"Things We Do"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
September 20, 2009

Cece, my wife, is in Tulsa, Oklahoma this morning visiting her mother.  Now that her mom is living in a senior residence, Cece goes several times a year and I go with her about once a year.  This morning I want to tell you a story about one of our trips to Tulsa.  In September 2001 Cece and I had moved to Chicago so I could attend Meadville Lombard Theological School.  As if ending two long time careers, moving cross country, learning our way around a very large city and starting grad school wasn’t enough to discombobulate us, we had been in Chicago just one week when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.  There was fear in the air for weeks afterwards, and we felt so isolated from family and friends.  Thanksgiving was only two months after the plane hijackings had changed our world, but we decided we really needed to visit Cece’s parents which meant a flight to Tulsa.  We were nervous about going through the new extra security at Midway Airport so we arrived a good two hours before flight departure time.  We congratulated ourselves on our prudence when we saw the very long lines for the security check area.  There were extra police, security guards and even military personnel with automatic weapons at the portal where we would have our carry on bags and our  bodies checked for things we couldn’t take on the airplane.  After 45 minutes of inching our way forward in line, a dreadful awareness came over me.  I still had my favorite penknife in my pocket! < Show knife > It looked something like this little one.  Immediately, I knew that I had really goofed up, and my stomach began to churn.  There was no way to get out of line or go back.  We had already checked our luggage.  Everybody was aware of the new rule after 9/11 that you couldn’t have any knife on an airplane.  I had rehearsed in my mind for days before the flight that I would leave my knife at home.  But as I dressed that morning, I dropped it into my pocket.  What was I thinking?!

I had carried a penknife in my pocket for over forty years.  I didn’t know how to be in the world without one.  Maybe it’s a “guy thing.”  I have many stories and remembrances of my favorite knives.  This one was very special to me because Cece had given it to me for my birthday.  Every time I admired that elegantly crafted beauty I remembered her love for me.  Cece told me she could see the pain in my face as we approached the checkpoint, where I was about to lose that splendid little knife. 
 
I tried to think of a way out of this tight spot.  Hoping for a reprieve, I handed my knife to the security check woman and pleaded with her to save it for me.  She said that she couldn’t do that – the knife would be thrown away.  Cece asked her to save it and give to someone.  She said she would. And then we were through the checkpoint and then—it was gone.  I had the classic reaction - “I can’t believe I did that!”  As we walked into the food court, I was in a daze.  I felt fragmented.  As often happens when I am not perfect, I began to beat myself up.

Why did I take a knife to the airport?  Why did I, an intelligent human being, do something that I knew full well I shouldn’t do?  I could not, with all of my best intentions and with my highly trained mind, prevent myself from doing the one thing that I wanted most to avoid that day.  What was I thinking? 

It may seem strange to talk about grieving the loss of a pocketknife, but it took me quite awhile to let go of it.  The knife was a material thing, but it was also an icon, a symbol for part of my life.  It existed for me on both material and spiritual levels.  Because of its importance to me, something still bugged me about that experience during the entire Thanksgiving holiday.  Losing my knife caused relatively minor harm, it wasn’t impossible to replace, but it reminded me of other things I had inadvertently done.  As badly as I want to “not do” things, sometimes I do them anyway.  What’s up with that?  Is there something wrong with me?

After I lost my knife, I felt ashamed of myself for failing to do something that I knew I should have done.  My internal dialog went, “You should have known better,” then, “You did know, but you failed,” followed by, “I can’t believe you did that,” (I distinctly remember my mother saying that to me many times) and finally, “You really must be stupid.”  My own mind accused me of failure and confirmed my foolishness.  My self-confidence spiraled downward.  My blunder had brought up shaming messages internalized long ago.  And these were coming up over just losing a knife.  When I do something worse, something that hurts a loved one for example, I hear even stronger messages in my head such as, “You don’t really love her or you wouldn’t have done that,” or, “You are incapable of caring as deeply as you should.”
When we screw up, shame and guilt call our intentions into question.  These powerful and painful feelings demoralize us and weaken our self-respect.  They can make us feel like bad people, or at best inept.  Learning how to counter shame has been one of the biggest struggles of my life, so I want to share with you a few key things I have learned about shame.  Most people don’t differentiate between the emotions of shame and guilt.  They are very similar.  When we have done something wrong and we know it, we rightfully feel guilty about it.  Guilt is a very healthy emotion because it makes us address what we have done, and often won’t let us go until we make up for it.  As long as guilt doesn’t incapacitate us we should allow ourselves to feel guilty until we do something to put right what we did wrong.  Shame is different from guilt in that we feel shame about something, and we don’t know what we did wrong, or we didn’t really intend to do wrong.  It is much harder to get at the source of our shame, because unlike guilt, we don’t have a specific wrong that we can fix.  Shame then becomes about us, about who we are deep inside, rather than about a definite mistake we have made.   If we didn’t really intend to do wrong, but we did it anyway, there must be something wrong with us, right?  Well, no – that’s not true.

Shame tells us there is something wrong with whom we are.  And because that isn’t really true, it is very hard to combat such messages.  Shame just isn’t logical.  Remember, shame is not about our actions, and it makes us doubt our integrity.  Shaming is a terrible thing to do to someone, but many of us have experienced it, and once we learned it, we have done it to others.  Shaming begets shaming.  When we feel shame, and its devastating effects on our self-esteem, and we can’t figure out how to get rid of it, we are likely to project our shame onto someone else.  The nature of shame is to spread itself into an entire family system.  I am totally against shaming, and I wish we could eliminate it from the human repertoire of behaviors, but it’s not an easy thing to combat.  That’s why it is vital that we have a process for breaking the cycle of shame.

