Tender: On Compassion and Evolving Worldviews

The older I get, the more my heart softens. 

If you told a 15-year old me that would happen, I would be horrified. Softness and vulnerability were not things I valued. My Christian high school trained me and my peers to stand firm on our beliefs and refute the beliefs of others. Whenever we learned about other worldviews (including through a class that segmented the complexities of human thinking into either “Christian,” “Humanism,” “New Age,” or “Marxism”), the goal was to understand the enemy. Compassion was not an important piece of that. Pity, yes, that was an acceptable reaction. Mostly, we studied so we could learn how to debate someone and enforce our views. 

Compassion and pity are very different.

To me, compassion is empathetic. It’s a desire to understand and alleviate suffering because all people are worthy of dignity and respect, no matter who they are or what they believe. Pity is condescending. It’s something reserved for those who are “less than.” It’s also passive. It doesn’t encourage action on the part of the person who feels pity, or at least not an action where the other person is an equal participant. 

In school, I could be good at debates, but only when I suppressed my true emotions. While ‘appeals to emotion’ were valuable in debates, they were very calculated. Their purpose was to manipulate the audience, swaying them to your side. We never really talked about the speaker’s emotions or what they might feel about a topic. I remember feeling satisfied with a presentation if I remained cool and collected. If my heartbeat stayed steady the whole time I presented my case – even if recounting heartbreaking stories – I was winning. 

My emotions tended to flare up most when I researched and argued on behalf of an issue that didn’t align with conservative Evangelicalism. I almost always ended up truly believing I was on the right side of the debate and became frustrated when that ultimately didn’t matter. Nearly all these debates were intellectual exercises about real-life issues that affected real people. It didn’t seem like anyone felt more compassionate after the school day ended. 

The more I learned about other views on my own without the filter of a teacher’s perspective, the more understanding I became. The black-and-white ‘God-or-Satan’ mentality started to blur. 

For anyone who grew up in fundamentalist (or fundamentalist-lite) Christianity, they know just how significant this blurring is. We’re told it’s a sign of spiritual weakness. It’s a sign that we’ve become vulnerable to the influences of Satan and worldliness. Our questioning is often dismissed as just wanting to fit in with a secular crowd. I still had that belief in my mind, so I resisted my heart’s softening. I tried not to think too hard about the beliefs I was espousing because once I did, I knew I would question them. I wouldn’t be able to ignore the paradox of a creed that preaches the concepts of mercy and love, but punishes and exiles anything (and anyone) it perceives as “sinful.” 

Eventually, I couldn’t deny the paradox. It took a lot of personal pain and acknowledging the pain of others to realize that “standing your ground” on beliefs can be incredibly destructive. Changing my worldview is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Strangely enough, the narrative many churches sell is that sticking to the ‘straight and narrow’ path is what’s truly difficult. Supposedly, only “good Christians” can do it. In my experience, the opposite is true. It’s much easier and more comfortable to walk the same road you’ve always walked, not questioning what you’ve believed your whole life. Taking a step off that path, to walk in someone else’s shoes…that’s hard. 

Many Christians consider themselves “good” Christians if they don’t change their mind on issues. They’re admired for their steadfastness and commitment to a very specific set of beliefs. What I see is people who are numb to the experiences of others.

If a Christian truly values love – which is considered greater than both faith and hope – they would be constantly wrestling with their beliefs. They would be acutely sensitive to the pain of others, especially pain inflicted in the name of Jesus. If there’s a hint that a certain belief might be harmful, every Christian should be willing to reconsider their stance. 

There are many, many Christians who are wrestling, who are tender, and who are prioritizing compassion over being “correct.” They are often punished for it.

As someone’s beliefs shift, they are often shunned and even threatened by mainstream Christianity. The attacks on Jo Luehmann, a Colombian-American writer, is a horrifying example of Christian-led abuse. Blogger Libby Anne over at “Love, Joy, Feminism” describes what happened in her post “Christian Gatekeeping 2020.” 

In June of this year, Jo responded to a hateful comment by a man claiming that colonization was excusable because indigenous people needed Jesus. Jo called that belief out for what it is: white supremacy. In her words, “all hell broke loose.” Christian accounts with big followings – including Adam Ford, founder of Babylon Bee – started mocking Jo, who had a relatively small following. She started to get hundreds of DMs from these accounts’ followers. Most of the messages were abusive. These self-professed Christians also began reporting all of Jo’s social media accounts as “hate speech.” She was locked out of her Twitter and Instagram for a time. I’ve seen some of the comments people are still making. They include death threats. This is how far efforts to squash uncomfortable discussions and beliefs can go. Christians who aren’t willing to entertain the idea that they may be wrong are trying to scare Jo into silence. They’ve not been successful. 

