Turning the Page

We can have an overreaction to life’s events, but when we search out what’s behind the reaction, we often find history-based pain. Let’s help the prickly pear.

It was a reaction I wasn’t expecting. I had made a few jokes, and their response wasn’t to have a simple laugh with me but to get highly defensive and even go on the attack.

Have you ever wondered why some people take offense even to something seemingly unoffensive?

Where no harm was meant but there sure was a reaction!

In their overreaction, you decide that you need to be super careful around them.

You pick your words with utmost care so that you don’t get an explosion, that overreaction.

But all of this controlled containment of your natural self leads to a shutting down—you’ tiptoe’ around them, careful not to push their buttons.

And honestly, how does that lead to a more in-depth, more meaningful, and intimate relationship?

Maybe it’s withdrawal. Their response to some situation is a withdrawal into themselves—hiding away in a cave of negative echoes.

You see, we respond to the present out of the formation of our history.

The painful events of our history have bumped and knocked us into drawing up a guidebook of conclusions about life. Some of those conclusions need to be revisited as adults and decided upon if they are truly helpful or not, and if they help us develop meaningful and intimate relationships.

I read this quote the other day from David Riddell.

The more you fear humiliation, the angrier you must get, in your attempts to protect yourself from its history-based pain. David Riddell

Let’s unpack this.

We like to tease each other. It’s normal, and it’s part of play and growing relationships.

But we don’t like to be humiliated. To be shamed and feel small, foolish, or incompetent.

So we protect ourselves from anyone or anything that might trigger those feelings of humiliation. We fear being humiliated.

So we get angry at the injustice of it all. We lash out at the abuser.

But as we do this, a wall is being built—a barrier that stops the flow of intimacy – in-to-me-see.

It’s a history-based pain that keeps getting the touchdown.

Something happened back then that is like a trampoline that even now you still bounce off. It seems so normal and natural for you to respond that way, but it’s not helpful.

When someone is overreacting, then it’s important to remember that how they respond is their responsibility.

You cant control them and the way they react to the various stimuli they are going to come across.

We are volitional beings. God has given us the cognitive ability to make choices.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of the extermination camps of holocaust Germany, knew something of our ability to choose how we respond.

Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.  Victor Frankl

Perhaps you know someone who is what I call a ‘Prickly Pear.’

An actual Prickly Pear is a fruit from the Cacti family. It can be eaten and enjoyed but on the outside of the skin are fine prickles or bristles that easily dislodge and can cause skin and eye irritation.

So you handle them with care.

If you want more of a human face to a prickly pear, then meet Gloria.

If you want to know Gloria and discover her goodness, you need to have loads of patience and learn to ask questions.

Good questions that defuse the walking landmine that they are.

Questions have a way of opening up lines of inquiry, and if you want to go deep with a Gloria or Glen, then gentle empowering questions need to be asked.

Questions to ask yourself

1. What do I know about their history that might help explain their reaction?

1. I’m curious, why did you respond in the way you did?

As we review the bumps and bruises of our story, we will notice times when we responded in certain ways to life events that have left us with thinking and emotional response habits.

But we are not locked into our past.

We can change, our brains are plastic (malleable), and we have God of infinite creative power that desires to make all things new.

So we now offer up our thinking and emotional response habits to God, asking for questions to unlock the purposes of the heart.

What would Jesus want me to know about this moment in my story and in his-story?

Can Spirit (Holy) help to lubricate the wiring in my brain to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus? Philippians 2:5

I believe they can.

• Check every over-reaction in the present for an echo from the past. Trace it, face it, replace it, or live on in all-out reaction to others. D. Riddell

1. Fight, flight, or freeze. All can be overreactions to stressful triggers to history-based pain. What tends to be your default response mode?

Barry Pearman

Photo by Marc Szeglat on Unsplash

We are all in a daily grind of struggle, but when you listen for the voices of demand, you can learn to be kind to yourself and others. You can find rest.