When people behave impulsively, as people reacting to shame often do, they are said to be driven by emotions.  Unitarian Universalists have always championed the use of reason, and until recently, many of us thought the emotions were the antithesis to rationality.  We used to think emotions came from the primitive parts of the mind; that the impulsive and unruly emotions were to be overcome by rationality, which should be the ruler of the mind.  Using this theory, people who are wracked by shame should just get a handle on their emotions and think their way logically out of their conundrum.  This certainly can work for some things, but it’s not usually effective for shame, because as I said, shaming messages are embedded deep in the psyche, and they are not logical to begin with.   Furthermore, we no longer accept the archaic notion that the emotions are at war with the rational mind.  We now know that emotional information can complement rational decision-making.  It is precisely because we don’t have total control over our emotions that they can make us aware of things we might not perceive without them.  Emotions spontaneously give us useful information directly from our core selves.  It is not rational to stifle or ignore emotional information.  It is better to try to incorporate emotional messages into our thought processes and to channel emotional energy into constructive actions. Still, letting shaming messages sink in unchallenged is confusing and reduces our objectivity.

I’m going to stop for a moment and ask you to see if you can think of a shaming message you hear when you mess up. :::  One that’s coming up for me is “You numbskull!” :::  Do you know who gave you your shaming message?  Let me ask you this, “Is that message true?”  ::: Of course it isn’t.  If the shaming messages you hear aren’t true and relevant for you today, now’s a good time to replace them with ones that make sense to you.  So, when I hear “You numbskull!” I say to myself, “That’s not true, I am smart, and mistakes are only human.”  In order to overcome feelings of shame we must break the vicious cycle that starts with feeling bad about ourselves because of shaming messages, followed by doing something we don’t really want to do, and then receiving more shaming messages. 
It may be hard to overcome these feelings, but rejecting shaming messages that aren’t true can really help our  self-esteem. 

We may strive for perfection, but we will not often reach it.  We cannot make perfectly logical, rational decisions all of the time.  To err is human; we all make mistakes, sometimes even colossal blunders.  Regret for our actions can be useful if it is not overwhelming and if it results in motivation for self improvement, but dwelling on why we are not perfect will not help us recover from a mistake.  Perfection is not a reasonable goal.  I tell myself, Yes, I did something I didn’t like, but that doesn’t mean I am a bad or stupid person.  This helps me break the spiral of shaming messages.
:::
In the case of my forgetting to leave my knife at home, I simply didn’t recall the information when I needed it because my mind was full of details about packing, and I was anxious and hurrying to leave home.  I had planned a specific behavior, but instead I followed my habit.  My response did not involve a rational balancing of choices.  Instead, the strength of my daily habit of putting all of the normal things I carry in my pockets simply took over when I was in a hurry to get to the airport.  It wasn’t an irrational decision; it wasn’t a conscious decision at all.

When we screw up, the question we need to ask is, “What do I need to learn from this?”  Fortunately for those of us who make mistakes, many things in life are repetitive.  We will have opportunities to improve on our past efforts.  In my years of working in utility plant maintenance at the Tennessee Valley Authority I learned that immediately after a problem has occurred is the best time to make a plan to prevent its recurrence.  That is the time when the experience is really fresh on our minds.  It is a good time to ask ourselves if our intentions had a realistic chance of success.  Analysis of the sequence of events can bring out key points where a different action could have made for a different outcome.

Planning maintenance work also taught me that the best plans are made by tapping the thinking of all of the people who were involved with a job.  Our maxim was, “None of us alone is as smart as all of us together!”  Everyone who has experience with an issue may offer good ideas.  In addition to surfacing new ideas listening to others teaches us things about ourselves that we don’t see on our own.  Often, when I am feeling stuck on what to do about a personal problem, talking with another person makes all the difference.  Sometimes I receive good suggestions for handling my issue, but even more helpful than advice is simply receiving understanding from another human being.  When someone wishes what is best for me, I can begin to forgive myself for not being perfect and begin to move on.  The process of reflection and adjustment of intentions is the starting point for changing future behaviors. 

There have been many times for me when reflection and planning a corrective action after a painful incident still didn’t prevent a recurrence, and I was very disappointed in myself.  For me, a repeated error is the most likely to trigger shaming messages.  Did I mention that last summer I donated yet another penknife to airport security?  When this happened, in order to combat the shame I felt, I told myself, “This incident is just one more time that I made a mistake, and I therefore have one more opportunity to work on it.”  It was just another chance to learn a bit more about how to handle life.  It can require lots of work, but the process is the same each time that we mess up—try, try again.  New ideas can become strong enough to determine actions.  The more often that we are able to successfully act in accordance a new intention, the less effort is required.  Over time, it becomes second nature.
Conclusion:
I believe that our behavior can modified and improved provided the necessary willingness, knowledge, resources, resolve and compassion are brought to bear.  We may strive for improvement, but we will never achieve total and unrestricted understanding of our inner selves nor can we always employ impeccable control of our actions.  There will always remain a bit of mystery about why we act the way we do.  May we forgive ourselves for our unintentional mistakes and experience the compassionate understanding of other people.  We will not reach perfection; nevertheless, there is hope for us to be able to stamp out shame, to be happy with whom we are, and to create a wholesome future for our children and grandchildren.
So might this be.