So Long Insecurity Page 9
Boy, are we having a reaction. We’ve spent ourselves blind, and worse yet, allowed an imaginary system to mediate our very real personal values. Listen, I’m a media addict just like most of you. I have no intention of throwing out my television, newspaper, or Internet access; nor do I plan to blindfold myself at the supermarket checkout counter or refuse to buy another movie ticket. But I’d better learn to be wise, moderate, and discerning. If we don’t learn to separate entertainment from identity and hyped images from real womanhood, our feminine souls are going to pass straight through the shredder. We must stop affirming and reaffirming to ourselves how inferior we are. It’s extremely unhealthy, and in reality, it’s the furthest thing from God’s concept of humility. We’d be wise to take note of how fickle the media is with its own stars and how short lived the friendly spotlight is.
Have you ever seen one of those magazines with photos of unsuspecting celebrities in unflattering swimsuits plastered right across the cover—cellulite and all? Their faces are always blacked out, and the question in the caption is usually something like, “Do you recognize these stars?” Then you’re told to read page such and such for their identities. I never do. I’m too horrified for them. I can’t help but picture my own thighs on the cover, and I try not to yell from the top of my lungs, “It’s me! Lord, help me! It’s me! Right here in front of the whole world!” Of course, that might explain why I’m writing this book and not somebody else. A slight psychosis.
We’re going to learn some practical tools along our journey to help us live real life as secure people and, yes, even right here in this treacherous culture. This is a terrific time to interject a couple of tools. First, we need to recognize when we’re overloading ourselves on media hype and back off when we sense it tripping our insecurity switch. Let’s learn how to put something down or turn something off when it’s just too much or makes a lie too believable.
We also need to make sure we’re deliberately exposing ourselves to materials that edify the human soul rather than erode it. If you deal with a measurable amount of insecurity, poring obsessively over InStyle magazine or amusing yourself with online shopping probably isn’t doing you any favors. If you don’t know if your hype of choice is a problem, try putting it aside for a while, and once you get past the initial withdrawal, see if you feel better about the person God made you to be. If you do, rethink how much you want to reintroduce that particular media outlet. Our culture molds addicts like cavemen molded clay, so moderation can be even more challenging than avoiding it altogether. Moderation is a practice that begs to be recaptured in our society, however.
Second, we need to start looking for ways in which we set ourselves up for failure. For instance, if we know in advance that a movie is going to have a lot of skin in it and will probably make us feel like a zero sitting next to our man, we really can suggest seeing something else. We don’t have to ask for trouble. Needless to say, there are significant parts of life we simply need to learn to deal with. On the other hand, there are other areas that are not unreasonable to avoid.
Perhaps you legitimately need to figure out a way to attend your man’s work parties without lapsing into old insecurities, but you really could opt out of going to Hooters. It’s good to learn to socialize without seeing others as a threat, but if there is a particular person who gets to you over and over and makes you feel small or stupid, perhaps he or she needs a quick shift to the B-list. Or if you find that whenever you and your man spend time with one particular couple you end up fighting, you need some new couples to befriend.
The point? Learn what you can handle and what you can’t. As you become more and more secure, you will discover with great satisfaction how much more you can handle and, at the same time, come to recognize what you should not have to handle at all. There’s a volume of wisdom in knowing the difference.
Okay, can you handle digging up one more root of chronic insecurity? Allow me to reiterate that we don’t have the time or space, nor do I have the expertise to offer you the definitive, all-inclusive list. Hopefully we’ve covered enough ground with these first seven, however, to recognize a similar setup when we see one. Here’s the last one I’ll include here:
Pride
Yep, pride. Capital P-R-I-D-E. It’s an ugly word, isn’t it? At least we got to put it off this long. Every other root of insecurity falls into the category of influences largely beyond our control. Instability in the home, significant loss, rejection, dramatic change, and the surrounding culture each constitute circumstances imposed on us rather than invited by us. Personal disposition and many legitimate limitations are part of our DNA package and therefore also not of our own choosing. Our last selection, however, is one we have to own.
And it’s as old as humankind. We would make a severe mistake if we went to great lengths to dig up every other root of chronic insecurity but left this one firmly in the ground. We’d never be free.
This one is not about culture. It’s about ego, and we all have one. Let’s face it. Sometimes people and situations make us feel insecure because they nick our pride, plain and simple. All the blows of life aside and every other root yanked out of the ground, we wrestle with insecurity because we wrestle with pride. Give some thought to the glaring connections between the two:
We’re not the only women in our men’s lives, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not the most gifted people alive, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not the first choice every time, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not someone’s favorite, and that hurts our pride.
We can’t do everything ourselves, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not somebody else’s top priority, and that hurts our pride.
We don’t feel special, and that hurts our pride.
We don’t get the promotion, and that hurts our pride.
We don’t win the fight, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not paid what we’re worth, and that hurts our pride.
