ourselves. It immobilizes us. It shuts us down. And in doing so, it can destroy a life—one paralyzed day at a time.

But there is another way.

…Creative Guilt

The way out of our shame is not to erase our mistakes. The way out of our shame is to feel guilty about them.

Guilt is shame redeemed by grace.

Shame tells us we are lousy. Guilt tells us we did something lousy.

Shame whispers, “Your mistakes define you.” But guilt proclaims, “We are defined by redemption, not by transgressions.”

Whereas shame seeks to hide the past, guilt claims the past.

Shame says you are corrupt and rotten and weak and powerless and you should hide because anything you do will be another failure. But guilt says, “Yes, I messed up. I’m guilty as charged. But my mess doesn’t define me. And because it doesn’t define me, I can do something different now.”

Shame looks backward interminably. Guilt glances backward and then moves forward.

Shame coerces us into passivity. Guilt propels us into action.

Shame buries our mistakes. Guilt apologizes for them.

Shame disconnects us from people. Guilt propels us into the arms of people.

Shame is a lie we swallow. Guilt is the truth we tell.

Shame is the death of us. Guilt is the beginning of a resurrection.

The Blank Page

As my daughter began to sink to the floor on the verge of a meltdown, I suggested, “Instead of erasing that picture, how about you draw me another one?”

She stopped mid-tantrum, crumpled paper in hand, and a smile evened out her dimples a bit.

I pointed at her big stack of blank papers and said, “You can draw me a bunch of new ones.”

I wonder if redemptive guilt is really just the voice of grace, whispering quietly to us, “Hush, little one. Quit trying so hard to erase and hide the past. You’re learning and growing and every time you mess up and try again, let’s rejoice. So put that eraser away, own your mistakes, and let’s try again, even if it’s a glorious mess.”

My daughter looked at me, bounced to her feet, and attacked a new blank page with abandon.

Drawing Redemptive Pictures With Our Lives

In life, we can listen to our shame—we can focus on all of our mistakes and we can get hopelessly bogged down in trying to analyze them, erase them, justify them, or hide them.

Or we can approach every day like a new sheet of paper. The size of the stack is different for each of us, of course—our remaining days are all differently numbered.

But if we have only a single page on our stack—only one day remaining to live—we have one blank page on which to draw a new, redemptive picture of our lives.

We can draw pictures of courage and vulnerability.

We can draw pictures of apology and forgiveness.

We can draw picture of love and sacrifice.

Today is a new day. Today is our blank page. Today is pregnant with the possibility of a new picture, a redemptive event, a beautiful love.

What will we do with today’s blank page?

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: Why Shame is Destructive but Guilt is Creative [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.].

Google Video Hangout: I’m beginning to prepare the first focus group about shame, grace, relationships, and life. The first meeting will focus on clarifying the differences between shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation. Remember, it’s not a therapeutic group—you are going to be teaching me about these important topics! If you are interested in participating, you can click here to email me your name and email address, and I will include you in future updates.

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook.

Preview: This week’s planned post about marriage and relationships was unfinished when the flooding hit Chicago last week. Assuming no more natural disasters, it will be the next post on Wednesday, May 1, and is tentatively entitled, “The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Life Partner.”

How I Will Dishonor the Victims of the Boston Bombing

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:30:51 +0000

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My wife runs marathons, and she finishes them in about four hours. Last October, I stood at the finish line four hours and nine minutes into the Chicago marathon. I know the joy of friends and family cheering on their loved ones.

On Monday afternoon, in Boston, that moment of joy and those people of joy were shattered by violence and lots of hatred and a couple of relatively small bombs.

On Monday afternoon, I guess I felt a little shattered, too.

Shattered, yet grateful my devastation was one of empathy, rather than flesh and bone.

I arrived home late on Monday night. My children were still awake but fading quickly in their beds. I kissed their foreheads and murmured prayers and after their eyes finally closed, I stood looking into the dark of their rooms and I felt grateful for breathing children and legs that work and the momentary safety of home.

As I watched them, I felt a depth of love for my children and my wife that doesn’t happen on a typical Monday night.

You may know the depth of love I’m talking about. I hope you do. It’s Love with a capital “L” and it cracks you open and it connects you to everyone and everything. In the depths of that Love there are no grievances too big for forgiveness, no brokenness too ugly for grace, there are no strangers and no enemies. It’s a love tenderized by pain and it’s a Love with the power to bring us all together.

I think we can honor the victims of this tragedy by giving ourselves over to this deep-love. And by clinging to it. But, over time, we won’t. I won’t.

I will dishonor the victims of Boston.

I will dishonor the victims by swimming up from the depths of that love and living once again in the shallows of my ego and self-interest and humanness.

I will dishonor them when my awareness fades.

I will dishonor them when my gratitude evaporates.

I will dishonor them in a hundred little ways: when I once again take my legs for granted, when the new scratch on the kitchen table is once again more important than the joy that put it there, when the stranger on the street no longer feels like the stranger that might die with me tomorrow, when all the petty endeavors of life become, once again, bigger than my love.

Indeed, I will dishonor them when my love swells and crests and finally recedes.

I will dishonor the victims of Boston because I’m human and because humans forget. But this time I’m resolving to remember a little bit longer than I usually do—a little bit longer than I remembered Sandy Hook.

I’m going to remember with prayer.

I’m not going to pray because it erases the past. And I’m not going to pray because I believe it guarantees healing or restoration for the physically and emotionally wounded. And I’m not going to pray for justice because I think it will ensure the guilty are captured.

I’m going to pray for the victims, because prayer keeps me aware. And as long as I’m aware, I’m loving. And as long as I’m loving, then terror loses.

You see, you can bring criminals to justice with law enforcement, but you can only bring terror to justice with love.

When terror looks upon Boston and sees a city drawn together, terror loses and love wins.

When terror beholds strangers coming to the aid of one another, terror loses and love wins.

When terror sows connection and a sense of belonging rather than fear and division, terror loses and love wins.

When terror plants the seeds of gratitude and gentleness in the heart of a father, terror loses and love wins.

I think the best way to honor the victims in Boston is to bring terror to justice, one loving moment at a time, one prayer at a time.

For as long as I can remember.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

A Daddy’s Letter to His Little Girl (About Her Future Husband)

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:30:45 +0000

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Dear Cutie-Pie,

Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was “How to keep him interested.”

It startled me. I scanned several of the countless articles about how to be sexy and sexual, when to bring him a beer versus a sandwich, and the ways to make him feel smart and superior.

And I got angry.

Little One, it is not, has never been, and never will be your job to “keep him interested.”

Little One, your only task is to know deeply in your soul—in that unshakeable place that isn’t rattled by rejection and loss and ego—that you are worthy of interest. (If you can remember that everyone else is worthy of interest also, the battle of your life will be mostly won. But that is a letter for another day.)

