THE SELF-HELP MOVEMENT: HOW WE THINK IS HOW WE FEEL
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To change our thinking is also to change our feeling and even how we feel about ourselves. However, do we have the ability to change our thinking in meaningful and productive ways?
The self-help community and the psychotherapeutic communities are committed to the assumptions that:
1. We can rewrite our basic scripts.
2. We have learned these scripts. Therefore, we can unlearn them and replace them with more livable and positive scripts.
Admittedly, some of our scripts are learned and can be overcome. However, there are compelling reasons to believe that other scripts are implanted as deeply into us as is our very humanity. We share a common humanity and a common moral nature. Consequently, we are not a blank slate from which our human programming can easily be removed or even written over. Instead, it has to be accepted in the same way that we accept that a fish has a nature that requires it to live in the water. Here are some evidences of our deeply embedded human nature:
∑ Certain moral judgments emerge as our neuronal system develops.
∑ We can also see the impact of this moral nature cross-culturally. We need to feel loved, valued, and respected. Our nature coerces us to fulfill these needs in a variety of ways – through attainments, popularity, money, and even positive affirmations. When we violate our moral script, we feel the need to compensate for the resulting feelings of guilt, shame, and impending judgment by proving our worthiness, denial, and by attacking others. We will even practice self-harm and self-deprivations to reduce the stress and to restore feelings of worthiness. This is because our feelings of guilt and impending judgment are so powerful that denial often fails us.
According to the Bible, we have an implanted indelible script that will not be silenced:
∑ Romans 1:32: Though they KNOW God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
∑ Romans 2:14-15: For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.
We have many strategies to deal with our deeply lodged feelings of guilt, shame, and impending judgment. However, human history attests to the fact that none of them are really that good.
We can live in denial. However, the denial of these intuitions is not selective. Instead, this denial is generally a denial of ourselves and what it means to be human. Just ask the sociopath. We can try to compensate through our attainments and affirmations, but these are as short-lived as a drug high. Regaining a sense of worthiness though self-harm is also short-lived. Instead, we will require increasingly high dosages of these addictive “drugs,” which can become lethal.
In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver identifies our drive to establish our self-importance and to be a “somebody”:
• Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)
We are so desperate to be a “somebody” that it might even lead us to murder. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:
• “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)
Perhaps, instead, we need to listen carefully to what our feelings are telling us. Perhaps we are experiencing guilt and shame because these feelings are telling us something very important that we need to hear. Perhaps we feel guilty because we are guilty in a very objective sense. Perhaps we are sinners who need the Savior who is calling us through our persistent feelings.
Our feelings are like a fire-alarm system. The alarm should not be regarded as a pesky noise that we have to silence but an indication of a real fire that needs to be appropriately addressed. Perhaps our feelings are also alerting us to an objective fire, which we need to address.
But how? The masochist correctly senses that sins cost and that a payment must be made for them. However, our sins are so serious that it was never expected that we should make a payment for them through self-harm. The achiever also correctly sensed that he had to be convinced that he is a “somebody.” However, all of his efforts would just make him self-righteous and arrogant.
Instead, God offered another way. He explained though the Prophet Jeremiah that Israel had to merely confess their sins and to trust that God would forgive them:
∑ Jeremiah 3:12-14 “Go, and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, ‘Return, faithless Israel, declares the LORD. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the LORD; I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt, that you rebelled against the LORD your God and scattered your favors among foreigners under every green tree, and that you have not obeyed my voice, declares the LORD. Return, O faithless children, declares the LORD; for I am your master; I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.’”
Does this sound too easy? Just try Him out! Chapman, serving a life sentence, tried Him out and now teaches Bible in prison.
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