We’re not paid at all, and that really hurts our pride.
I’m not minimizing the authentic pain of these kinds of realizations. Just because pride fills a heart doesn’t keep it from breaking. It just keeps it from healing.
I have come to the conclusion that we have no greater burden in all of life than our own inflated egos. No outside force has the power to betray and mislead us the way our own egos do. Pride talks us out of forgiving and steers us away from risking. Pride cheats us of intimacy, because intimacy requires transparency. Pride is a slave driver like no other, and if it can’t drive us to destruction, it will drive us to distraction. Think about the madness this one little trait can cause:
If we can’t be the most attractive, at least we can be the best at something.
And if we can’t be the best at something, we can at least be the hardest working.
And if we can’t be the hardest working, we can at least be the most congenial.
And if we can’t be the most congenial, we can at least be the most noticeable.
And if we can’t be the most noticeable, we can at least be the most religious.
And if we can’t be the most religious, we can at least be the most exhausted.
And it never ends, because big egos insist on our being a “the.” Not just an “a.” We’re that desperate for significance. We live our lives screaming, “Somebody notice me!” And do you want to hear something interesting? That’s exactly how God made us.
That very need is built into our human hard drive to send us on a search for our Creator, who can assign us more significance than we can handle. He not only notices us, He never takes His eyes off us. Every now and then a moment of clarity hits us, and we feel known by something—Someone—of inestimable greatness. These words fell from a psalmist who experienced such a moment:
O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I t
ravel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! . . . You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-17, NLT
In the radiance of His greatness, we are made great. Our search is over and our egos silenced. We no longer need pride to drive us, because we’ve found something infinitely more fulfilling: purpose. He is the reason we are here. And finally our souls are at rest . . . until once again we forget. Then instead of looking for ourselves in God, we look once more for God in man, and just when we think we’ve found someone who can hold us high enough and long enough to assuage our fear of forgottenness, we get dropped. Pride is a driver, and it invariably drives us in the opposite direction than it promised.
I chose to discuss these two final roots of insecurity together because the outside influence of culture and the inside influence of pride can get tied up so easily into a big, fat knot. As tempting as it may be, mustering up our pride is not the answer to our culture’s vicious assault on women. We really can regain confidence without stirring up arrogance. Pride lives on the defensive against anyone and anything that tries to subtract from its self-sustained worth. Confidence, on the other hand, is driven by the certainty of God-given identity and the conviction that nothing can take that identity away. That’s what you and I are after, not an outbreak of bloated ego.
Humility is a crucial component in true security. It’s the very thing that calms the savage beast of pride. More important, humility is the heart of the great paradox: we find our lives when we lose them to something much larger. Perhaps the writer of Ecclesiastes had a hint of this in mind when he wrote that God “has also set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Eternity. In the hearts of mortals. It doesn’t get bigger than that. Created in the image of God, we instinctively know that something enormous is within us. Pride is the result of mistaking the eternal for the temporal. We end up looking in to look up instead of looking up to look in. We get fixated on every self-gain and every self-loss until, in our inordinate self-protection, we end up licking our wounds to the point that they can’t heal.
Pride. A root of insecurity if there ever was one. We will never feel better about ourselves by becoming more consumed with ourselves. Likewise, we will never feel better about ourselves by feeling worse about others. Superiority can’t give birth to security. Neither, by the way, can the relentless pursuit of perfection. Earlier in our journey, I suggested that perfectionism is insecurity in art form. It never looks prettier and never acts deadlier. Perfectionism is perhaps our culture’s biggest temptation. In his fascinating book Perfecting Ourselves to Death, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter offers this intriguing insight:
Although perfectionists seem very insecure, doubting their decisions and actions, fearing mistakes and rejection, and having low opinions of themselves, at the same time, they have excessively high personal standards and an exaggerated emphasis on precision, order and organization, which suggests an aspiration to be better than others.
Most psychological explanations see the desire to be superior and in control as compensation for feelings of weakness, inferiority and low self-esteem. But it could also be that the opposite is true; we feel bad about ourselves because we are not able to perform as well, or appear as good, as we really think we can. We believe we are better than others, but we keep discovering embarrassing flaws. Perfectionists’ black-and-white thinking takes them on a roller coaster between feeling horribly inadequate and bad about themselves, and then, when things are going well, feeling proud to be so good. Low self-esteem and pride coexist in the same heart.9
Dr. Winter then goes on to quote psychologist Terry Cooper in this vivid snapshot of the coexisting odd couple:
If I search around long enough, I’ll find insecurity beneath my grandiosity and arrogant expectations beneath my self-contempt.10
We are complex people indeed. Perfect messes. Pridefully insecure. But let me tell you what isn’t complex: owning our own pride problem and confessing it to God. That’s when He’ll move it out of the way so we can deal with the roots of our insecurity we didn’t plant. Until we sort the pride out of our insecurity, we can’t, in every sense of the saying, see the forest for the trees. Everybody’s got a pride problem. Owning it is a relief. Every time I do, I sense the glorious God-given release that follows repentance, and I wonder what took me so long. I don’t feel shamed. I feel freed.