If you can trust your worth in this way, you will be attractive in the most important sense of the word: you will attract a boy who is both capable of interest and who wants to spend his one life investing all of his interest in you.

Little One, I want to tell you about the boy who doesn’t need to be kept interested, because he knows you are interesting:

I don’t care if he puts his elbows on the dinner table—as long as he puts his eyes on the way your nose scrunches when you smile. And then can’t stop looking.

I don’t care if he can’t play a bit of golf with me—as long as he can play with the children you give him and revel in all the glorious and frustrating ways they are just like you.

I don’t care if he doesn’t follow his wallet—as long as he follows his heart and it always leads him back to you.

I don’t care if he is strong—as long as he gives you the space to exercise the strength that is in your heart.

I couldn’t care less how he votes—as long as he wakes up every morning and daily elects you to a place of honor in your home and a place of reverence in his heart.

I don’t care about the color of his skin—as long as he paints the canvas of your lives with brushstrokes of patience, and sacrifice, and vulnerability, and tenderness.

I don’t care if he was raised in this religion or that religion or no religion—as long as he was raised to value the sacred and to know every moment of life, and every moment of life with you, is deeply sacred.

In the end, Little One, if you stumble across a man like that and he and I have nothing else in common, we will have the most important thing in common:

You.

Because in the end, Little One, the only thing you should have to do to “keep him interested” is to be you.

Your eternally interested guy,

Daddy

———

This post is, of course, dedicated to my daughter, my Cutie-Pie. But I also want to dedicate it beyond her.

I wrote it for my wife, who has courageously held on to her sense of worth and has always held me accountable to being that kind of “boy.”

I wrote it for every grown woman I have met inside and outside of my therapy office—the women who have never known this voice of a Daddy.

And I wrote it for the generation of boys-becoming-men who need to be reminded of what is really important—my little girl finding a loving, lifelong companion is dependent upon at least one of you figuring this out. I’m praying for you.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: A Daddy’s Letter to His Little Girl [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “How to Achieve Balance in a Healthy Marriage.”

How Our Friends Bring Us to Life

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:30:04 +0000

The word “friend” is a derivative of the verb “freon,” which means, “To love.” A friend is a person. And a friend is a verb. When our friends are a verb, they have the power to bring us to life. This is how…

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My three-year-old daughter is growing quickly. Recently, while helping her put on a pair of jeans, her waistband strained mightily. I asked her if she would like me to loosen it.

She looked at me with puzzlement and asked, “Why?”

So I found the adjustable-stretchy strap inside the waistband and loosened it several notches. I looked at her and asked, “Better?”

This time, she looked at me with awe. And she sighed, “Oh my, that’s a lot of better.”

My daughter didn’t know how comfortable her pants were supposed to feel. Because when dis-ease sets in like a slowly dripping faucet, we don’t notice it. We unconsciously adapt to it.

And I think many of us have had our hearts steadily, quietly flooded by the almost imperceptible drip-drip of disinterest.

The Power of Disinterest

Parents, teachers, and other authority figures serve many functions in the lives of children. But perhaps the most important function is to be engaged—to show a deep and abiding interest in the children they have been given to lead.

When engagement is replaced by actual or apparent disinterest, it has the power to cheapen anything in the heart of a child.

When an elementary school boy meets his father at the door to share the exciting fact he learned at that day’s science fair, only to be brushed off with a grumble about a long day at work,

a drip of disinterest has cheapened his little heart,

and he doesn’t even know it.

When the pre-school boy clamors for a parent to look at his Lego fortress and the parent absently says, “Just a minute,” while tapping out a message on a smart phone,

a drip of disinterest has cheapened his little heart,

and he doesn’t even know it.

When the toddler girl asks her father to look at the tiara she is wearing and instead of beholding her like a princess he says, “That’s nice, Cutie,” and then returns his attention to the morning paper,

a drip of disinterest has cheapened her little heart,

and she doesn’t even know it.

So, how do I know it?

Because I’m that father. And at some point, most of us have been those kids.

As children, the big people we loved were like gods to us. But the cracked, tender reality is, they weren’t gods.

They were human.

Even the most attentive of parents succumbs to disinterest. And to be honest, let’s thank God they do: a generation raised with perfect attentiveness would probably be a generation of little dictators—it’s good to be reminded we aren’t the center of the universe every once in a while.

But when moments of disinterest are not adequately balanced by something else, we more quickly and deeply decide our little hearts are unworthy of love and belonging. And we don’t even know it.

But what does all of this have to do with friendship?

Friends have the power to make us feel worthy again.

What Jack Frost Knows About Friendship

The film, Rise of the Guardians, is the coming of age story of Jack Frost. The cast of characters includes Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Mr. Sandman. They represent the guardians of childhood. But here’s the catch: they only remain real, tangible, embodied beings if children believe in them.

And the kids of the world don’t believe in Jack Frost. He walks amongst them invisible, disembodied, searching for a meaningful existence.

With one exception—one child who stubbornly believes in the Guardians. While Jack struggles to believe in himself, the child stubbornly believes in Jack, and the child’s belief literally brings Jack into material existence.

One person believed in him, and it brought him to life.

We’re all big kids now, and I think many of us still walk through this world feeling a little invisible. A little intangible. Many of us are desperate for just one person to believe in us.

Because the opposite of disinterest is not interest. It’s belief.

Friendship is a Verb

A reader recently lamented her hopelessness about the kind of “drive-through” friendships she experiences in her world. I think she was lamenting the disinterest and disengagement that characterizes much of what we call friendship in a world of social media.

I think she was saying, “It’s time to reclaim the word friend.”

I think she was saying, “I have friends who are people, but I need friends who are verbs.”

I think she was saying, “I have friends who drive through me, but I need friends who drive love into me.”

I think we all need friends like that. And I think we have to be careful about settling for anything less. Because every one of us is worthy of a friend who can look us in the eye and say to us, “I believe in you.”

Because when we say we believe in someone,

We are saying, “I think you matter and I think your story matters. It’s all heading somewhere and I want to be a part of it. I want to be there when you discover your center and your purpose, because it is going to be brilliant.”

We are saying, “Your journey is going to be messy, but I freely choose to get sloppy with you. And then we’ll clean each other off and find a better way. Together.”

We are saying, “I am a friend, but even more, I want to give you friendship.”

The same reader said it would be easier to not hope for this kind of friendship. And I agree. Seeking this kind of friendship—waiting for it patiently, taking risks to nurture it, wondering if it even exists—can be a scary and painful experience.

But it does exist.

It’s out there.

And when you find it, you will know it. Because you will feel visible. You will feel tangible. You will feel worthy.

In the words of a little girl: you will feel…sigh…a lot of better.