Christians like Jo Luehmann, Rachel Held Evans, and Nadia Bolz-Weber are the reason I called myself a “Christian” for so long. Voices like theirs give me hope that the worldview that defined my childhood and teenage years won’t go unchallenged in the future. On my journey, however, I’ve left the label “Christian” behind. I don’t know what I believe about Christ. All I know is that I’m softening. I know a lot of people from my past – the teachers, pastors, and classmates – would look at me and feel pity. They might see me as a cautionary tale. More likely than not, they don’t think about me at all. 

Worldview-wise, I don’t know where I’m going. I have one guiding principle: if my beliefs aren’t making me more compassionate to the suffering and experiences of others – especially the most vulnerable and marginalized – I need to question my beliefs.

Moving to Medium

My posts are getting more rare, but if anyone is still interested in what I put out into the world), I’ll be over at Medium from now on. You can find me by searching for Emmaline Soken-Huberty. I just posted my first thing, “Two Birds.” It’s a quick 2-minute read.

Hope to see some of you there!

still + small

They told me I must be small

I must diminish so He could grow 

Their voices overwhelmed me

A cloud suffocating by day

A fire burning at night

I grew still and small

Waiting to be saved

 

I must decrease so He can increase

 

They taught me my spirit was defiant

I must tame my darkness so He could shine

Their voices sliced me down 

I cut off the pieces

That made me too wild

I pruned and trimmed my branches

Waiting to be whole

 

The tree You cursed has withered

 

Then I ran

I turned over their tables, exiled from their temples

They told me the further I fled

The unhappier I would be

 

They lied, and does not the Lord detest lying lips? 

 

Still and small, my spirit survives

Scarred and sacred, she still sings.

Book Review: Pure by Linda Kay Klein

*content warning: general descriptions of trauma and anxiety*

I read this book in two days. I couldn’t put it down. What’s so engaging about it is that the author is intimately linked to her subject. Born and raised into purity culture, she suffered the same shame and traumas that the women she interviews did. She even grew up with some of them and experienced the exact same messaging. I don’t know if I’ve read a book of this kind before where the author is so much a part of it.

I’m thinking about this book at a strange time in my life. After losing my dog Yoshi, one of the great loves of my life, it was like the ground beneath me shifted. Things I had buried for years and that have been knocking on the door for months refused to be ignored a second longer. I’ve finally had to acknowledge that I do not feel safe in my own body. I’ve had to acknowledge that my very first memory – a strange, shrouded memory of some kind of physical trauma –  is still haunting me. It guides my sexuality, my anxiety, and how I feel in my own skin.

The extent to which this has affected my experience with purity culture isn’t clear. The big thing I’ve been thinking about is my first serious relationship back in high school. I was physically anxious constantly. I analyzed every little physical thing, feeling both intrigued and terrified. Because of purity culture, I believed that the warning signals going off were from God. If my boyfriend touched my leg or I stroked his hand, trigging a flight response in me, I thought it was God telling me what we were doing was wrong. Now, I know that isn’t the case. Because purity culture saw repressed sexuality as a virtue, it allowed me to ignore signs that something else was wrong for a very long time.

This book also made me feel very relieved. I’m not the only one who feels confusion and anger. Even with deconstruction and transformed beliefs, the women in “Pure” still struggle with the messages engrained at an impressionable age. In my head, I believe that “purity” is a false construct, but in my body and heart, there’s a battle going on. With me, there’s an added layer – that early physical trauma – that complicates things.

Basically, purity culture isn’t the end-all-be-all for my array of issues, but it played a strong supporting role. At certain times in my life, it played a starring role. I recommend “Pure” for anyone who needs to feel that they aren’t alone in dealing with the fallout from purity culture, and for anyone who wants to understand what purity culture does to people.

Purity culture isn’t a relic of the past. It’s alive and well in many communities, and I anticipate a strong backlash from the mainstream church in response to people telling their stories. That’s usually what ends up happening when the church gets called out. Thankfully, there are churches and spiritual communities that are different and willing to listen. They will also need to be vocal. It’s time for a change.

Location, Location, Location

Broken glass, pins, nails…these are the items that litter my dreams at night. They start growing from beneath my skin, they fill my ears, eyes, and nose, and they coat me like a suit of armor. When I told my spiritual director that these are the sorts of reoccurring dreams I have frequently, she looked taken aback. She asked if I had ever seen a Jungian therapist, or one who specialized in dream interpretation. Um, nope. That sounds…odd. Her concern did prompt me to start researching dreams, though. They are symbols of the subconscious. If something is bothering a person, it will eventually emerge in their dreams. There’s no escape.

