Have you ever hidden things about yourself? Maybe ways you’ve felt jealous of someone or threatened by someone? Ways you’ve struggled with a habitual sin? Maybe it’s walking around with an angry edge but never really addressing it. This can often lead to feelings of condemnation, hopelessness, struggles with loneliness, or anxieties. One night at a restaurant I observed another couple who didn’t talk or look at each other the entire meal. The husband just sat there reading a book as they ate. There was no intimacy between them. Clearly they had some issues in their hearts that had not come to the light.

Hiding things about ourselves hinders fellowship and keeps us from feeling clean on the inside.

So often we try to handle things on our own, putting up a strong front, but this is independence. Independence is the opposite of fellowship. Independence is what blocks our true heartfelt connection with God and man. What is the key to effectively deal with this? It starts with understanding how to come to the light.

We come to the light when we risk trusting someone enough to open up to them. Exposing our interior secrets and struggles to another person shines a light into the dark corners of our hearts.

Is there someone who really knows you? Someone who knows you well enough to see your patterns? One to whom you trust enough to put the walls down and allow to speak into your life?

1 John 5:7 says, “If we walk in the light… we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.”

There are two primary things here. One, light brings us to experience true, effective fellowship wherein we feel connected and no longer lonely. And two, light is where the blood cleanses us, where it becomes effective, where our heart can truly receive forgiveness, and we feel clean.

If you’ve been in emotional pain, feeling cut off, struggling with anger or fear, take a step. Find someone you trust and begin coming to the light.

We live in a world that values strength and belittles weakness. We idolize characters such as Rambo, John Wayne, and Jason Bourne. It is so easy to feel that there is no way to advance in life if people see our weaknesses, our personal struggles. So we tend to be drawn toward hiding these things about ourselves. We want to put them in the dark where no one can see them. Yet, if we can’t even acknowledge we have struggles, how can we ever hope to overcome them? Understanding what is darkness and what is light puts a huge tool in our hands for growth.

Blatant sin, of course, is darkness; however, there can be smaller, less noticeable ways where we might be living in the dark. 1 John 1:6 says,”… if we say we have fellowship with God, but we continue living in darkness, we lie and do not follow the truth.” So what exactly does this “living in darkness” mean? Simply put, anything that is hidden and not exposed. To paraphrase Andrew Murray’s definition of humility, darkness is not being willing to be known for who we really are.

If we are humble – being known for who we really are – then we find no reason to hide our past, our present struggles, or our future dreams. But being open and transparent like this involves risk. If we were to divulge certain things about ourselves, people may reject us or make fun of us, or even worse, they may not love and accept us. And it’s possible they may abandon us.

It’s much easier to stay in the dark than to take the chance of living in openness and transparency, but unfortunately, there are “friends” that tend to hang around us there. Fear, worry, anxiety, shame, guilt – all of these can be our ‘best friends’ when we’re in darkness. And there’s no peace or rest there. Only by embracing light do we position ourselves to experience growth.

We can be free from our past and live emotionally present in all our relationships today! By facing the hidden darkness in our lives, we can find freedom to be who we really are, unashamedly. Light is the place where we have the actual experience of feeling secure in our Father’s arms and live open-hearted to the world.

I recently attended a meeting of professionals who were well-educated, had good jobs and good families. A person came in and inconsiderately interrupted the meeting. No one said anything to this person but the majority of those in the meeting gave fleeting glances of disgust or disapproval. This is shame in action.

In years past I had not realized how common shame is. I had heard statements like, “Guilt says you have done something bad, shame says that you are bad;” and “Shame only grows in the dark.” I thought shame only occurs in someone who has really been exploited or victimized in some way. I certainly didn’t see how it applied in my life and definitely not in any regular kind of way.

Identification and recognition are key first steps to overcoming shaming interactions.

Why is this important?
When I judge another human being I am effectively saying that I am better than they are, that I would never fail in the type of way they did. This serves to put a wall up around my heart, a barrier between that person and myself.