I dedicate this post to all of the friends who have believed in me along the way. Your love brings me to life. I hope I bring you to life just a little, as well.

If you have a friend you believe in and you want to let them know, or a friend who has believed in you that you want to thank, share this post with them. Let them know their story matters.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: How Our Friends Bring Us to Life [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “A Father’s Letter to His 3 Year-Old Daughter (About Her Husband).”

Out with the Good, In with the New!

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:30:03 +0000

The old theme song goes something like this: “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have, the facts of life.”

But sometimes, life feels more like: “You take the good, you take the good, and there you have too much life.”

Sometimes, even good things need to go…

Photo Credit: Camdiluv ♥ via Compfight cc

My wife wants to get a new dog. My oldest son wants to add a fifth extracurricular activity to his plate. My younger son can’t understand why we aren’t able to fit in wrestling, Legos, a movie, and book reading every night. My little girl wants to wear six outfits at once because they are all “bootiful.”

Here at UnTangled we talk a lot about redeeming the painful things in life. Yet, many difficult decisions in life are about having to choose one good thing over another.

Giving Up Good Things

We live in a world in which a virtual cornucopia of good things is available to us with the push of a button or the swipe of a finger. The Chicago Tribune reported last week the majority of adolescents now prefer a smartphone more than a car. Because a car can only take you to one good place at a time, but technology can deliver you to many good places, all at once.

Sometimes, we work hard to be grateful for the good things in life. And we should be grateful. But we can “grateful” our way right into overloaded and stressful lives, full of every manner of good thing.

Sometimes, if we want to live rich, textured, and sane lives, we have to sacrifice some of the good things, too.

We have to make choices and let good things go and creates space for depth instead of breadth.

I love my wife and I love my kids and I cherish my friends and I adore my clients and I am passionate about this blog and I am fueled by quiet and contemplation and there is no end to the good things I want to do.

But I need to make some choices and let some good things go.

So, I’ve settled on eliminating the “second weekly post” for a while. That’s not to say I won’t ever post twice a week. It’s just to say I’m not planning to. Yet when something happens to rock our world, or holiday inspiration strikes or I just get antsy and have something to say that can’t wait, I won’t hesitate to send you a surprise post.

Welcoming New Things

But sanity isn’t the only reason to eliminate good things from life.

I heard Bob Goff speak at the Story 2012 conference last September. He said he cuts out a good thing in his life every Thursday, because if you want to grow and be renewed, you have to make space for new good things to arrive in your life.

He said on the way to the conference that morning he had called up the head of a board he sits on and he had quit. When the man asked why, Bob told him, “Because it’s Thursday!”

Bob said he was excited about what new thing might be coming down the pike to fill that newly vacated space in his life.

Letting go of the “second post” is going to make some space in my private life, but it’s also going to create space for some good-new things here at UnTangled. So I want to take just a minute to tell you about some of those things (and then I want to ask you a question):

Beginning with the next post, all posts will have a link to an audio version narrated by me. It will be in the form of a Quicktime audio player at the bottom of each post. If you read the post by email or RSS, there will be a link to the website where you can access the player on both your home computer and mobile devices. My posts are longer than the average blog post, and I hope this will make them more portable—something you can listen to on the go.
I think it’s time for me to start writing a book. There, I said it. And I want your help writing it. To that end, in the near future, I want to initiate periodic video hangouts on Google+. They will serve as focus groups to develop ideas around shame, grace, marriage, parenting, and life—and those ideas will become the material for the book. I want you to be a part of it. Stay tuned for more information.
Finally, I have posted here at UnTangled on Fridays since the very beginning. For the first time, I will be moving the weekly post to Wednesdays. This post begins that new rhythm and my next planned post—“How Our Friends Bring Us to Life”— will be next Wednesday, April 10.

A Question

At its best, this life is like a cornucopia overflowing with abundant fruit and a deep magic. And yet, like anything that overflows, it periodically needs to be emptied a little. Our lives need to be emptied a little so new fruit can spring forth.

What are the good things in life you want to experience, for which there is no space—not because life is just stressful and painful, but because life is overflowing with good things?

What kind of fruit is waiting to grow into your life, with a just a little space for it?

Share your thoughts in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

The Mess: The messy places in life—and the messy places within ourselves—present us with a choice. Because the mess is where our shame collides with grace, and we can choose to succumb to shame, or we can fight to receive grace. Come visit The Mess, and join the rebellion against shame. And as always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

Good Friday or Ridiculous Friday?

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:30:00 +0000

For most of my life, I hated Good Friday.

The name seemed ridiculous to me. The event seemed ridiculous to me. For decades, I thought it should be called Unnecessary Friday.

Photo Credit: bruckerrlb via Compfight cc

People way smarter than me used big phrases—like “substitutionary atonement”—and told me it was absolutely necessary. They said Man had sinned against God and now God needed a sacrifice in order to forgive mankind, so he sacrificed his son.

But I never completely bought it.

I mean, what kind of a God is so ticked off he can’t get over himself and his anger without killing one of his children? In the words of Richard Rohr, “Is God that unfree?”

I tried. Believe me, I tried for years to swallow it, but I could never get it down.

And I’m so glad I didn’t.

Because a decade as a psychologist has me wondering.

As a psychologist, you spend every day lowering yourself into the depths of humanity—the depths that exist in your own heart and in the hearts of others. You touch the bottom of existence and you claw your way back to the top and you want to shout to the heavens, “There is something beautiful down there!”

It wrecks you. In a really good way. Because it deconstructs all the beliefs you’ve inherited about how people are basically rotten, depraved, and sinful at their core.

You realize people are, at their core, simply humming with beauty.

You realize grace is not just some benevolent tolerance of a corrupt creation.

You realize grace is the accurate reflection of the beautiful creatures buried within us.

And you realize, on a Good Friday, you have to write about it, because it may be essential to turning this whole bloody planet around…

Why Sin Isn’t the First Problem

In August 2012, during an Icelandic bus tour, a woman was reported missing and a search commenced. It was a false alarm. In all the confusion, the woman reported to be missing was actually a member of the search party.

Unbeknownst to her, she was searching for herself.

I think this is the story of humanity and there are three key elements—shame, sin, and grace—and until we get them straight, Good Friday isn’t good and the world doesn’t make any sense.

Shame is misinformation. Shame is the lie that our worthiness has gone missing. Shame is the belief that what is inside of us—the substance of who we are—is rotten and makes us unworthy of love and belonging. Shame is the belief that we must find something outside of ourselves to make us worthy of love.

Sin is the search. As a result of the lie, we search to find worthiness in perfection and achievement and status and the acquisition of resources and the accumulation of lofty experiences and the accrual of power. Much of religion has called this sin and deemed it the first problem, the main problem. But it’s not. Sin is our reaction to the first problem: our shame.