That all makes sense to me. It’s how I know that I’m still not over my fears about witches, demons, and the trauma inflicted by charismatic, evil-obsessed spirituality. In my dreams, I’ll frequently get attacked by a witch or start getting possessed, and the language I learned from the old days comes spilling out, in an attempt to fight. It never works.

I can do work when I’m awake to try and decipher the dreams, to deal with what understanding I can glean from them, but while I’m in the dream, I feel powerless. I started looking into how dreams could be controlled, and “lucid dreaming” came up. It’s when you know you’re in a dream and gain a heightened sense of awareness and control. You can effectively create objects, conjure specific people, and perform actions from thin air, just like you would if you were awake and writing a story. This time, though, you’re living the story within the dream world.

I read “A Field Guide To Lucid Dreaming,” and learned that I mostly dream in the second tier of dreaming: I know I’m dreaming, but I have very limited control. In nearly every dream I have, I know it isn’t real, but I can’t do the things I want to, like fly or make nightmares go away. In order to get more lucid and improve my control, I’ve had to start keeping a dream journal again. It’s an overwhelming process, because I remember my dreams in great detail, and I dream pretty much every time I go to sleep. If I take a nap during the day, I’ll dream, so that’s two dreams per 24-hour period.

I’ve written down about ten dreams since I started my new dream journal, and I have dozens of dreams written down from a few years back. In going through them, there are patterns that emerge. The first one I’m going to take a look at is where the dreams are set. One of the most frequent locales? High school.

High school was really hard. Making friends was like trying to tame a wild animal, when the roles of wild animal and human switch frequently. The strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism and policing of thought ground me down to an angry, throbbing pencil nub that felt like it couldn’t be useful anywhere else. I loved a boy who couldn’t love me back the way I needed, and when he left me, I realized I had poured all my energy into that relationship and I had nothing left for healing. Depression hit hard and the medication trials hit harder, so both my mind and body were exhausted.

It’s been so many years since that time and I tell myself I’m over it, but when I go to sleep, I’m back in those hallways, and things are a little bit stranger. My uniform shrinks and grows, transforming its shape, so I can’t focus on anything else. I get lost and panicked that I’ll be late for class. I try taking a math test, only to suddenly collapse with blurred vision while the teacher remains uninterested and unconcerned in what’s happening. I get into fights with classmates from my past, screaming at them, but their faces are blank and they move like shadows past me.

In those dreams, I feel a handful of emotions depending on what’s going on, plot-wise, but there are trends: abandoned, voiceless, trapped, neglected, alone. These are all feelings I had in high school, and they all came to a peak when I was so depressed, I wasn’t going to school. I don’t even know how many days I missed. During that time, I don’t recall maybe more than one person reaching out and asking if I was okay. Some would ask my brother if I was coming to school when he showed up alone in the morning, but eventually, after getting the same answer every time, they just stopped asking. If I had gotten mono or something other longer physical illness, I might have gotten get-well cards, or flowers, or a visitor or two. For depression, dead silence.  

On the rare occasion when I was in at school, I was so lifeless, I just fell asleep during class. I couldn’t fight it; I had no energy for fighting. Someone trying to keep me awake wouldn’t have been helpful, but I can’t even imagine what a pat on the back or squeeze of the hand from a girl sitting next to me would have done for my motivation to keep trying to live. It felt like people were just watching me slowly die. I have no idea what they thought of it. Pity, probably.

The dreams I keep having tell me I’m not fully-healed from the feelings of abandonment and neglect high school spawned. Those emotions are a refrain in a song that will play in my head whenever my soul aligns a current experience with the past, and they send me right back in time. All the years of learning and maturity and recovery crumble, and it’s like I never left that building.

I’m not quite sure what to do about it. Well, that’s not true. My spiritual director recommends writing letters to myself as if I was back in the moment of trauma. I would be sending my own get-well cards into the past. That sounds like a good enough plan as any, especially since I’m a writer, it’s my strongest love language, but it’s also kind of scary. It seems so emotionally overwhelming and painful, like tearing the scab off a wound that never really healed. This is the year of wild emotions, though, so I have to start somewhere.

drawn to the wild

For 2019, I didn’t want to just write a list of goals. Don’t get me wrong, I have those, too, like creating more original recipes, exercising for 30 minutes every day, and reading 40 books. I want something more representative of the journey I’ve been taking with my spiritual director, as well. One quote kept coming to mind. It’s from a Canadian poet whose true identity people aren’t sure about. His name is Atticus, and he always wears a full face mask when he performs. That’s the kind of mystique young people adore, and he has a huge following on Instagram. Here’s the poem snippet that’s been speaking to me:

Love her, but leave her wild. 