This person deserves a  medal.

Sometimes I listen to a person sharing something of their lives, and I think they deserve a medal or some award for what they have been through.

We hand out awards for bravery, sports, business leadership, arts, and other achievements but not for those who have faced the grit and grind of life.

I hear, at a heart level, the failures, successes, regrets, moments of passion, and also moments of sheer exhaustion. Yet they still keep going.

It’s a humbling experience at times to go deep into the struggle of another’s life. There is an invite to say ‘well done.’

But they downplay your sense of amazement. Not so much out of modesty but more so out of an unawareness that what they do is quite amazing.

• ‘Raising three kids on my own – not that bigger deal.’

I want to say to them, ‘You’re amazing.’

There is often a pull to self-isolate. To hide away with our struggles. Rugged individualism has an allure to it of ‘I can do this on my own.’

Yet at the full stop point, that place where you run out of resources there is a need to reach out and seek help.

‘I can’t do this on my own.’

Only in the movies does the self-made superhero exist.

Most of all, we need others who say that they are with us.

They may not be able to magically solve the problem or heal the hurt, but they can offer to wipe away the tears of exhaustion.

They are there to be there for that moment.

Can you be kind to yourself?

Can you, for a moment, look at the grit and grind of your life and rest yourself in a bath of kindness?

Perhaps there is a little voice inside you that is saying you’re not enough. That you don’t measure up. You’re a failure, and you need to try harder.

Maybe you have a list of measurements that you have to achieve to feel you’re doing ok.

It could be spiritual exercises of having a daily quiet time, reading the Bible, praying for a certain amount of minutes, attending these church events, giving a certain amount of money.

Can you be kind to yourself and drop these for a moment.

No one is going to jump on you and kick you off God’s team. If you have critical people like that in your life, then perhaps it’s time to find a healthier group of people to be friends with.

For six days, this creative team worked and built. It was truly unique what they created. Mountains and microbes. Stars and snails. A man and a mouse.

What a burst of energy it must have been. Furious love exploding out everywhere.

Then on the seventh day, they had a rest. Phew.

A deep rest of sitting with each other and soaking in the kindness of it all. They were kind to each other, themselves.

We still have that opportunity of entering kindness and rest.

Being kind to ourselves is an invite to rest with them (God) because we accept our clay bound human limitations.

To be kind to ourselves is to know that there is a much larger story going on, that we are part of it, and that God, with their creative artistic flair, will bring all things together for good (Romans 8:28).

Can you rest yourself in that?

Yet, there is still that little critic inside that whispers and shouts a list of expectations.

• Do this

There’s no carrot, only a stick that drives the donkey of your life.

Please, be kind and stop ‘shoulding’ on yourself.

Start to notice the inner voice of the critic and see the influence it has over you. Where did that voice come from? Who was that slave driver?

It may be time for you to learn how to work out of your rest.

Yesterday I had a typically busy day outside, but I stopped for a moment.

I noticed that there was a particular wildness in the wind and so I ceased working for a few minutes and let the genesis energy of the wind flow around my face and through my lungs.

I was kind to myself and rested.

It was a ‘No’ to the ‘shoulds’ and an embracing of the ‘coulds.’

There were options. I could keep on working, working, working, or I could, for the next few moments, become mindfully aware of the presence of God in the wind around me.

I was kind to myself and I rested.

You may be working so hard in life that I can hardly rest with you. Please, be kind to yourself and take a rest.

•  Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Socrates

1. Are you kind to yourself?

Barry Pearman

Photo by Anthony Duran on Unsplash

Life can hand us a bunch of questions with few answers. But there is something inviting in a question, and so we explore a road less travelled.

When Bob climbed into the passenger seat next to me, I could see that something was wrong. He wasn’t his normal cheery self. It was like a question had gripped his thinking.

Have you ever had that experience? Something has happened in your life, and with a sense of shock, you are consumed with trying to understand it.