And grace is the truth. Grace announces our worthiness was never missing to begin with. And it calls off the search. Grace proclaims, “You believed a lie, but the truth is you are beloved, exactly the way you are.” Grace isn’t preoccupied with sin like we are, because it knows sin is the byproduct of shame. It knows when the darkness of our shame succumbs to the light of grace, our sin—our search—dies with it.

But you don’t need to take my word for it. Or the story of an Icelandic tourist. Because this story of shame and sin and grace is an ancient one.

A Delivery Room, a Playground, a Parent, and a Friday Afternoon

There is an ancient poem that begins one of the most popular (and reviled) books in the world. It’s a powerful rendition of the development of humankind. In the Book of Genesis:

The Garden of Eden is like a delivery room—six days of chaotic, violent, majestic labor, concluding with the birth of God’s children. And he looks upon them and concludes they are good.

Good enough.

They are pronounced to be without shame.

But the babies grow up and the Garden becomes like a school playground and this bully comes along and we call this bully the serpent. And the bully hisses his lie: “You are not good enough. You are not like Him. You should be more than you are.”

And in the playground-Garden, we watch the first shaming.

And we watch as these two people—ratified as good by the Parent of all things—believe the not-good-enough lie.

We watch as they experience original shame.

And the bully continues his lie. He tells them there is something outside of themselves that will make them truly worthy, and he points them toward an apple-of-promise. He tells them, “Go do this, and you will be good enough.”

And like deceived children, they do it. They eat the apple,

and we watch the first search—original sin.

And the search plays out through the centuries: brother kills brother out of jealousy, Babel is built and wars are waged and humanity gets torn apart by its attempts to escape the shame-full lie. And what does God do? He just throws up his hands and gives up on the whole damned experiment, right?

Wrong.

This ancient story doesn’t end there.

Because like a parent with a bottomless love, he sees his rebellious teenage child—but he also remembers the good, innocent, infinitely worthy child he first cradled in the delivery room.

And he knows that child is still in there somewhere.

He’s like a parent with a bottomless love, waiting up into the wee hours of the night for the drug-addicted child to arrive home so he can wrap her in a hug and say, “If I could only convince you of your beauty and your goodness then you wouldn’t need to run away from yourself with all these drugs and all this violence.”

And like a parent with a bottomless love, he knows words will never be enough to get the message across. He knows he has to act. Sacrificially. Not as a reward for finally changing—but as an affirmation of the child’s worthiness, even in the midst of all the destruction and the mess.

And so the ancient story continues…

He comes and—in the words of Rachel Held Evans—he “straps on sandals” and he walks our roads with us.

And it’s no mistake he rebukes those who are searching for worthiness by establishing rules and hierarchies of power and judgment.

It’s no mistake he makes his home amongst those who have stopped searching and are keenly aware of their shame and are ready to hear: “You are worthy, just as you are.”

And, it is no mistake that in one afternoon of slow, agonizing, humiliating death, he transforms his culture’s ultimate symbol of shame—a cross—into an antenna, broadcasting the ultimate message of grace: You are worthy of love and you have a place to belong—exactly the way you are.

And the first viral message of humankind echoes across the centuries:

For a God

Who.

Is.

Love.

Reconciliation was never required, except in our own shame-filled minds.

Death and Resurrection

I still don’t like the name “Good Friday.” Because, these days, I think it’s the understatement of all time and history.

And the story continues.

With you. With us.

In the story of Good Friday, we have been given a timeless blueprint of death and resurrection. It requires three simple steps:

We must freely choose to venture into the depths of our shame—into all of the ways we have been deceived into believing our worth and our beauty are conditional upon anything—into all the ways we’ve been lied to by the words and actions of parents and teachers and friends and foes and powerful people of every kind.

We must confess the ways we have searched for worthiness outside of ourselves. We must be honest about the ways we have lived in the dark and the ways we have spread the darkness.

And we must embrace the relentless truth of grace: we are worthy of love and belonging, exactly the way we are—all weak and powerless and broken and raw and grieving and dying and scared and despairing and angry and lost…and beautiful.

It’s. that. simple.

I know, for many, this will seem like a bunch of fluffy-feel-good spiritual nonsense. But let me be clear: venturing to the bottom of our shame is the opposite of “feel good.”

It is to feel torn apart from the inside out.

It feels like death.

But to sink to the bottom of it and to touch the Beauty humming at the core of us?

Well, that is, indeed, a resurrection.

This post is not meant to be the “final world.” It’s meant to be the FIRST word. What do you think about shame, sin, and grace? Share your ideas at the bottom of this post

Loved this book: Recovering the Scandal of the Cross by Mark D. Baker and Joel B. Green.

———

Free eBook: My new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. You can click here to subscribe, and your subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook. As always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

Preview: My next post will be Wednesday, April 3, and is tentatively entitled, “Why Giving Up is Good,” or “Out with the Good, In with the New.” I can’t decide.

Why Couples Shouldn’t Do Couples Therapy (Says the Couples Therapist)

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:30:59 +0000

The number one cause of escalating conflict in marriage is one we rarely talk about. As marital therapists, we focus all of our energies on the conflict between spouses, but we ignore the battle within each partner. And as a writer, I segregate my posts about marriage and my posts about shame. Until now…

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A Saturday night with the person you love can go south in a heartbeat, can’t it?

Several weeks ago, my wife and I had just finished another night of one-more-cup-of-water requests, my-legs-hurt laments, and can-I-have-another-kiss rituals, and the rustling from the kids’ bedrooms had quieted.

And a couple of open hours sprawled out before us like an oasis in the desert of living.

Until my wife began to discuss the recent seminars she’d conducted in Guatemala. She looked at me like I had heard the story before, and the truth began to slowly dawn on both of us: I had never asked about her teachings in Guatemala.

I felt a moment of sheepishness. And then I went on the attack—a mixture of defensiveness (“I watched the kids for ten days so you could do the trip!”) and offense (“It’s your fault for not telling me sooner!”).

Listen. I’m a shrink. And I still get surprised all the time by my your-not-good-enough voice of shame.

It can sink a Saturday night in just one quick beat of a shame-shadowed heart.

Marriage Enemy Number One

Our hearts are like a sponge for shame, and most of us are pretty saturated with it by the time we meet our lifelong companion. So when our partner criticizes us, or asks for change, or asks for more, or simply gets a little too close for comfort, our heart gets squeezed and we leak shame all over the place.

Except shame is a lie so it never comes out all honest and confessing. It comes out like barbed wire. Usually, we try to make our partner feel even less worthy than we feel ourselves—with verbal attacks, emotional slander, and sometimes simply with silence.

And in most marriages, shame begets shame. So, when we shame our spouses and squeeze their hearts, their shame oozes out, and they go on the attack.

