Courage for Lambs

Excerpt from Introduction
As human beings, we’re all broken. This book is the account of my own brokenness. My human limitations. My journey in overcoming tragedy. My “coming out of fear.” The healing process of fighting my way back. It’s an account of how I got broken by this fallen world and what it took to get healed. I don’t always look good in it, but it’s an honest account. I agree with American journalist Bill Stout, who said, “Whether or not you write well, write bravely.”
Several years ago I was sitting with one of my counseling clients. At the time I was in training to be a psychologist. This particular woman had been in a seriously abusive relationship which had ended several years before. She had kept most of the painful legacy of it bound up in her heart until our recent sessions.
“I’m trying to understand myself,” she mourned, “I don’t know why it took me so long. Why didn’t I get out sooner? I stayed in that relationship for 11 years! It took me 11 years to get out.” Her self-deprecating attitude showed me that she was despising herself.
“It took me 12,” I said quietly.
She lifted her head and stared in my face. There was disbelief and questioning in her eyes.
“I was in an emotionally and spiritually abusive relationship myself,” I stated,
“and it took me 12 years before my eyes were opened to what was happening and I had the courage to leave.” I sometimes alluded to my own life when I knew I could leverage a client toward healing.
“But you’re a smart woman,” she said, as if trying to put me in a different class than herself, since she saw me as the “doctor.”
“So are you,” I countered. “Listen, being smart has nothing to do with it. Lots of smart women have been in abusive relationships.”
In later sessions this woman told me that this had been a turning point for her. She began to stop despising herself as an inferior or stupid person. If someone she respected had been through a similar thing, maybe she, too, was worthy of respect.
If the grace and love of God are real, and I know them to be, then I don’t have to hide my life. The Bible doesn’t shrink from recounting the sins, fears, and failures of its very human characters. In their stories we find hope for ourselves.
We’re all looking for hope. In letting myself be real, hope also becomes real.
I used to be more concerned about protecting my image. I didn’t want to look particularly defective, inferior, or stupid. I wouldn’t want people to really know what I’d been through, what my failures are, how really human I’d been.
This book is about being human and being broken. It’s a disorderly story. But it does move on past that. It moves on because there really is more. There is hope and healing and love and respect and stability to gain. There is recovery from shame. There is grace and understanding. There is actually even a destination called joy.

Excerpt from Chapter 2: The Betrayal
Arriving for a church service, I headed toward the restroom downstairs. I was an early arriver tonight and few others were here. As I approached the stairs, Brother Hansen came around the corner. Glad to see him, I extended my arms for the usual hug. Rather than merely hugging me, he raised my chin with his finger and placed a solid kiss on my mouth. I was startled. Without missing a beat, he said, “Glad to see you,” and was off down the hall. His facial gestures didn’t indicate anything unusual, but I inwardly felt a sense of embarrassment.
Taken aback by the surprise kiss, I thought: What was that? I didn’t like kissing others on the mouth, and it violated my sense of internal boundaries. I knew some families kissed mouth-to-mouth, but we’d never done it in my family. An affectionate kiss on the cheek was the norm in my other relationships. This felt inappropriate…a married man kissing me on the mouth?
He had planted the kiss with assertiveness, and he had acted as though it was perfectly normal. Trying not to believe it was inappropriate, I dismissed it from my mind. I thought I must be exaggerating my own uncomfortable feelings and felt somewhat ashamed to even question whether my pastor had done anything improper.
Although I had reflected briefly on the kissing incident a few times, it wasn’t on my mind when I arrived for my usual Thursday session later that week. As Brother Hansen and I talked, we were both sitting on the couch in his study. Suddenly, in the middle of our topic, he scooted over to me, put his arms around me, and started to kiss me.
Danger. Red light. Danger. Warning bells were going off inside me. My surprise turned immediately to fear. I felt physically frozen and emotionally intimidated.

Excerpt from the ending essays: The Arch Enemies: Shame and Grace
If we want to get to the bottom of the problem, to the real thing that’s preventing our emotional freedom, it’s the cancer of shame. Shame is, in theological terms, the inability to value our self in the same way that God values us. Shame is another expression of human brokenness and our tendency to distort truth, especially about ourselves. Shame holds us back from appropriate self-love, and by extension, loving others. The quality of our love for others is always related to the quality of our own self-acceptance. Therefore, shame affects both my relationship with myself and my relationship with others.

Shame has many emotional expressions. Some people experience shame primarily as feeling defective, inferior, or self-loathing. Others feel it as being ugly, stupid, or inadequate. For some it is the desire to hide oneself, to fear being known, or to present a false self to others because the real self is insecure.

Shame can be triggered by a thought in our own mind, I’m inadequate, or it can be felt as an emotion, flooding one’s body. We’ve all experienced a shame-attack. In a second we can feel deflated, defeated, paralyzed. Shame is nearly any negative moment of low self-value. Everyone has some degree of struggle with shame, fear about one’s value, or low self-worth. All human struggles occur on a continuum, from mild to severe. For some, the shame struggle is mild. For others, it is debilitating.

Shame is surrounded by fear, because it doesn’t want to be seen. Fear perpetuates the shame because it makes us keep it hidden. No one likes to talk about their shame, yet revealing the fear in a supportive and loving environment is part of the cure.