I was recently on the subway in Seoul where I saw a Muslim man with his wife who was covered in a burqa. I had previously judged that if foreign women have to wear the appropriate clothing in Muslim nations, then Muslim women can adjust in non-Muslim nations. As I saw this couple I thought to myself, “Dude, men are not after your wife. You don’t have to keep her covered like that.” Immediately I realized – that was a judgmental thought. It put a barrier up in my heart between he and I and blocked the flow of love and compassion and any hope of sharing the gospel with this man.

Our Foundation
1 John 4:18-21 says we can talk a good game, but if we have a wall up toward a brother, we have one up toward God as well. When I block myself from love, it opens the door to many difficulties such as less desire or discipline to pray and more desire to escape into television or food.

The Christian life is designed so that it only functions well on the foundation of a heart open to love. Without this, I can go through the motions of prayer or Christian service, but there’s no life in it. Keeping my heart “on-line” to love is a crucial skill.

Everyone feels fearful or hurt from time to time; conflicts and misunderstandings are a part of life. There are basically two ways people respond: shame and condemnation, or guilt and accountability.

Challenges
Ron had a terrible day at work. His boss accused him of a mistake on a major project and he feels his job might be in jeopardy. He comes home wired, tense, longing for the refuge of his Lazy Boy/TV cave. His wife immediately hits him with, “the car won’t start” and “by the way, Jr. is failing math.” Then Ron loses it; he gets bitterly sarcastic with his wife and down right caustic with his son, “What’s the matter with you boy, are you an idiot? I told you to lay off those video games and study more.”

Shame and Condemnation
In a shame-based family system individuals respond to conflicts in shame perpetuating ways. There is a constant underlying message of devalue, not just communicating you did wrong but that you are wrong. These individuals have lived with the pain of shame instead of dignity and so spend their time protecting themselves from this pain by never allowing anything to be their fault. Since it is impossible to never be wrong, everything must be subject to judgment and charged accordingly. This ‘moral monitoring’ means that the littlest mistakes like, forgetting to floss, not rinsing off a dish, not taking your shoes off at the door, can get you “a look” that communicates, “What’s wrong with you?” The Pharisees lived here. Their hearts were never open to mercy and the smallest infractions were subject to their censure.

Shame is a hidden belief about self that “I am flawed.” This belief is triggered anytime something goes wrong. Therefore, life’s challenges can’t be seen on their own merits and viewed simply as a problem to be solved, but instead someone must always be to blame. I can’t allow it to be me, so it must be you. So Jr. doesn’t just need more study time or perhaps a tutor, Jr. needs to suffer for his insolence.

Personhood and Abuse
Personhood is the quality of being an individual person and so worthy of dignity. The origin of shame is abuse that violates and diminishes personhood. This is done through crossing mental, emotional, and physical boundaries by attacking another persons’ right to choose what they think or what action they’ll take. This plays out in statements like, “What’s the matter with you?” “What were you thinking?” or it could be a backhand across the face.

These attacks are in two categories: fight or flight. “Fight” is anything from a sarcastic remark, to a demeaning statement, to physical harm. “Flight” can be anything from the silent treatment, to not being willing to discuss certain issues, or even to full on abandonment.

Healthy Guilt and Accountability
All of us make mistakes sometimes. The provision for that is healthy guilt and accountability. If I have made a mistake, guilt is appropriate. Guilt is a painful feeling that I have violated one of my values. It is a remorseful awareness of having done something wrong. Healthy guilt leads me to take responsibility, walk in accountability, and make repair. If someone has acted inappropriately toward me, accountability has to do with honoring the other as a person yet not covering the consequences they face for their actions.

Unconditional love and healthy guilt allows people to make mistakes. When there’s a base of unconditional love and healthy guilt to resolve conflict rather than shaming behaviors to handle what bothers us, people can live in healthy community and growth takes place.