Usually, when the friendly fire is over, it’s impossible to tell who really fired the first shot. We assume our spouse is at fault and we completely ignore marriage enemy number one: shame.

Why Sometimes Marital Therapy Isn’t the Answer

For many couples, the cycle of shame-escalation in the relationship is so intense the marital therapy hour looks like a weekly battlefield reenactment. The script is written and the players have little interest in changing their own lines. Oftentimes, both spouses are secretly looking for an audience who will cast the deciding vote in their favor.

So, the viability of any couples therapy is dependent upon each spouse’s answer to two questions: are you willing to focus on yourself and face your shame? And are you prepared to do so for an hour a week in the presence of your partner?

If the answer to either question is “no,” the couple should not be in marital therapy. Instead, each spouse should be attending individual therapy. But partners resist individual therapy for at least two reasons. First, the mere suggestion of individual therapy feels like more shame—more you’re-not-good-enough.

Second, the individual therapy room can feel like a prison cell—no distractions, no one to blame, no place to direct the shame spilling out of our hearts. Which is why many people go to individual therapy and use the hour to complain about a spouse.

It is far more painful to look in the mirror.

Fighting for Your Saturday Night

As my wife and I began to go toe-to-toe that Saturday night, she had the wherewithal to step back and say, “You know, right before you got angry you looked embarrassed.”

I stopped mid-fury, and suddenly, the battle wasn’t between her and I, the battle began to rage within me.

Frankly, I think every marriage hinges upon this kind of moment: Do I deny the shame she saw peak out before my defenses were up and go back to shaming her, or do I own it?

“Crap,” I thought, “This is going to hurt.”

The shame began oozing up from the cracks in my heart, and I began to share with her the multitude of ways I had felt not-enough in the past week.

It hurt to feel it. It hurt to admit it. But it felt so good to share it.

And with no shame to defend, I felt free to apologize for all the ways I bungle my priorities and lose my focus on the most interesting thing in my life—her.

It wasn’t the Saturday night we had hoped for, but I think it was the Saturday night we needed.

How to Fight Within Marriage Ourselves

You don’t fight for your Saturday night by fighting with your spouse. You fight for your Saturday night by fighting with yourself. By fighting back against your shame. Except in our fight against shame, we don’t wield weapons toward others, we lay them down.

We breathe deeply, giving ourselves just enough space to make a wise decision—the decision to look in rather than shouting out.

We cultivate a quiet-still attentiveness—it pulls the covers of anger off the bed of our shame and reveals the aching, hurting kid underneath, who just wants a place to call home.

We use a graceful self-compassion. Until we can be gentle with ourselves, we can’t be gentle to anyone else. So, when we discover the hurting kid within us, we speak to him or her like we would to any kid with a skinned knee or a bloody elbow—with an embrace and a whispered, “Hush…”

We use courage and vulnerability to reveal it all to the person we love. We say things like, “This isn’t about you; this is about me. I’m terrified I’ll never be good enough for you, but I bluster as if you are the one who isn’t good enough for me, because that feels way safer.”

And we insist on being with people who can receive this kind of confession gracefully and receive us within their embrace.

So, as the marital therapist, I often find myself saying, “I can’t help until you have faced your shame. But if you are willing to do that first…

…I don’t think you have any idea what kind of radical, life-altering, world-changing love the two of you could create together. Then, marital therapy will be a rebellion that turns this world upside down.”

How has overcoming shame improved your marriage? Share your thoughts, or any other ideas, in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

Preview: It’s spring break! No mid-week post this coming week. The next post will be on Friday, March 29, and is tentatively entitled, “Why Christians Can’t Stop Sinning.”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

The One Thing with the Power to Bring Us All Together

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:30:23 +0000

Photo Credit: henry grey via Compfight cc

On a frenetic Monday morning, I arrived at my office with my thoughts whipping and cyclonic, scrambling to stay ahead of life. When I opened my office door, I practically tripped over my surprise.

Sitting in one of my office chairs was an enormous beach ball, with a note attached: “Just a visual reminder. We love your blog!” (Have I ever mentioned if you can work with thoughtful, caring people you should work with thoughtful, caring people?)

As my laughter died away and my smile lingered, my mind returned to problem-solving mode: the beach ball needed to be deflated before my first appointment.

I sat on the ball and the air began to hiss in expulsion. Slowly. So slowly. As the ball hissed and the clock ticked, I looked around my office at all the trappings of my effort to stay ahead in life:

Three diplomas—representing ten years of my life.

A framed clinical psychologist license—representing another two.

A shelf full of books—representing years of information consumed in an effort to feel interesting.

And I realized: “No amount of schooling, studying or scrambling gets this done faster.” As the ball slowly deflated, I sank to the floor, but I also sank into my own humanity. And I thought: this beach ball is a lot like our pain.

It’s an equalizer.

Competing to Be Unequal

The dictionary defines “equalizer” as anything that makes us alike in value, rank, or merit.

We spend most of our lives avoiding equalizers like the plague, and I think our favorite way of fleeing from equalization is competition.

Competition is our way of saying I’m up here and you’re down there and we are not equal.

And yet.

Regardless of how hard we try, in the end, pain and loss and suffering come for every one of us and they expose all of our competition as one big game of charades. Our pain eventually topples our sense of power and inverts our sense of control.

Suffering is the great equalizer. From herniated disks to surprising loneliness to shocking divorces to unexpected diagnoses, every single one of us will eventually be equalized by pain and suffering—our hierarchies will be erased and the truth revealed: we’re all just humans existing on the same level playing field.

Most of us live in fear of this eventuality. Many of us get depressed when faced with the prison of mortality and our frail humanity. But I think there is another way.

I think we can allow our pain to lead us home. Several nights ago, my sons showed me the way.

Two Equalized Little Boys

The snow was coming down all heavy and slushy and darkness had descended, when our doorbell rang. Standing on our front porch—looking wet and tired but still hopeful—was a young man from the local college. And he carried a shovel.

He told us he had walked many blocks, knocking on doors, hoping to work for a few extra bucks. He told us we were the first door that had opened to him. He asked if he could shovel our driveway for five dollars.

With a grimace, we pointed to the driveway and said, “As you can see, we shoveled recently, and we actually don’t have any cash on us right now.” His eyes got sad—but his smile only flickered—as he wished us well and turned away.

But as he stepped off our porch, my five-year-old son leapt off our couch. Tears welling up in his eyes, he asked frantically, “Can I pay him?” And without waiting for an answer, he ran for his bedroom, returning moments later waving a ten-dollar bill and desperately asking, “Is this enough?”

Watching the scene, my nine-year-old cracked, too. He ran to his room and pulled out his own ten-dollar bill. He returned, shoving it into the hands of his little brother, and said, “Let me pay him.”