If you have lived for a few years, you will most likely have a closet full of questions.

Its that place where you store away those questions that haven’t been answered yet.

Or maybe they have been answered, but not to your full satisfaction.

I’m talking questions of the heart.

Perhaps the answer given was glib.

A nice, pretty sterilized bandaid used to avoid exposure to the rawness of the pain.

Few of us genuinely want to hear the rawness of another’s pain. We don’t even want to go near our own.

The older I get, I find that I have many questions and few answers.

Recently I have been listening, via Daily Audio Bible, to Job and Ecclesiastes.

Now here are a couple of books that inspire joy and overflowing positivity!

Job sits in torn clothes and a pit of ashes. His world has been thrown upside down and shaken to its core.

But why? He questions everything, especially God. His so-called friends question him and tell him their less than helpful answers.

The writer of Ecclesiastes seems to be stuck in a well of hopelessness.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”

How about that as a sales pitch for success!

One of the delights of the book of Job is how God responds to Job and his friends.

Job asks questions. God responds with questions.

The questions God asked Job to answer were of a nature that no man could answer, put in a box and say ‘There I have the answer’.

I have some questions for you,

Job is cognitively invited to see his questions in the context of something bigger than himself.

There is a larger story going on, and we are invited to be part of it.

You don’t have to have the answers to gain entry.

Actually, those with the questions are more likely to hear the bigger God questions that truly matter, and that shape and form one’s wholeness.

Every one of us will, at some stage, go through a Job experience. It might not be as dramatic as Jobs with loss of family, wealth, and health, but we will all taste the ashes of loss.

It could be the betrayal in a marriage or the death of a friend. The loss of a job or a crippling car accident. Cancer eating your body and fire burning your house.

There’s a mill, a grindstone, a storm, and a place of fire that we all pass through—a place where everything seems meaningless and hopeless.

It’s a time where you’re invited to reassess all that you have believed in.

• Is God good?

Perhaps the place that gave you the answers as a child no longer provides the answers for the fire scorched adult you are becoming.

I once was pastorally coaching a man with a severe addiction problem. His wife had had enough and had told him the marriage was over.

He was in the fire of change, and he didn’t like the taste.

He asked what he should do.  So we talked about her past and how she had suffered abuse and needed a deep sense of security. The facts were that he was untrustworthy and an abuser of her trust.

We had to give her, via his observed behaviors, new factual evidence that he was doing things differently.

So he became religious, in a good sense, of creating new habits. He did it for himself first. The change was for his own sake, and that if it restored his marriage, then that would be a bonus.

He questioned his beliefs and didn’t like the answers. We rebuilt his life, and the marriage was restored.

I want to listen to people with questions. I probably don’t have the answers, but the joy is to see that they are actually questioning things.

To just accept everything and go along in a trance of what others tell you shows little desire for growth or depth. That power, contained in a good storm or fire, has left no maturing mark.

Spiritual formation happens at that crossroads where there is a question.

Do I explore the road less traveled, or do I take the familiar, but old, and less than satisfactory route?

We need to, as Parker Palmer would say ‘hear each other into deeper speech’. 

Bob, can I ask you something?

Mental health is ... exploring the questions for the questions that are underneathCLICK TO TWEET

• Learn to respond to others with honest, open questions instead of counsel or corrections. With such questions, we help “hear each other into deeper speech.” Parker J. Palmer.

1. Do you have a closet full of questions? Ones that you have subconsciously stored away but now and then make their unwelcome appearance? What are those questions?

By Barry Pearman

Photo by xandtor on Unsplash

In our spiritual life, we want to know if we are making progress, but much of growth and formation is intangible, so we have to look deeper than a mere measurement.

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but when we dug a little deeper, I could see the wisdom.

I was talking with a counselor, and I asked him how do we know if we are growing spiritually or not? There isn’t any objective measuring tool where we can say we have moved 5 points ahead or back. That would really open us up to feelings of pride or failure.