Growing in God’s love should move us toward treating others with dignity, even those we very much disagree with. The question of another person’s worth or dignity should never come into play. This has a huge affect on our walk with God. If I treat others with condemnation, I will not be able to escape feeling like God treats me that way. This is a milestone that must be crossed if we are to learn to walk in a depth of obedience to the Lord.

When emotionally healthy people check out a spiritually abusive church, they don’t stay.  They recognize the dysfunction.  Healthy people put up boundaries which unhealthy people try to violate or outright reject. However, brokenness created in the “pre-abuse setup” produces a susceptibility to further abuse.

I have a friend who says, “Home is where the outside matches the inside.” It is the reason why a woman who has grown up with an abusive alcoholic father and doesn’t deal with her wounds can find herself married to her second abusive alcoholic husband. The way her husband treated her while dating felt familiar to her “normal” feelings growing up. She may even feel uncomfortable around healthy men – she sees herself way below his level. Those wounded by abuse often fall prey to “learned helplessness.” Those abused when they actually were powerless to stop it, continue to believe that they are helpless victims long after they actually have the resources to overcome.

Pre-abuse factors include past physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect. The atmosphere is familiar, but surely a church must be a safe place. Those who grow up in a dysfunctional family without an appropriate mother or father figure may be used to – or addicted to – chaos. An abusive religious system offers structured chaos. The chaos is ordered around “scriptural” issues which seem to be worth fighting for. Those who are socially isolated are susceptible because they are looking for an accepting community.

His Chapel (not the real name of the church) was our family. We had many brothers and sisters who all believed as we did – who all suffered the same reproach for what we held dear. People outside the system were deemed “unsafe” so we stuck together.  However, we found out later that our relationships were only as strong as our adherence to the system. Abusive systems play off of the members’ guilt and shame. “No one else would accept me like these people if they knew what I struggled with.” I did find much forgiveness and confidentiality inside the system, but I also knew that implications could be made if I left.

People with poor life skills lack the interpersonal boundaries and assertiveness necessary to stand strong against abuse. They also fear that they can’t stand on their own. Learned helplessness leaves them vulnerable to the dictates of the system. Along with poor life skills comes poor or no foundation for evaluation of appropriateness. The system offers them so much of what they are looking for, but they lack the ability to perform a mental cost/benefit analysis. “Does the perceived benefit of staying in the system outweigh the emotional toll of performing to system specifications?” is a question that many are unable to adequately answer.

Reconciliation Ministries

Years ago I was on a sales call with a friend. We were meeting an executive at a trucking company my friend knew. I was expressing fear: “Do you think he’ll get mad we didn’t call first?” “If he seems too busy, we can just leave some information with his secretary.”

My friend finally said, “It’s not that delicate.” That phrase turned a light on for me. I wasn’t even aware of the fear I was experiencing. I hadn’t realized my stress and lack of rest.

So often I have been afraid of saying the wrong thing in front of people I considered important. My turmoil would lead to inward striving. This fear made it hard to step out and try things. It’s made it hard to be comfortable in my own skin and simply be at rest.

Striving is about shame, an inner feeling of inferiority; that something is bad, wrong, flawed about me. This shame shows up when I’m trying to do a given thing and I feel it is not okay to make a mistake or fail because if I do, my self-worth is in question. But if I can see these dynamics–how shame leads to fear and striving–then there is hope. God is able to comfort me and love me out of them (I John 4:18–perfect love casts out fear). God really does have a life of rest available for us!

Think of that guy at work who is super friendly. He’s always quick to make you laugh, a great conversationalist, makes you feel liked and included. But, he’s often a little late to the office, there are times when he puts some of his workload off on others, and he sometimes doesn’t consider other people’s time boundaries.

What about the demanding boss who expects you to work extra hours without extra pay? He talks down to people and doesn’t use appropriate respect. Everything is always about his vision and the company and never about building people.

Now think of God being so kind to Israel in bringing them out of Egypt. God protected them, yet they turned to idols. God contracted with them to give them the Promised Land, yet they continually backed out of any responsibility on their end. Instead they used excuses that flowed out of a victim mindset.