Together, they raced to the front door, shouting at the young man to stay, terrified he would get out of ear shot.

My five year old carries a lot of pain. We see it in his deep-solemn eyes all the time. And much of the time, I think, he ends up competing to keep the pain at bay.

But on a snowy March night, he let his pain lead him home.

Going Home By Making Our Home Here

Our pain can lead us home by leading us to create a home, right here in the middle of this broken humanity.

We don’t have to wait until our pain is inevitable and unavoidable—we can choose to let it out of the dungeons of our hearts.

Now.

And we can let in the pain of a fractured humanity.

Now.

And we can let the pain be the common ground upon which we meet each other, separate but equal, different but equally broken, unique but sharing in the suffering of life.

Pain can make little children empty piggy banks for a stranger who doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore because they share the common ground of disappointment and loneliness. It can lead us home by making every stranger a brother or a sister in this struggle we call living.

When we allow ourselves to feel our pain—when we allow ourselves to feel at home in a world riddled with pain—it will not make our pain disappear. But it will redeem it.

Because redemption isn’t always about making our pain go away—sometimes it’s about choosing how to live it.

My boys showed me how I want to live it…

like a welcome mat,

like a front porch light on a dark night,

like a lighthouse on a stormy sea,

like an invitation on a lonely day.

I want my pain to invite everyone else home.

Can you imagine a world of people equalized by their pain? Can you imagine a world where our sense of home doesn’t end at the front door? Can you imagine a world where every painful moment is redeemed by an ever-expanding community of people surrendered to their humanity?

Can you imagine?

Has pain ever equalized you and drawn you closer to the people you love? Share your experience or any other thoughts in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

Free eBook: My new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. Click here to subscribe, and the subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook. As always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

The Mess: The messy places in life—and the messy places within ourselves—present us with a choice. Because the mess is where our shame collides with grace. We can choose to succumb to shame. Or we can fight back. Come visit The Mess, and join the rebellion against shame.

Preview: My next post will be this Friday and is tentatively entitled “Why Couples Shouldn’t Do Couples Therapy (Says the Couples Therapist).”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

Why Grace Gets Angry (And Sometimes Starts a Fight)

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:30:24 +0000

Photo Credit: twm1340 via Compfight cc

All mature writers have a “voice.” Or so I’m told. I’ve also been told my “voice” is gentle, compassionate, and hopeful.

Several weeks ago, though, my writing voice changed for a paragraph or two. When I was explaining my shame and wanting to “kick it in the teeth,” my tone got a little angry. My language got coarse. The vibe got a little feisty. I started using words like “war.”

It wasn’t an accident.

In our rebellion against shame, we’re going to have to get a bit sassy, a little feisty. Act a little spunky. We might have to play a little rougher than usual.

The Wizard

In the words of Alice Miller, shame feeds on “weaker creatures.” This is a fundamental characteristic of shame, and its importance cannot be overemphasized. We have two options: we can deal with our shame, or we will pass it on to someone we deem weaker.

Shame has been passed down through the ages like an infection, and it is always transmitted from powerful people to those deemed to be “lower creatures.” You see, people in positions of power usually have plenty of shame—in fact, the powerful often strive for influence and control as a way to deny their own shame. (There are probably a few exceptions to this rule. Probably.) And so people with power shame the weaker creatures under their control:

Parents do it to children. (Yes, I even do it to my own children.)

Bullies do it to the weaker kids on the playground.

Teachers dominate students with it.

But what does that same parent do when his boss is ticked? How does the middle school bully act when confronted by his victim’s parents? What do shaming teachers do when the principle calls a meeting with some upset parents? What does any shaming person do when faced with someone who has more authority?

I’ll tell you: the person who uses shame from a place of power begins to cower when there is no weaker creature to feed upon.

And the same is true of the shame that weighs down our fragile souls.

It’s dependent upon us remaining small and abdicating our authority to it. If we fight back, it wants us to do so quietly and politely. It wants us to remain dignified and serious and solemn—reverent in the face of shame.

Because our shame is like the Wizard of Oz. If it can keep us feeling small, it can retain it’s big and ferocious facade. It can dominate and intimidate with smoke and mirrors. Our shame is an illusion—it lacks substance and maintains its power by putting on a great show.

And as long as we remain in the audience, trembling and quiet, it can take more ground inside of us.

The Bank

After a decade as a psychologist, this is about as close as I can come to making a guarantee: when we get feisty and fight back, pulling back the curtain on shame’s blustering lie, we will begin to discover it is all bark and has very little bite.

But the curtain is a stubborn one. We can’t pull it back delicately. We have to yank it.

Swear at your shame, and I can almost guarantee you it begins to shrink down to its actual size.

Personally, when I’m battling my shame-ghosts, I prefer a combination of pissed-off-and-funny.

I remember the first time I yanked back the curtain on my shame and told it what to do. Someone had just planted a dagger in my heart—they had just said the one thing they knew would make me feel the most worthless. But suddenly there was a new voice in my head, and it had an edge to it. That tenacious voice said, “Sorry, the shame bank is closed today. We’re not taking any more damn deposits.”

Them were fighting words.

And the beauty of it was, I didn’t need to fight the person who had shamed me. After all, they weren’t the one who needed to hear those fighting words. I was. Or even more accurately, my shame was.

The Yellow Brick Road

We are all traveling the yellow brick road of our souls. Whether we like it or not, all roads lead to Oz—all roads lead us back to our shame. The question is: what will we do when we get there? Will we let the Wizard bluster, or will we yank back the curtain?

If we decide to yank it back, we won’t be alone. When we decide to fight the voice of shame, the voice of grace will be our companion—it is usually a gentle whisper, but the voice of grace will exercise its authority and do what is required to drive out our shame.

Sometimes, the voice of grace rebukes hypocrisy and tips over tables and starts a little trouble and it drives the shame right out of the sacred places within our hearts.

And when, in tandem with the voice of grace, we have pushed back our shame (for now), we will notice the voice of grace gets quiet again. It returns to its whispering reassurance: “You are beautiful and beloved.” And it won’t stop there.

It also reassures us of the beauty and belovedness of everyone around us.

And this is the great irony of battling our shame: when we begin to fight it—to kick it in the teeth—we no longer feel the need to fight anyone else. We no longer need to pass on our shame to a weaker creature. We are more compassionate to those around us. We reconcile with our communities. We forgive our enemies.

By tenaciously exercising our authority over shame, we gain the power of belovedness, which allows us to be weak and vulnerable with everybody else.

In the end, the war on shame is, indeed, the war to end all wars.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the young lady who stopped me in the gym and challenged me about the “war on shame” verbiage. You know who you are. I went home and wrote this post. Without dialogue like that, I would have nothing new to say.

How do you get tenacious with your shame? Share your experience or any other thoughts at the bottom of this post.