Fortunately, pride is not hard to spot. It’s not emotionally complicated like the effects of instability in the home, significant loss, or dramatic change. It’s ego, and we know it. In that very moment, we can whisper the words, “That’s nothing but pride. God, forgive me. Self, get over it.” If I’m by myself, I don’t whisper. I say it out loud like I mean it. Pride is one of those roots that God can jerk up in a second. We just have to pry our sweet little fingers loose. Our culture has done us no greater injustice than training us to avoid taking responsibility for our own issues. In trying to relieve us of the whole concept of personal sin, our culture’s reordered values have cheated us of the right to repentance and sublime restoration. They have hijacked our healing. A clear heart and a clean path are still only one sincere confession away.
Chapter 7
Don’t Let It Fool You
Insecurity. It will make a fool of you. What follows just might be one of the most profound sections of this book. In the pages to come, you will find the stories of women very much like you and me who were willing to answer one simple question I posted on my blog: “Has insecurity ever made a fool of you?”
When I first posted the question, I wasn’t sure what kind of response I would receive. But I got enough answers on the blog to fill every page in this book and make us feel pathetic and sorry for ourselves for the next six months. Fortunately, that couldn’t be further from my aim. I’ll be completely up- front with you about my goal: I want us to see the price we’re paying when we don’t deal with our insecurity. Unchecked and unhealed, it makes an idiot out of us over and over. Sometimes in small ways. Sometimes in enormous ways. But at the end of the day, even a small idiot feels like a big idiot. Reading stories like the ones that follow can help us see in others the things we desperately need to face in ourselves. Since we don’t have the space for all the stories, I chose certain selections because they were either highly representative or particularly poignant. Before we throw ourselves into these testimonies, I need to make a deal with you.
You’re probably going to be tempted to skip parts of this chapter because, for starters, it’s so much longer than the rest. Further than that, it’s purely painful to read at times. Reading these stories not only causes us to feel for the people sharing them, it also sparks the memory of a few difficult circumstances of our own. In one way or another, insecurity has made fools of all of us. Naturally, we’d just as soon not remember how. But dear one, if we’re going to get serious about letting God deliver us, we must look in the mirror and realize how disfigured we are—far from God’s original intent for us. Until we do that, we’ll continue to settle for what we have.
Maybe your story is completely unlike most in this chapter. Others might be so close, you’ll wonder if you wrote them in your sleep. I ask you to risk the vulnerability and read every word that follows. When we wrap up this journey, many of you may well have decided to cooperate with divine healing precisely because you didn’t want some of t
hese snapshots to find their way into your photo album. Now for the deal: if you’ll see it through, I promise to throw in some amusing examples for comic relief, and I promise this will be the last entire chapter I devote to the ugly side of insecurity. We’ll get to the beauty of healing after this.
Okay, here goes. I’ll loosely categorize these stories by the insights they offer, and with your permission, I’ll also let the women speak in their own words. To edit their language would be to edit their emotions. Let’s just let them have their own voices.
Insecurity can make you act like an idiot in female friendships.
Me and a friend of mine recently had a relationship problem. This person is also a family member, so we have to make our friendship work no matter what. But we sometimes just have a difficult time because we’re so different. She also can be very intimidating. Well, with this most recent relationship tiff, I realized my error, so I wrote an apology (via e-mail—we live far apart). I didn’t hear back from her—thought she must hate me—very insecure about our friendship! So I wrote another e-mail . . . still haven’t heard back from her! I read back over my e-mails and realized that I wrote some really stupid stuff because I was so insecure. I wrote yet one more short e-mail telling her to just forget about me and everything I said. I’m so tired of being in such a tizzy! I feel like a fool and have been in such emotional turmoil over all of this! It’s still not resolved to my satisfaction. I’m waiting to see if she’ll ever talk to me again.
Haven’t some of us been there? We gnaw on a relationship like a dog on a bone. We worry a detail half to death out of insecurity, get no response, and then overcommunicate yet again to say, “Forget I communicated all of that.” And they rarely do.
Here’s another example involving women friendships:
I had a friendship about twelve years ago that consumed me. She was everything I thought I wasn’t. So I attached myself to her. We worked at the same place, and we saw each other every day. She was in executive leadership, and she was very concerned about our relationship being unprofessional or something so everything had to be secret. (She was also extremely controlling.) I lied more than I care to remember to “protect” this friendship . . . to my coworkers, family, etc. It was awful. But I couldn’t let go because I was so locked in. What made me a fool beyond that is that so many people knew what was going on and just didn’t say anything. I was caught in some lies. It was a mess. We moved out of state, and the foolishness followed me as I discovered more people who were onto it the whole time. How embarrassing. I still wince every time I think about it.