I’ve been afraid of my emotions for a long time. In the depths of depression, my emotions were scary, dark creatures that flooded my mind with despair. When I was involved with charismatic Christianity and its intense prayer style, my emotions would become overwhelming and I would feel like I wasn’t in control of my body. People would say it was either demons or the Holy Spirit manifesting, though I could never be sure which was which, so I suppressed any strong feeling just to be safe. Even my anger has been censored by society, my family, and my own sense of what’s “appropriate” or “Christ-like.” I don’t like crying in front of people because I don’t want anybody to see me lose control. I’m afraid of their reaction.

This year, I’m resolving to be wild. I am the “her” in Atticus’ poem. My emotions are big, so I’m going to let them be big. I can hear other voices expressing hesitation, saying that people won’t understand, that there will be consequences for these type of emotions. I know that. When I say “leave her wild,” I don’t mean I’m going to blurt out every single feeling that crosses my heart. I mean that I’m going to let myself feel it. That could mean expressing them in some way, but it could also mean just keeping it to myself. I won’t always nurture my feelings in the best way, but I’m done with censorship and trying to tame the fire.

The other quote that keeps rising to the surface is a song lyric from Audrey Assad’s “Drawn To You.” My relationship with God is complicated and I’m still not over a lot of past experiences with the church. Chris and I even tried establishing a spiritual community of our own, and it blew up in our faces. However, I’m still seeking. I always have. There’s something that pulls me back over and over again. This year, I’ll be trying to find a church community. I’ve been in two churches and didn’t run for the hills. That’s progress.

New Season

I’m at the point in my life where I’m considering going back to church.

Shocking, I know, but it isn’t just about me. If it was, honestly, I would probably never be the kind of person who gets up on Sunday morning. Just thinking about it makes me kind of queasy. I’m definitely not there yet, but I’m going to make it a goal to work on with my spiritual director. Why? It’s important to Chris.

He’s a church boy. He gets up super early every Sunday and does the soundboard for the service. He wants to go to groups. It’s such a big part of his life, and it’s been slowly separating us from each other. It’s not like he’s been pressuring me, but it’s still something we aren’t sharing.

We went to a Christian concert a little while ago, and it was in a church. I felt kind of weird walking in, but I didn’t feel the need to rush out. The music was really good, which was the only reason I went, and even a bit “edgy” for the crowd. I’m pretty sure Chris was the only man doing any kind of movement. Danny Gokey was the headliner and at one point, he started talking about new seasons. Chris and I feel like we’re moving into a new season, and if I try going back to church and groups, that will definitely be new to me.

I’m faced with a question though: how can a new season start in places that are so familiar, in a negative way? Churches, generally, all feel and look the same, especially the ones Chris goes to. They even smell the same. How can something good and new come from that? I know, I know, God can do anything, he makes all things new, yadda yadda, but I still have to get my ass through the doors. My mind knows it’s not the same place, but my body is trained well. It’s hard work to retrain the thing. Even going to a different church isn’t really an option, because I’ve been to so many, there isn’t a church environment I haven’t seen or experienced. All of the “sets” have memories attached to them. And I’m not going to ask Chris to change churches just because one might not provoke as much of a trigger for me. Arg, the things we do for love.

I’ve basically decided to not expect miracles, but if one happens, awesome. Church isn’t going to suddenly become this amazing, transformative experience, but it doesn’t have to be the place I dread most, either. I would be fine being okay sitting through a service and finding my real spiritual fulfillment through other channels. I do still want a group, that’s more important than services, and I believe that’s something I deserve. That’s where I really need a new season.

Day 16 on 75mg

If I wrote this yesterday like I planned, it would have been a more cheerful blog. Today, however, has been unexpectedly rough. I think my first mistake was eating a breakfast with too much sugar and caffeine. I had leftover nectarine crumble and a chai latte with my new blend. I was careful to not add too much sugar, but within ten minutes or so, my head felt like it might explode. At the same time, I was struggling with an article’s images and trying to get pics in a high enough resolution, and that made me really angry for some reason. So I was frustrated, in a lot of pain, and walking the clock, because I was supposed to have a doctor appointment.

That didn’t happen. Chris ended up having to cancel it while I lay in bed, clutching my head, praying for death. It hurt to think, but thoughts still pounded through. These last few days I’ve been getting increasingly angry with the Brett Kavanaugh situation as more allegations emerge along with  revelations about how Republicans knew and have been trying to rush the nomination process anyway. A lot of Christians (like Franklin Graham) have been trying to shrug off what Kavanaugh did or just say outright that the women are lying. It’s been making me feel physically ill.