———

Preview: My next post will be next Wednesday and is tentatively entitled “How Pain Can Lead Us Home.”

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What Madmen, Drunks, and Bastards Know About How to Live

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:30:29 +0000

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success…If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”

—Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Photo Credit: Dean Ayres via Compfight cc

The January night was moaning with a cold-dark wind. And our fireplace was talking back in hisses and pops of disappearing wood.

When a small voice inside of me said, “Three years of fires in this fireplace, Kelly, and you’ve never just sat. You’ve never just watched.”

So I settled in to gaze into the firelight.

Yet a mind on fire can burn hotter than wood, can’t it?

Within seconds, my eyes glazed and my thoughts blazed—blog ideas begging for a keyboard, voicemails to be checked, books to be read, texts and emails to return, a world to be kept at bay, a life to be conquered.

The desire for success can mangle the beauty in almost anything.

The Success Deception

As a psychologist, I feel like I’ve been let in on one of the most important secrets in the history of humankind: success doesn’t make us happy.

Each week in the quiet solitude of a psychotherapy office I hear some version of this story: “I wanted to prove everyone wrong and I worked like mad to reach the pinnacle of my profession and I’ve got it all—the spouse and the kids and the house and the cars—and I’m still not satisfied.”

Peter Rollins has said success feels like Wild E. Coyote the day after he catches the Road Runner—it feels like, “Is this all there is?” and “What now?” Every lottery winner describes the same kind of despair, because they’ve stumbled onto success and its dirty little secret: no amount of success can make us happy.

I think joy and contentment may be available to us all the time, in every place and in every moment, but the search for success keeps us looking in all the wrong places. Because the search for success keeps us thinking about the future—planning, organizing, anticipating—while joy and contentment are the qualities of a mind anchored in the present.

Anxiety and stress are not only caused by fear of the future—they are also caused by coveting the future. The bottom line is, whenever we invest our mind and spirit in a moment not yet arrived, we pave the way for anxiety and stress and their close cousins—anger and depression.

The search for success robs us of this moment and replaces it with endless moments of yearning.

Every Bush is Burning

Perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it best when she wrote:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

And daub their natural faces unaware.

If we can quit searching for success, we can start plumbing the depths of what is, right here and right now…

On a January night moaning with a cold-dark wind, the firelight danced in front of me. I struggled to be still, as I felt within me a storm-surge of just-do-something-for-crying-out-loud! It felt like panic and I rode that wave of ego and insecurity with one steady breath after another. The wave crested and my mind’s tide slowly receded.

I turned my attention to the fire. I turned my attention to the moment.

I watched as orange-purple tongues licked the air in every direction. I felt my cheeks tightened by heat, and I felt the coolness of the dark behind me. I saw shadows dance, and I smelled smoke like an ancient messenger. Somehow, the fire seemed to transcend time—present at the birth of the universe and enduring agelessly, warming hands before language and now warming hands that hold iPhones.

I felt time burn away, and without time there is nothing to aspire to, nothing to work toward. There is only being, and only one place to be: in this moment.

To Become Like Children Again

And I became aware of how timeless we feel when we’re playing instead of striving, and how foreign it must be for my playing children to have parents ranting about getting out the door on time. And I wondered, could all things become play if we sacrificed our “successful” futures at the altar of our ordinary—and extravagantly beautiful—present?

Could we forsake the compulsion to succeed in everything we do?

Could we turn every moment of work into play by gazing deeply into it and finding the beauty of the ordinary there?

Could we get lost in time, rather than losing our lives to time?

Could we run late because joy doesn’t wear a watch and giggling doesn’t always stop when we need it to?

Could we fail brilliantly if that’s what it takes to reclaim the awe and wonder of every person and smile and grimace and laugh and sob and breath?

Could we simply get messed up by the awesome-ordinary?

And could we take off our shoes and behold that every common bush is burning?

Have you every been struck by the bottomless beauty of our “common” world? Share your experience in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

———

Free eBook: My new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary reality of marriage. New blog subscribers will receive a free PDF copy, by clicking here to subscribe. The subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook. As always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Sincerely, Kelly

Preview: My next post will be this Friday and is tentatively entitled “How a Little Anger Can Set You Free.”

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Winners Anonymous: Breaking Our Addiction to the Extraordinary

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:30:26 +0000

When I write about becoming rebellious losers or embracing loss, I often hear the question, “Why do I find it so difficult to embrace being a loser?” I think the answer is a complicated one, but I believe our fear is a big part of it. Specifically, I think we are scared of being ordinary…

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Confession of a Psychologist

I have a confession:

I sometimes regret adding the “Dr.” to my web presence. I sometimes cringe when I see it in the URL. Because I think it’s awfully easy to hide behind those two extra letters and a wall full of diplomas. It’s easy to be the expert. It’s easy to be the guy with the answers. It’s easy to let others assume I have it all together.

Psychotherapy is a strange animal: we pay to consult with an expert but, ironically, if the expert pretends to have it all together, it actually interferes with the process of healing. Because hiding behind the “expert” status directly conflicts with some of the fundamental goals of therapy:

To fully embrace our humanity.

To accept we are all messy-beautiful creatures.

And to settle into the peacefulness of this conclusion: we’re all pretty ordinary, and that is blessedly good enough.

Fear of the Ordinary

In her new book, Daring Greatly, Brene Brown suggests our refusal to lose is the result of “…the shame-based fear of being ordinary.” She describes it as “the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

We don’t hate to lose because losers are failures. We hate to lose because losers are ordinary—ordinary humans who make mistakes and advertise their brokenness in a million different ways—and we have allowed “ordinary” and “worthless” to become dangerously intertwined.

I think we’ve become convinced extraordinary is the only acceptable way to be:

Ordinary people with a skill for acting are elevated into celebrities. Young men with a skill for putting a ball through a hoop are marketed into multi-million dollar gods. Entrepreneurs with a skill for innovation are put on magazine covers and a pedestal we call affluence.

It destroys them—celebrities overdose, athletes develop God complexes and go rogue, and innovators work themselves to death—but we ignore the effects of our obsession with the extraordinary. Instead of calling it what it is—a disease—we scrape and claw to participate in the epidemic.

In our kitchens and living rooms, marriages crumble beneath the weight of each spouse’s need to feel more extraordinary than their partner. On playgrounds, our kids compete for the mantle of the Most Extraordinary with basketballs and words and fists. And in the public square we turn politics into religion and religion into politics and we battle to the bitter end, claiming our group is extraordinary and everyone else is a loser.

We run from ordinariness like we would run from a ghost. And, indeed, we are running from a ghost. It’s the ghost of shame whispering in the quiet recesses of our hearts, and the lie on its tongue is this: “To lose is to be ordinary, and to be ordinary is to be nothing.”

