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we will have a zoom meeting and facebook live

looking forward to hanging out w you all!!

next post about identity

4/8/20

Identity

 

The heart of me, of us.

 

The center of who I am, we are.

 

It is here that we find the cause of how we act. 

 

Want to know why you do something?  Look at your identity. 

Want to know why you spend your time the way you do? Look at your identity.

Want to know why your credit card statement looks the way it does?  Look at your identity.

We could go on.

 

Here, in the middle of COVID, we have had the coping mechanisms stripped away.  Like layers of an onion, we have seen our lives shrink, closer and closer to the heart of who we are.  We have had to slow down, our busyness gone, and as we survey our lives, we see our identity and the actions that result from it.

 

I mentioned in the last post, that my fear of being hurt and my fear of failure drove me like a madman to self-protection and perfectionism.  These sucked the life out of me.  My fears lived me.  On the surface I looked highly productive and successful, but inside my fears were living me – I was the yoyo and my fears were the hands holding the string.

 

But the fears were really the action end of my identity – my identity drove the fears and the fears drove me. 

 

And my identity was squishy.

 

I didn’t really know who I was – I was living reacting to my past, to my brokenness, to my hurts and heartaches.  I thought I knew who I was, but I was wrong.  I was caught in a constant survival mode – trying to quiet a war inside me that demanded to be noticed.

 

You see, my actions, my fears, announced my identity:

My fear of failure spoke that inside me I was convinced that if I did not perform as the perfect doctor, the perfect dad, the perfect husband, the perfect friend, that…

I was worthless.

I truly felt that I needed to prove my worth to be someone of value.

My identity?  Worthless. 

 

You can see how frantic I would become to not fail, can’t you?

 

My fear of being hurt spoke that inside me I was convinced 1) I was not safe 2) life would not be ok 3) there would not be joy or goodness and that any goodness I was experiencing was only temporary til I got the crapped kicked out of me again 4) the only way to survive was to protect myself

 

My identity?  Consumed by Unsafe, Bullied, Harrassed, Lost, Lonely, Hurt – I was bruised and broken – that was my identity – doomed to sit in pain and misery – miserable.

 

You can see why I was freaking out at the first sight of anything bad or hurtful that was coming my way, huh?

 

These broken places in my heart were driving the ride of my life. 

And they were making me someone I didn’t want to be.

 

I wanted to be sure of myself.  I wanted to know when to say, “no.” I wanted to know how to play and laugh and have fun.  I wanted to enjoy life.  I wanted to feel peace and goodness in the moments of my life and not expect something bad.  I wanted to deal w the pain and hurts of life and not let them wreck me.  I wanted to spend my time and money in ways that were consistent with what I thought about life, not protecting myself or proving myself.  I didn’t want to hurt my kids and my wife w my negativity and defensiveness.  I wanted my kids to grow up believing in goodness and possibility.  I wanted my wife to be able to count on me.  I wanted to be consistent and strong and true.  I wanted to feel stress and not feel like I was destined to fail or like I needed to hunker down and protect myself.  I wanted to be able to risk and not fear failing.  I wanted to see people w realistic expectations and know that I couldn’t make everybody happy.

 

Yet, every time I tried to be these things, my identity shoved and pulled and pushed and screamed at me – it was living my life for me.

 

I woke up day after day and realized that I was not who I wanted to be.

Here’s the thing, and remember im not a psychologist, just a plain, flannel and cowboy boot wearing family doctor in ordinary old middle America:

 

I’m pretty well convinced that most of us, the everyday American person, lives with an identity that is kinda squishy.

 

I think that is part of what is so freaky about this COVID thing.  We feel uneasy, unsettled. 

We are looking at how we have spent our time, our money, our energy – and we find ourselves questioning…

We are looking at how our culture, our world, has spent its time and energy and money and we are questioning…

 

How is it that i/we believe things and yet our actions seem to be saying something else? 

 

We look back at the frantic last 5 years and we realize that an awful lot of our life has been lived for us and we don’t like it, but we’re not sure what to do about it.

 

I may be way off base here, but working w thousands of people over nearly 20 years of practice, it seems that identity squish is something that plagues us – it seems many if not most of us are being lived instead of living.

 

So, if we are to continue, how bout we talk about some general types of identity squish and then maybe about some things we can do about the identity squish and then after that what we can become out of less squishy identities?

another blog post and dont forget tomorrow night

4/3
When life is overwhelming.
When the crazy of the world is crushing.
When the buzzsaw of COVID 19 shreds thru your defense mechanisms and everyday life leaving you a trembling mess.
When your defense mechanisms are not available or are so overwhelmed that is becomes clear they are not working.
What do we do when life and its pain peels away all the normal and reveals the broken?
This is the world we are living in.
When I leave for the office at 725am, when West Lafayette is usually buzzing w people, the street is silent. Walking around Purdue’s campus, usually alive w tens of thousands of coeds, silent. Standing in line at the pharmacy yesterday and someone coughed and it seemed like the entire room jumped.
The same look on peoples’ faces as after the Murrah building bombing, and worse.
I see the frustration and the hurt – the loss of innocence – the feeling of betrayal, by life.
Aren’t we are supposed to be entitled to life, liberty, and happiness – but how are we doing that hiding in our houses and keeping our 6 feet apart? How is that supposed to work when we are locked in a cage called our house and told we can’t come out. Someone seems to have promised us this life, this liberty, this happiness and success and laughter and goodness and what we feel is lost, abandoned, hurt. We have been working really hard to be happy in a culture that has promised us so much, but now that it is all stripped away, we wonder. Seems there was some false advertising. Our culture has lied to us.
In this revealing, we see that maybe our society and us, maybe we are not forever. We are having to face the mortality of our culture and ourselves. We have to see that we are broken – our way is broken.
See, in the days after the OKC bombing, our defenses were gone. Our way of life was threatened. Life as usual was stripped away. We all felt it.
This pandemic is so much bigger, so much scarier, so much…
See, COVID is shredding our culture. It is exposing the culture, and unfortunately, our lives.
How are you feeling as you pass thru the life-grinder called COVID? As your life as usual is ripped up? As your rhythms are so remarkably disrupted and disordered.
Sad? Angry? Lonely? Jealous? Afraid? All of the above?
What specifically makes you sad?
Things or people you have lost? Hurts you have endured. Not being able to do something, go somewhere? Not being able to touch people or be with people you care about? Maybe just not being able to feel the way you want to feel when you want to? Maybe the nagging suspicion that everything you thought was real is not? The uneasiness of realizing how you were spending your time, your money, your passion, your energy, prior to all this and the sneaking feeling that maybe that is not how you want to be now?
What makes you angry?
Seeing people out and about when you are stuck at home? Seeing good people die? Not being able to work? Not knowing how you will provide for your family? People getting refused ventilators because there aren’t enough? People buying up masks and protective equipment and hoarding and seeing health care workers risk their lives to care for someone without? Being deprived of the comfort and ease that you are used to? Being threatened for your very existence when some people roll in the money taking advantage of difficult times? Not knowing what direction your life will take? Realizing that you made plenty of money to weather this well, if you had just been more careful? Maybe you are feeling the end result of a whole lot of your choices and you are not even sure why you chose them?
What makes you afraid?
The possibility of losing people you love? The possibility of abandoning the people you love? Not being able to measure up to your standards? Disappointing yourself? Someone else? Not knowing what the future holds? Not feeling safe? Feeling like all the things you thought were stable, maybe they aren’t? Feeling like maybe you have been pursuing the wrong things? Maybe our whole world has? Feeling like all the life you have spent trying to get a house and a car and fun things and all, maybe it was all for nothing?
See, when cultures and lives and relationships and bank accounts and stock markets get shredded, we find the layers of our lives being pulled off.
One at a time, like an onion, we find that the things we used to do/be are not there. The places we would go are not there. The people we would see are off limits. Peeled away, one at a time, we find that we are alone, with ourselves.
We look up and we suddenly see that the things we have spent our lives doing are gone. We see that the way we have spent our lives has been full of stuff: activities and spending and earning and distracting and numbing – for what?
And we are left w…us.
That, my friends always feels uneasy. Sometimes, crazy uneasy. When all of us are feeling it together, it is ridiculously uneasy.
When life is peeled off, we often realize that we have not been spending our life doing the things that really matter. We have not been being the people we really want to be.
Many have commented on how in these times, they are realizing the value in things that they had been missing before.
Some we miss now that were there before:
neighbors. Hugs. Just talking to another human. Extended family. Freedom to come and go as we please. Getting together in big groups just to celebrate. Having a child run to you. Feeling like you have everything figured out. Feeling like there is a rhythm of life that will go on forever.
And
Some we see more clearly now:
Close family. Breath in our lungs. Every day of being alive without COVID inside us. Laughter. Flowers. People who care for other people. People who sacrifice. Basic things like someone who takes the trash for us or who delivers our package. The taste of home cooked food. Learning things together as a family. The value of a human life. Companies that care more about their employees than their profit. People that are willing to risk because of love. Companies that give to help people they don’t even know. Old ladies who say no to a ventilator because a younger person needs it more than them
It simultaneously feels good to see these things w more clarity and unsettling that we have been missing them.
We look at who we have been pre-covid and we miss the easy of it, the rhythm and routine of it, we miss feeling like we had everything figured out – but now we are seeing that, much like I wrote in my last post, we have been lived by our lives, instead of living our lives. We are the yoyo and someone else has the end of the string.
In my case, fearing losing anything else, I spent my days anxiously trying to figure out and anticipate threats in order to feel safe. In fear of failure, I worked til I exhausted myself and nearly abandoned my family, only to fear becoming a bad father and husband and internally pressuring myself to be perfect, heaping condemnation on myself when I failed. I spent my life so determined to be the best doctor in the world that if one patient was unhappy, one bad review, I felt crushed.
On the outside, I seemed successful and productive and hardworking, but inside I was being lived by my fears. I was believing an unspoken brokenness inside me that was defining my life.
Then, when life was stripped away and I realized that I was not actually being the person I wanted to be, I looked in grief and despair on my life. I was not living the life I wanted to live.
When I was face to face w me, I felt uneasy. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t really know what I stood for.
Times like these COVID times tend to bring us face to face w these kinds of moments. We see, us. Personally, familially, and culturally.
And, I gotta say, there are a lot of us that are not liking what we are seeing. There are a lot of us that are not fans of our culture. There are a lot of us who wish that when we start life back up again, we can be different.
I have a name for what we find at the base of ourselves. The heart of us. Understand, im no psychologist, just an ordinary guy, but I call it identity.
Identity.
Who are you? Really? The heart of who you are.
This is the part of me that made me quake when all the layers of myself were peeled off.
I realized that
I
Didn’t
Know.
I didn’t know who I was.
I had an idea of who I wanted to be.
I had a great idea of what my behaviors were showing I was.
But I really didn’t know who I was.
I had what I call a squishy identity.
And my identity was more something that I had become because of my fears and my hurts and my losses and my brokenness – they had decided who I was.
And
Who I was decided how I acted, what I felt, and who I became.
That’s how my life was living me.
And
I think a lot of our world is very much in the same boat.
And, if we are going to go thru the shredding of COVID, and we begin to have a chance to see ourselves clearly,
Why not look at our identity, as people and as a culture and stop letting our lives live us and instead begin living our lives?
Why not reevaluate our identity, and let our lives flow out of that?
In my next post, let's talk about identity.

A Blog post and don't forget ZOOM and facebook live Mtm this Thursday at 645pm, the 9th

ZOOM #:Meeting ID: 698-753-453

630 chatting time and 645 start - fyi we willl have to stop and restart 1/2 thru

3/31/20

Loss

April 19, 1995 - a day that will forever be burned into my memory. At 9:02 am, I was in class – a 2nd year med student does a lot of that – we were about 1 mile away. 

There were murmurs among my class mates, we were told we were not to leave the building. Within minutes, every screen in the building came on w pictures of our city, smoking. News reports droned on… 

A giant crater had been torn from the earth in my downtown. 

Literally right across the street from the YMCA where I commonly played basketball, 168 people lost their lives.

And our city stopped.

In our basement is a box with every newspaper from that day til the day Tim McVeigh was executed.

We watched TV hour after hour, sleeping only when our eyes couldn’t do it anymore. We prayed and we cried. Nothing else was in our minds, nothing on our hearts.

Going back to school, the morgue was in the parking lot where the med students parked – and each day we walked by the makeshift semi-trailer outside it where our people were being identified. We all knew. We all felt it. There was not even an attempt to “move on.”

We tried to make sense of it – applied our brains to it – felt like a smile would never come again. But there were no answers. There was only pain.

The entire city was quiet. No one honked their horns. No one raised their voices. Everyone drove w their lights on – a symbol of our unity and shared grief – we posted “We will never forget” everywhere.

Over months, we healed, kinda. Life resumed. We found our smiles and saw the people around us. We appreciated our breaths and every day.

Recently, I went w my oldest daughter, Emily, to the Bombing Memorial. Notice how above, I said we healed, kinda. Walking through the memorial was a wonderful thing. But, I wept. I wept for the loss of life and I wept for the loss of my innocence. I wept for my city and my people and I wept for my world, where violence and hurt are still far too common.

Loss.

Grief.

Can I confess something?

Over my lifetime, I have faced loss from an early age. Starting at age 7, loss and its inevitability, how it can come into a life and crush and destroy and wreck it, started wreaking havoc on me.

And

I have not had a healthy response. There was no one to teach me. There was only pain. 

This produced in me an overwhelming fear of loss and a desire to avoid it and its pain, at all cost. I would rather run away from it, numb it out, hide from it, pretend it wasn’t there,
Or if I couldn’t ignore it, then I would insist upon protecting myself from it – figure it out, analyze it, solve it, til I felt safe.

In effect, I tried to run from grief and loss. To hide. Tried to solve it, explain it, protect from it.

It has taken me many years to realize the toll that that was taking on me. 
My survival and safety stole my life. And the pain of my past was like a massive chain on my present and my future.
You see, after a while, avoiding loss and hurt became more important than truth. Internal safety overruled real life. 

I woke up one day and realized I was not at all who I wanted to be. I was not thinking, acting, feeling, or behaving what I believed was really important in my brain.

My broken heart was ruling my life.

Can I give you a piece of advice?

In times like this – COVID 19 times – your safety will feel threatened, your finances, your health, your relationships, your emotions, your time, your space, your sleep, your thoughts.

Your coping mechanisms, your avoidances, your habits will be pushed – many will be removed or at least shoved into areas you haven’t been in a long time. You will find yourself face to face with you. 

In times like these we have a choice. 

Be honest or hide.

My advice?
Be honest about your pain. Own your fear, we all feel it. Be real w your loss. Be human. Don’t run to a substance, a binge, an escape, don’t just cave to the craving to solve, analyze and protect. Don’t just numb out – be a person.

When normal is stripped away is sometimes the best chance we have to really see.

As you move to honest, find someone to talk to. A good counselor, virtual is best right now. They are out there. A good friend (6 feet away at least) who wants what is best for you, not just to help you escape. Talk to your doctor, they are ready to help. A good pastor can help. A kind neighbor can help.

You do not have to be lived by your escape, your busyness, your brokenness. Messed up times like these can guide us to refocus our lives and allow us to live true to who we really want to be.

I would love to go on a journey with you to rediscover you. I would love for us to find ourselves, to become ourselves.
It will not be easy. Easy is to continue the path you have been on.
It will not be quick – this is not a sitcom episode, this is your life.
It will take time, but it is so worth it.
In my next post, I plan to talk about where we find ourselves when the broken gets peeled off.