What he said was along the lines of this.

How well are you relating to those closest to you?

He conjectured that if we were growing spiritually, then this would be seen in how we relate to others.

We could pull this apart because relationships are a two-way street.  Some people are plain dangerous to be open and intimate with. They will take advantage, abuse, and possibly try to squash your faith. We all have a journey to take.

But I could see where he was coming from.

He was looking at how the three members of Trinity loved and served each other. A kind of self-giving self-sacrificial love between each of them where each tries to outdo the other in overflowing love.

‘I’m going to love you more’ ‘No, I’m going to love you more.’

Spiritual growth and formation, I believe, is a movement to that kind of intimacy and love.

If those closest to me, those who see me at my best and my worst, can say that there is a sense of an overflowing faith, hope, and love coming from me, then maybe something of that perichoresis dance has filtered into my movement.

Perichoresis (from Greek: περιχώρησις perikhōrēsis, “rotation”) is a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to one another. Perichoresis 

Relationships are tricky.

We want to give the very best to the other, but we also want and need from others certain things such as love and respect.

None of us love with perfection.

We can be like, as Dr. Larry Crabb says, two ticks with no dog.

A marriage bound together by commitments to exploit the other for filling one’s own needs (and I fear that most marriages are built on such a basis) can legitimately be described as a “tic on a dog” relationship.

For much of my life, I have considered that my spiritual life was measured by what I do.

Examples

• Personal devotional life – reading the Bible, prayer, scripture memorization, meditation

All good activities to do, but it feels more like a religion of doing than a relationship of being.

Any step away from these, and you’re seen as backsliding and that you need to repent and try harder!

So often, it can feel like you’re the dog and others – individuals and organizations are the tic sucking the life out of you. They have a wonderful plan for your life that seems to subtly also include sucking the life out of you.

I have limits as to how much love I can give to others. This old dog has only so much blood and life from which others can draw life from.

Paul, in a little section of the letter to the Romans, he talks about living with difficult people.

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Romans 12:18

In these few words, he says that it’s not always going to be possible to live at peace with everyone. That you can only do so much and that you have limits in your capability.

You won’t be able to meet everyone’s needs. You may know this logically, but it’s your heart that needs to hear it.

When I sense the demand of a tic, the desire to meet a need that was never mine to meet, then I gently point them to an overflowing well of nourishment.

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen.  And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Here were some tics, people much like ourselves with hungry, needy hearts. They had a desire for long deep draughts of love and respect.

Jesus comes, shows love and respect for them by speaking in the context of fishing. They drop their nets and follow.

They have found the well from which to draw from.

Formation becomes natural as they model themselves off ‘the Christ’.

I would love to be able to hang out with Jesus, much like those early fishermen, tax collectors, and other waywards.

I know it would probably wreck my life and possibly those around me. Throw everything into even further confusion and then have it settle into something new. Jesus has a habit of doing it that way.

How would I measure spiritual growth and development?

I like the idea of relationality has its merits. That is where God does their finest work.

I would also like to know if there is a growing fruitfulness in your life. At a relational level, that there is some evidence of the fruit of the Spirit

Things like affection for others,

A willingness to stick with things,

An involvement in loyal commitments,

Maybe I would also like to know if there is a growing sense of grace towards yourself and others.

All of this is highly subjective and can’t be measured. Only God knows the heart, and let’s leave it at that.

Mental health is ... having a spiritual formation journey that grows and develops. It overflows and touches the lives of others with faith, hope, and love.CLICK TO TWEET

• Being is more important than doing, the heart is more important than the mind, and caring together is better than caring alone. Henri Nouwen

1. How would you measure one’s spiritual formation?

Sharpening: A Spiritual Habit for Better Mental Health

Your Brain Needs to Rest Beside Still Waters

Mental Health Grows Through Little By Little Dance Steps

Barry Pearman

Photo by Raychan on Unsplash

Social isolation lockdown comes with touch-deprivation and highlights the need we all have of touch, but perhaps we can reach out and hold each other safely.

