Disturbance

I'm not going to tell you my record for number of years that I've avoided going to the dentist, but I'll let you know that it's somewhere between "a few" and "several." Many of us desperately want to avoid discomfort and pain, even at the expense of healthy habits, healthy relationships, and healthy teeth.

We're like pools of water trying to maintain a calm surface...and life loves throwing rocks at us. Whenever someone we like ignores us, or when we accidentally offend a friend, or when the door handle comes off in our hand, we become disturbed. We have a number of solutions to the ripples that inevitably rock our world--like my approach to dentistry, we avoid things. Sometimes we try to counteract the unpleasantness by lashing out (road rage) or numbing (the entire "Thank Goodness It's Friday" mentality, which is basically code for "now I can try again to numb my problems out of existence").

Life throws rocks into our otherwise peaceful existence.

I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about something my sponsor told me about disturbance:

We become disturbed to the degree that we're broken. 

In other words, if I'm upset about something, it's not the thing I'm upset about that's the problem. The problem is that I have some deficiency or personality flaw. Let me give you an example:

One day I publicly embarrassed a student. She and her friend were on the gym team, and I asked, "does the fact that you're in class and she's not mean that you didn't make the cut and she did?" A dumb thing to say, although I didn't mean it maliciously. She was apparently feeling pretty sensitive about it, and ever after that day she and her friend hated me. I even took them into my office and apologized, explaining my side of it. At the end of the semester I got a surly email from one of them, complaining about her grade. I (believed that I) honestly wanted to help her understand, so I sent an email explaining some piece of wisdom. Then she abandoned all thoughts of not-offending-the-grade-giver, and she let me have it. After I read her email I was SO upset. I felt misunderstood, stereotyped, and unfairly attacked. All her faults and weaknesses made me choke on her words--"She was such a half-hearted, flakey, overconfident, entitled student--what a hypocrite that she would attack me without seeing her own shortcomings!" I struggled for days with a desire to write her back, pointing out all these mean things I was thinking about her. I even wanted to justify it as helping her be a better person ("somebody needs to give her a wake-up call"). I'm glad I let it lie.

I can see now that, yes, all those mean things I thought about her were more or less true. However, I was at fault. I was angry because I felt guilty, prideful, insecure, and hypocritical. It was a bad semester--I was knee deep in a secret addiction to pornography, daily lying (mostly through omission) to my wife. I didn't dedicate enough time to my students because I was drowning in other work, acting out, and numbing my guilt. To some degree I knew she was right--I was a broken and hypocritical person. Even though that's so clear to me now, all I could see were her problems (more on this intentional blindness in a future post--I call it the reality distortion field).

Here's where things get tricky. It's easy to look into the distant past and see mistakes like this, but disturbance is around us all the time. I've found myself getting angry, then remembering this idea that I'm at fault if I'm disturbed. I want to yell--"my kid just drew all over himself with a marker! How am I to blame!?" or "That woman, a member of the church, was super immodest! I didn't want her to dress like that, yet I'm super triggered! How am I to blame!?" This indignation is a bad sign. Doesn't it just feel like I'm trying to force the water to be calm?

Instead of focusing on the "originators" of the disturbance, I need to look at myself: "I just yelled at a three-year old for doing something completely predictable and completely non-permanent; what have I done recently that's causing me to feel like lashing out?" or "I--the messed-up addict--am railing against a woman who in all likelihood doesn't understand and is trying to cope with her own problems; what do I need to do to regain my equilibrium, then strengthen my recovery (which has apparently gotten off track)?"

Here's where I edited out a paragraph that was meant for someone else--someone who is disturbed by something I want to defend, and I wanted to force this person to look at their disturbance as a sign that they should be more concerned with their own personality flaws than with this thing. However, I realize that my reason for putting this paragraph in was to lash out and lecture, not deal with my own disturbance. I write this paragraph to acknowledge that I'm a flawed, disturbed individual who needs to be more concerned with my own personality flaws than with this person. 

The solution isn't to try to move my pond out of the way of the rocks. It's not to yell at the rock thrower. It's not to find a way to create ripples that cancel out ones that are already there. There are times when I can figure out how to deal productively with my problems on my own or with the help of others. With addiction, though, there are so many ripples and counter-ripples there's only one real solution. It's to come to Him who commanded the waters--"peace, be still"--and they were calmed.

Job understood this, and he proved how un-broken he is. All his physical possessions were destroyed, his ten children were killed, and he was rejected by his friends and wife. If that's not disturbance, I don't know what is. Still, he said, "Till I die I won't remove my integrity from me" (Job 27:5) and  "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:25-26).

That's the kind of pond I want.