These extreme emotions are new to me and I don’t really know what to do with them. Writing them down in my journal helped, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

Aaaand now I’m feeling nauseated, so let’s end there.

Five

A big part of my spiritual “therapy,” I guess you’d call it, has been identifying and focusing on my “safe places.” These are the sensations and states of being that make me feel closest to God. When they’re cultivated, I can think about trauma and ground myself in safety, so I’m not disrupted by painful memories. I’ve found five safe places:

Yoshi
Chris
Walking
Nature
Floating in the ocean in Jamaica

I experience different aspects of God in these places. With Yoshi, I feel adored and significant. With Chris, I am accepted, respected, and loved. While walking, I am strong, free, and flexible. In nature, I am free, rooted, grounded, and open, like the opposite of claustrophobic. When I remember floating in the Jamaican water, I am completely at peace, held, and still.

My spiritual director pointed out that it’s interesting that there are five things, like fingers on a hand. I immediately thought of the book title, “The heart is a muscle the size of your fist.” It’s a novel about protests and I haven’t actually read it, but the phrase sticks with me. In my head, I connect a fist or a hand with the heart. The key to spiritual fulfillment is to hold the Five within myself at all times, so no matter where I go or what I experience, I can rely on them. To help get a visual sense, I painted a picture:

Each color represents a different part of the Five, and they all seep into one another and come from the heart. The heart has cracks from my traumatic experiences, but that’s where the color bleeds from.

The Five represent my essence. When I feel stressed or conflicted about something, disturbed by a past memory or triggering event, I’ve been turning back to whatever part of the Five best supports me. Sometimes it’s lying outside on the deck with Yoshi, looking up at the trees, just listening to the sound of the leaves. Other times it’s going for a walk without my headphones and just really focusing on each step, letting my arms move, breathing more deeply. In the past, I would focus too much on what was bothering me. I would run it back through my head over and over again, writing it down, picking it apart, analyzing it. That process has led to revelations, but I’m tired of it. One of the reasons why I didn’t want to go back to regular counseling was because I felt like I would have to rehash all the things wrong with me again. My spiritual director isn’t so interested in the details of things. It’s more about how memories and experiences fit into the bigger picture of what I believe about God, myself, and others. Most importantly, it’s about moving forward and not letting trauma define me. She’s all about “respecting” the trauma and having compassion towards it – it’s not as if I’m denying the impact of anything – but healing comes from immersion in the Five, not the trauma itself.

What are your safe places?

 

Finding The Root

I was in my spiritual director’s office the other day, and we had just hit on a big revelation about what my core “issue” is. Because (like everyone) all my fears began when I was a kid, I need to connect with my inner child in order to heal. All the other experiences I’ve had with toxic Christianity, unhealthy friendships, etc, all served to reinforce the main lies I learned as a child: I am not safe and I am too much.

It’s been hard for me to really claim that it all began in childhood because by all accounts I had a great childhood. I had/have great parents, a close family, and no horrendous events. What my spiritual director has been teaching me though is that EVERYONE gets their root problems from childhood. That’s just what life does to us, and if we don’t take care of ourselves when we get older and have the emotional and spiritual resources to deal with what we’ve experienced, it only gets worse.

When I think about myself as a child, I get really uncomfortable. I don’t want to look at myself then, I want to focus on who I became and how much stronger I got. I don’t consider myself a “motherly” person at all because I can’t relate to children, I don’t understand them. What I have to do now is learn how to be a mother to my inner child, because that’s the part of me that’s wounded. When I experience rejection or loneliness or trauma as an adult, it’s the child part of me – the part that doesn’t know how to handle those emotions – that takes on the pain.

I feel like I’ve finally found the root of what I’ve been looking for. In all my counseling, I’ve bumped up against it, but never quite put a pinpoint on what the problem was. It’s overwhelming and relieving, but also intimidating. My spiritual director told me to prepare myself for some “stirring,” like when you disturb the bottom of a lake, all kinds of sediment and stuff comes up along with the water. I’m going to be filtering out the negative shit to get at the good stuff, and it will not feel great.

Where to start? I think the first thing I need to do is get comfortable with maternal feelings. They freak me out. I don’t have them when it comes to kids. However, I love animals and my pets. I’m very maternal to Yoshi. It’s a matter of channeling that towards Inner Child instead of holding her at a distance, avoiding her, neglecting her. Even writing that, I tense up a little. It’s so foreign to me. That’s a definite sign that it’s something that needs to change.