She walked up and gave me the biggest hug. Her husband shook my hand.

I’m missing touch. Are you?

I know some people who are huggy people and love to have big open arms that embrace others. It feels like you are being swallowed up by them.

Whereas others don’t like the physical touch.

But I wonder what will the world be like once this COVID19 crisis is over.

Questions bubble in the brain.

1. Will we be more paranoid about physical touch?

Something happens when we touch. It’s a physical awareness that we’re not alone.

There is pressure on the nerve endings of your skin. Someone has moved from their existence into yours. You are not alone.

And it’s not just the COVID crisis that’s changing our touch habits. It could be the device your reading this post on.

Tiffany Field is a researcher of touch at the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. She traveled to different airports in Florida to watch people interacting.

She made a shocking discovery: Nobody was touching each other. Everyone was on their phone.

Read an article about her research here. Why Physical Touch Matters for Your Well-Being

Everyone passed him by. Nobody stopped to talk, touch, or even have eye contact.

It felt like he wasn’t there, even though he certainly was.

He thought of getting a little bell and ring it in time with the syrup worship songs they sang.

Perhaps he needed to sing ‘Unclean, unclean’ in this place of worship.

It was a kind of social isolation he knew. No one knew how to handle him. He was on the outside.

You see, he could no longer play the cosmetic mask games they were playing. He hurt on the inside, and it flowed outwards. There was no ability to contain his depression and make out like everything was ok.

He needed presence.

That was until a little old lady of 92 came and sat next to him, held his hand, and told him without words that he wasn’t alone. Her old wrinkled and crinkled hands entwined for a good half hour.

He was in love.

Back in 2009, I wrote my final essay for my Bachelor of Applied Theology.

My essay was entitled The Dehumanising Effects of Sexual Abuse.

In my research, I came across the work of theologian Miroslav Volv.

Volv writes

On the cross the circle of self-giving and mutually indwelling divine persons opens up for the enemy; in the agony of the passion the movement stops for a brief moment and a fissure appears so that sinful humanity can join in.

We, the others – we the enemies – are embraced by the divine persons who love us with the same love with which they love each other and therefore make space for us within their own eternal embrace.

An embrace involves always a double movement of opening and closing. I open my arms to create space in myself for the other. The open arms are a sign of discontent at being myself only and of desire to include the other.

They are an invitation to the others to come in and feel at home with me, to belong to me. In an embrace I also close my arms around the others – not tightly, so as to crush and assimilate them forcefully into myself, for that would not be an embrace but a concealed power-act of exclusion; but gently, so as to tell them that I do not want to be without them in their otherness.

I want them in their openness. I want them to remain independent and true to their genuine selves, to maintain their identity and as such become part of me so that they can enrich me with what they have and I do not’. Miroslav Volv

Actually there wasn’t a 92-year-old lady, and that was the day he left the church that had deluded him.

Instead, he went to the others on the street. He found others in the gutter, and they shared war stories.

They all had wounds and bruises. Some of which had turned into scars.

For some, they were still bleeding, and hugs were mingled with the anger and the hurt of a fresh wound.

Then there were others for whom the wound had turned into a scar.

There was a confidence in them of a well-walked traveler. They had walked the walk, and they could silent the talk.

I have this thing about being a preacher who reveals things about herself,

Please, be that 92-year-old woman or man who knows how to hold someone else’s hand, soul, life safely. Let them speak their wounds and see the scars take shape. It’s a beautiful thing.

You may just look a lot like Jesus.

Mental Health is ... learning to give and receive touch. In an ever-increasing isolated world, we all need to learn how to touch wellCLICK TO TWEET

• Remember that touch-hungry children become touch-hungry adolescents. Don’t miss the opportunity to provide the remedy, before they start looking to others. D. Riddell

1. What do you think might be the long term effects of social isolation?

Barry Pearman

Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash