“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. (Rule 2)
There are a trillion things to pay attention to. Almost all of them are irrelevant.
I would argue there’s no better use of time than understanding your own personality and the personalities of those around you”
(promo for Jordan B. Peterson’s Discovering Personality course)
The Lord has been working on me the last few weeks, in terms of showing me some things about me… Every once in a while He seems to shake things up and carry me through a time of introspection. Not morbidly so, or with regrets….. just calling me to deeper work, refining work.
Woodlawn’s Celebrate Recovery is just down the street from me and I felt led to go the last two weeks, and what God was doing got sort of fast tracked…. between that and the new season of Being Known podcasts by Dr. Curt Thompson…… Refining is always welcome.
In season 8, episode 3 of his Being Known podcast on Youtube, Dr. Thompson talks about how our narrative about our lives impacts our physical bodies. He observed that our traumas fracture our sense of purpose. To address what he recognized as his own residual impact of traumas, he realized he needed to do some forgiveness work. He created a list of people he had not fully forgiven. He talked about how he came to that realization. As I listened to him, I realized there are some I, too, had not fully forgiven.
Dr. Thompson imagined himself sitting down at the kitchen table with each individual and Jesus. One is invited to share his version of events that have become his narrative. Then Jesus asks, “How does your version of events as they happened to you compare to my own perspective of how I see you?”
Thompson observed how often we actually envision revenge against those who have harmed us and that there is positive reinforcement or pleasure that occurs as we hold on to grudges.
Over time such traumas can become located in the part of our body where we feel the pain.
Thompson says forgiveness isn’t a thing we do. It is a thing we become…. a virtue, a place of being so that we don’t return to the experience of anger, humiliation, betrayal, or other feelings.
There’s great relief in turning loose of the emotions and the physical retention of those emotions, allowing holistic reintegration of spirit, soul, and body
God created us with mud, THEN breathed life into it. We can sense and embody beauty in the physical body.
Trauma shatters my ability to even be aware of the body clearly. It becomes something “other” to me as I try to deny the truth of my pain.
Our ability to exercise imagination helps reconnect spirit, soul, and body and incarnate the character of Christ, conferring his beauty on us. Spirit and soul direct the body and release it from the tyranny of emotional tension stored in the body.
He said there are 10 people on his list he is working though. Listening to this, I began to enumerate the persons in my life, too, who’ve been responsible for trauma to me that I’ve held on to. A quick list resulted in 10 who had wounded me with lies, stolen valued treasures, or betrayed trust and one who had physically and violently attacked me. All of them are out of my life now. There were several more that I had fully forgiven who continued as part of my life. That in itself is telling, it seems.
In my third week of attending the confidential women’s open share group at Celebrate Recovery, I shared with them what I have been dealing with in relationship to reformulating what forgiveness actually looks and feels like. As I was listening to others share, 3 things cane to my mind….
1.) “schadenfreude”
2.) 1 Corinthians 13 (specifically “love does not delight in evil), and
3.) Micah 6:8 (“Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”)
Later, in a quick check online, Wikipedia shed some light on what I was having difficulty describing.
“Schadenfreude, a German word, is literally translated as ‘harm-joy’. It is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing “inequity aversion“.
Researchers have found that there are three driving forces behind schadenfreude – aggression, rivalry, and justice.
Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with lower self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.
It is hypothesized that this inverse relationship is mediated through the human psychological inclination to define and protect their self- and in-group– identity or self-conception. Specifically, for someone with high self-esteem, seeing another person fail may still bring them a small (but effectively negligible) surge of confidence because the observer’s high self-esteem significantly lowers the threat they believe the visibly-failing human poses to their status or identity. Since this confident individual perceives that, regardless of circumstances, the successes and failures of the other person will have little impact on their own status or well-being, they have very little emotional investment in how the other person fares, be it positive or negative. (Since this is a rare event for me, it seems I would fall into this group. And it may also be why it has taken me so long to recognize it and why, only after hearing Dr. Thompson describe his own struggle with forgiveness in such cases, did I even relate to the experience in myself!)?
Conversely, for someone with low self-esteem, someone who is more successful poses a threat to their sense of self, and seeing this person fall can be a source of comfort because they perceive a relative improvement in their internal or in-group standing.
- Aggression-based schadenfreude primarily involves group identity. The joy of observing the suffering of others comes from the observer’s feeling that the other’s failure represents an improvement or validation of their own group’s (in-group) status in relation to external (out-groups) groups. This is, essentially, schadenfreude based on group versus group status.
- Rivalry-based schadenfreude is individualistic and related to interpersonal competition. It arises from a desire to stand out from and out-perform one’s peers. This is schadenfreude based on another person’s misfortune eliciting pleasure because the observer now feels better about their personal identity and self-worth, instead of their group identity.
- Justice-based schadenfreude comes from seeing that behavior seen as immoral or “bad” is punished. It is the pleasure associated with seeing a “bad” person being harmed or receiving retribution. Schadenfreude is experienced here because it makes people feel that fairness has been restored for a previously un-punished wrong, and is a type of moral emotion.”
Because Micah 6:8 came to mind concurrently with the word schadenfreude and the character of love from 1 Corinthians 13, I realized immediately that God was pointing me to my own failing in the third category of the source of this emotion and its relationship to forgiveness. My sense of schadenfreude is rooted in moral judgementalism.
Dr Thompson ended episode three with the observation that after God created Adam, it was a wound in Adam’s side that resulted in Eve. Does that say anything to us about the cost to the body of having the joy of personal emotionally and spiritually intimate relationships with other people, in spite of the pain we may have experienced because of them?
Christ’s wounds brought healing and reconciliation with God for us. His resurrection and ascension and sending his Holy Spirit bring a narrative of beauty that changes our own narrative of pain. It’s hard to be in the presence of beauty, and striving to see that beauty in others, mediated by Christ and continue holding a grudge or delighting in another’s trouble.
Perhaps loving one’s enemies begins with not gloating or delighting in their pain or failure, and instead in praying for God to have mercy on them…. and on having mercy on them ourselves….as we desire that His mercy would be available to us, as well.