Boundaries are not just a nice teaching that worked its way into the Body of Christ to help co-dependent women. Boundaries describe where everyone lives. The lack of boundaries is the lack of dignity and justice.

Dignity and justice are universal human problems, their absence always allows a boundary to be crossed, inducing shame. These dignity/shame dynamics are the central roadblock to growth and fulfillment.

For example, I ministered one time in Nigeria, sharing my story of painful experiences and how God met me and brought growth. Many of the pastors came up after the teaching and said, “We’ve never heard anyone share their weaknesses. We only share our strengths.” In their churches, they preached a standard of faith and victory that set the bar high. They themselves couldn’t live up to it, but they would never share that; if they did, people may no longer follow them. Here’s the point. This high standard by the leader made it “not okay” for anyone to live under that. So now, no one can be honest about their shortcomings and therefore no growth or maturing ever takes place.

Facing ways we’ve experienced injustice, attacks on our dignity, impossible standards that employers, churches, or society have communicated to us is the beginning of growth. So often, like the children of Israel, we don’t want to come into the light with our shame issues. However, when we do, they become the very stepping-stones to real growth. By doing this, true change is within reach.

There are times where it’s good to look back and reflect on life. Ruminating over what you’ve been through, how you’ve grown, how you’ve changed. Seeing Divine Providence working in our families, our jobs, our situations. Kids grow up, friends and relatives pass on, we move to from place to place. As we do this reminiscing, there may be some things that we may glance at and feel a twinge of pain–that feeling of remorse or regret.

No One Lives a Perfect Life
In pondering our lives’ mistakes, we can get into the “I wish”s. You know what I mean. “I wish I would have taken more time with my kids.” “I wish I would have never moved away for that job.” All of those experiences that we did or didn’t do.

I was feeling this way about a few things not too long ago and while reading a Dave Ramsey book on finances, I ran across this statement: “Failure is not permanent.” I knew this. I had heard all the stories of Thomas Edison’s process of inventing the light bulb, of Abraham Lincoln trying to get elected, and Babe Ruth’s phenomenal baseball records. I knew you had to strike out a bunch of times before you got home runs. But all of a sudden, God illuminated this statement and a deeper revelation came to me.

Training Wheels
It’s not just about falling off a bike while trying to learn how to ride. It’s not just about investing in the wrong stock at the wrong time or filing for bankruptcy. It’s about everything! God knows we are not perfect (do we?). But we are supposed to learn from our mistakes and use them to help us grow and mature. Take some time to really look at those doosies and see why we did or didn’t do whatever it was. Check our motives, check our boundaries.

Let It Go
And as we search through our rubble, just like in the book of Nehemiah, God will use the very mishaps and failures we made for something good. He can build with that rubble and those broken pieces. Rom. 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” So to allow God to work it for good, we have to let go of the grief. Jesus bore our sorrows on the cross so we don’t have to. Take them off of your shoulder and put them on His, then look for the treasure you’ve gained from them. The past is passed. Release it, let it go, and grow from it. Keep pressing on towards the mark; failures are not permanent, they are foundations to built on.

So Simple We Miss It
Remember TV shows like The Brady Bunch, Eight is Enough, The Waltons, and Little House On The Prairie? In the typical story, one of the family members faces a challenge they think is too big to handle, or something happens where they get their feelings hurt. They wrestle with the problem, talk it out with the family, feel emotionally supported as they struggle with it, and find a way forward in a way that brings personal growth.

This seems simple enough; however, there are some very profound principles here.

Perfectionism and Abuse
“No son of mine will get grades like that.” “I can’t believe you acted that way.” “You better not talk to your dad for a while; he’s not at all happy with you.”

There are definable characteristics of families that operate in a shame-base versus a respect-base manner of interaction. Perfectionism is one of them. With perfectionism there is no middle ground, something is either right or wrong, in or out. Perfectionism is a control behavior that uses shame. Anything can be under its scrutiny; eating, cleaning, school grades, personal grooming, having money and how it is used, even physical health are subject to the perfectionism standard.  The individual’s worth as a person is always in question.