“I’m Just a Dude”

Several months ago, I was at a pub with a friend, enjoying a late dinner. The televisions on every wall were advertising the extraordinary in various forms of athletic endeavor.

ESPN like a drug dealer of greatness.

My friend and I talked about our temptation to have eye-catching careers, to be model husbands, to be exalted fathers. We talked about how easy it can be to get lost in the adoration when things are going well, and to get lost in despair when they are not.

And then he said something that was a game-changer for me. He said, “Kelly, I say to myself, ‘I’m just a dude,’ and I remind myself that is enough.”

I’m just a dude.

And that is enough.

We must uncouple “ordinary” and “inadequate.” We must remember that all of us are human. We have hearts that beat, lungs that breathe, and souls that are hungering for a sense worth. We must feel this in our bones: I’m just as ordinary as everybody else. And we must love ourselves and the people around us, not in spite of it, but because of it.

Winners Anonymous

Most 12-step programs begin with a confession. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the initial greeting goes something like this: “Hi, my name is So-and-So, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Well, I have a confession: I’m just a dude.

What would you think about starting a new 12-step movement with me? We could call it Winners Anonymous. We’ll confess our addiction to winning. We’ll admit we’re all craving the drug of victory and the euphoric feeling of “extraordinary” that comes with it. We’ll embrace that we are all ordinary losers. And we will resolutely insist that we are ordinary, messy, and beautiful people, all at the same time.

I’ll go first:

“Hi, my name is Kelly. And I’m an addict. I fight to win so I don’t have to feel ordinary, because I’ve confused being ordinary with being not good enough. I want to break my addiction to winning. I want to remember ‘I’m just a dude.’ And I want to experience the peace and freedom that come from being ordinary while swimming in grace.”

Want to join a bunch of ordinary, beautiful losers?

Questions: What false narratives do you have about what it means to be ordinary? How do they prevent you from embracing your own beautiful, ordinary life? Share your experience in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

Preview: My next post will be this coming Wednesday and is tentatively entitled “What Madmen, Drunks, and Bastards Know About Beauty.”

The 5 Barriers to Empathy in Marriage (And How to Overcome Them)

Dr. Kelly Flanagan — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:30:43 +0000

Empathy is the foundation of any authentic connection. It’s the bedrock of togetherness, it’s the fuel of compassion, and it’s the mortar of grace. We must hone our ability to feel it and to give it. But empathy can be elusive. Even psychologists, who are skilled in empathy, can struggle with it when they walk out of the office and into their homes…

Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sernicola (Creative Commons)

Dusk is closing in when the shrink arrives home from work and walks in the back door. Some nights, all is well. His wife is smiling, the kids are happy. But on other nights, all is not well.

Some nights, his wife is tired and worn-thin after a long day at work and the onslaught of the children’s cries for food and attention. Some nights, his oldest son is anxious and fretting about the upcoming standardized tests, which his teachers have been hyping more than the Superbowl. Some nights, his middle son is sad and distraught about the various injustices suffered by any middle child. Some nights, his youngest daughter is bouncing and bubbling with joy and eager for a Daddy mirror, for someone to reflect all that effervescence.

Some nights, everyone wants a little empathy and the therapist is feeling stubborn.

Some nights, he gets home, and he knows what he should do. He should remember that sometimes the people we love act in such a way toward us that we begin to feel exactly what they are feeling. He should get quiet and notice that just beneath his stubbornness are his own feelings of fatigue and frustration and anxiety and injustice…and maybe even joy. He should notice this and offer himself up, reach out, find the common ground.

He should. But he doesn’t.

Because even for psychologists, empathizing with the people we love is so hard to do. And I think it’s particularly hard to empathize with our spouses. After all, we don’t expect much empathy from our children. But we expect an awful lot from our partners.

The Five Reasons We Don’t Give Empathy

I think there are at least five fatal barriers to establishing empathy in our intimate relationships:

1. I don’t want to go first. In any relationship, both members need empathy. But at any given moment, empathy is unidirectional—it can only flow in one direction at a time. Which means someone has to go first. Someone has to be willing to meet the needs of the other, before their own needs are met.

2. I don’t agree with you. Empathy requires us to place ourselves in another person’s shoes, to allow our hearts to beat to the rhythm of theirs. We often fundamentally disagree with their perspective, and so we are tempted to debate them intellectually, rather than join them emotionally.

3. What if I get it wrong? When we try to place ourselves squarely inside of someone else’s emotional landscape, it can be a little scary. It’s unfamiliar territory. They are inviting us in, but what if we get it all wrong? Empathy can be terrifying if we have any perfectionism within us.

4. I don’t want to feel that. On the other hand, you might know exactly what your partner is feeling. It may bring up thoughts and feelings in you that you would prefer to avoid. If we don’t want to feel our own sadness, we won’t want to feel sadness on behalf of the person we love.

5. It’s not my job to fix you. We confuse empathy with “fixing.” We think we have to do something to take the emotion away, and we don’t want to be put on that hot-seat. Or some of us will have the opposite reaction: I’m going to fix you. But this undermines our ability to provide empathy, as well. Because empathy is not fixing. Empathy is joining.

Climbing the Barriers

If we want to give empathy in our relationships, we will have to sacrifice some values we hold dear:

We will have to be willing to lose, because it will feel like losing. It will feel like our partner’s needs are being met before our own. But there is no other way.

We will have to put aside all of our intellectual debates. Empathy is not a matter of deciding who is right and wrong. It is simply a matter of finding an emotional common ground.

We have to be willing to get it wrong, because we will get it wrong. Empathy is messy. There are no three-easy-steps to accurately understanding the person we love. We have to be okay when our partner tells us we’re not getting it. And then we have to try again.

We need to embrace our discomfort, because empathy will take us into some uncomfortable place within ourselves. If we are unwilling to go there, we need to quit talking to our spouse and start talking to a therapist of our own.

And we have to quit trying to fix things. There will be a time for that later. For now, empathy is about connecting within an experience, not making the experience go away.

Empathy is for Everyone

Some nights, I know that stubborn-grumpy therapist, because he is me. I wish I could tell you he always finds his way to empathy, but I can’t. Some nights he does. Some nights he doesn’t. And you won’t always find your way to empathy, either. But that’s okay. That’s not the point. The point is that we begin to try.

Because empathy isn’t just for therapists, it’s for all of us.

Questions: What makes it difficult for you to empathize? Share your experience in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

Free eBook: My new eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available for free to new blog subscribers. Just click here to subscribe, and your subscription confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also available for a low price on Kindle and Nook. As always, thank you for reading; it’s a gift. Blessings, Kelly

Preview: My next post will be this Friday, March 8, and the working title is, “Winners Anonymous: Breaking Our Addiction to the Extraordinary.”

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