The three well-known characteristics of a dysfunctional, or shame-based family are: don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel. In this environment, there is no learning about who we are, or  personal growth, because it is not okay to make a mistake. If I happen to say the wrong thing, I get rejected and shamed. Nobody talks about what happened, what was going on in my heart that prompted my statement, nor is there any emotional support to work through what was in me.

A Respect-Based Family
With a respect-based family, people are free to make mistakes. There is a safe environment. Blame and talking about others faults is not condoned. There are still consequences for wrong actions and bad behavior, but they are handled in a way that does not take away the person’s dignity. The person is thus free to discover what their feelings were and what went wrong. Growth therefore is possible.

Healthy Emotional Awareness and Its Fruit
People that grow up in respect-based families reach their adult years and have some sense of knowing who they are. It was safe to feel their feelings, so they have a sense of what their strengths and weaknesses are. They were allowed to make mistakes, face consequences, and therefore learn some autonomy, therefore, they don’t struggle with a victim mentality. They have a “life is possible” outlook, and there is confidence to step out and try new things. They are not threatened by others that are different or who have opposing view points, nor are they afraid to hold their own view point when it goes against the tide, yet without needing to move into devaluing others.

This also has huge implications for the church. We have had an incredible amount of preaching based in the perfectionism standard. Consequently, not much growth has occurred. Some people who have been Christians 20 or 30 years still have “childish” issues they have not overcome. Christians often have little sense of who they are and what their calling is, let alone the hope in fulfilling it. The world often views us as condescending and sanctimonious, it is no wonder they have little interest in what we offer.

I truly believe in the coming years we will see an emotionally mature church, a spotless bride at Christ’s return. One who emotionally supports, loves, and respects all people.

I came across an interesting quote concerning what happens to those who grow up in and live with abuse.
“Both the tyrant and the victim in the system have a very limited sense of themselves as persons, inadequate development of relationship skills, and no understanding of the nuances of intimacy.”

This sums up nicely what emotional and spiritual maturity looks like.

Limited Sense of Self
Do I have a sense of being secure, that basically I’m safe, that my rights will be respected, my boundaries of thought, feeling, choice, and physical space will be honored? Or, do I constantly fear rejection and have an “us versus them” mentality and walk in a constant low level suspicion?

In feeling safe, do I have a sense of my strengths and weaknesses? Am I free enough to be in a learning relationship with God and life? Or, is everything either right or wrong, good or bad, in or out and so everything has a box I quickly apply? The Pharisees lived like this, so insecure they sought to take all of the “unpredictable” out of life with their laws for everything. This makes it impossible to ever learn or grow.

Inadequate Relationship Skills
With no sense of my own self, no sense of ways I’m growing and needing to grow and making proactive choices toward growth, it becomes hard to relate well with others. If I see everything as either “in or out,” then I’m going to treat you that way also. If it feels like there is something inadequate or shameful in me if I don’t know something or haven’t learned something, I will apply that same perfectionism to you. I will have little ability to live and let live, to flow with the currents of life.

Nuances of Intimacy
All the latest studies, especially in the area of brain development, point toward intimacy in relationships as being the foundation to emotional and spiritual health. When I can live connected to God and man there is a sense of grounding. I can risk loving and living and trying new things. I can flow with the give and take of relationship without being overly insecure. My sense of being loved and valued grows as well as my ability to be life-giving and self-sacrificing to my community around me.

God shows Himself as loving and safe and highly valuing of freedom. Jesus said the father gave the inheritance to the prodigal son knowing he was making wrong choices. He didn’t force his will upon his son. Father sent Jesus for us while we were yet in sin, yet making wrong choices. God didn’t fear rejection and didn’t seek to control our freedom. He so loved that He gave. If we are insistent on going to hell, God will let us. However, love awaits us if we simply choose to receive Him. He will never leave us; we are safe in His love. He gives us dignity, a place in His family. God gives us the love and security we need to grow into healthy intimacy.