Random thoughts 2019 - a collection of thoughts which arise in the course of life; they may come from counselling situations, random conversations or observations. New posts will be added frequently so visit the site regularly to read John's thoughts. These random thoughts are also sent out by email - click here if you are interested in receiving the regular emails and also to add your comments or further questions.
Growing on the inside
I have been thinking about the enormity of the growth process that many adults face in adulthood. Let me explain. As you will know if you have been on one of our ‘Understanding Yourself’ courses, we each have ‘two people’ living in the ‘house’ that is you. Those are your two temperaments. Often one of those temperaments (usually the extrovert) is far more developed than the other (usually the introvert). To change the illustration, those two people go into life together, but the extrovert typically takes up the challenges that life brings, and the introvert hides away because it doesn’t feel safe, understood or connected. The result is an imbalance, and you find yourself in adulthood with a strong extrovert and an infant introvert.
You can function like that for a while until serious responsibilities come along that require the strength and qualities of the introvert. This is the point at which conflict and struggle can arise in a relationship. Now you are in trouble. The exposing of the weakness in the introvert can leave you feeling very unstable, even torn apart inside by the gap between your extrovert and introvert. Strong emotions that have been suppressed for years can rise up and threaten to engulf you.
What to do? Understanding what is happening is half the battle. You aren’t crazy, nor a failure, nor inadequate. It’s just that your introvert is about 16 years behind in the growth process. Recognising that at least lets you know what is going on. And what needs to happen? You need to grow. How? Just as it is meant to happen to a child – learning step by step to take the emotional risk of getting the introvert involved rather than hiding. That involves making a good choice each time the temptation arises to retreat. It is an incremental process.
Once the introvert engages with another person or situation, then you will experience feelings, often deep feelings that you might only vaguely have been aware of before. As adults, those feelings may tap into a reservoir of long-neglected emotions from the past. Instead of burying them, talk them out with someone who understands you. In other words, do something different this time around to what you did in those developmental years.
Now, this isn’t easy. It’s alright to be immature as a child because you aren’t meant to be grown up! It’s not so good when you are an adult. Expectations are high. Self-worth issues quickly come into play. There is a massive temptation to bury the immature introvert at a greater depth and use your extrovert to defend yourself.
Go on a journey - one in which you discover the wonder of the missed introvert. Don’t hide. Don’t get knocked back. Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ If you are burying who you are then that is hardly loving who you are, and you won’t give that vital part of you into your relationships. Let love drive you to understand and grow.
I have been thinking about the enormity of the growth process that many adults face in adulthood. Let me explain. As you will know if you have been on one of our ‘Understanding Yourself’ courses, we each have ‘two people’ living in the ‘house’ that is you. Those are your two temperaments. Often one of those temperaments (usually the extrovert) is far more developed than the other (usually the introvert). To change the illustration, those two people go into life together, but the extrovert typically takes up the challenges that life brings, and the introvert hides away because it doesn’t feel safe, understood or connected. The result is an imbalance, and you find yourself in adulthood with a strong extrovert and an infant introvert.
You can function like that for a while until serious responsibilities come along that require the strength and qualities of the introvert. This is the point at which conflict and struggle can arise in a relationship. Now you are in trouble. The exposing of the weakness in the introvert can leave you feeling very unstable, even torn apart inside by the gap between your extrovert and introvert. Strong emotions that have been suppressed for years can rise up and threaten to engulf you.
What to do? Understanding what is happening is half the battle. You aren’t crazy, nor a failure, nor inadequate. It’s just that your introvert is about 16 years behind in the growth process. Recognising that at least lets you know what is going on. And what needs to happen? You need to grow. How? Just as it is meant to happen to a child – learning step by step to take the emotional risk of getting the introvert involved rather than hiding. That involves making a good choice each time the temptation arises to retreat. It is an incremental process.
Once the introvert engages with another person or situation, then you will experience feelings, often deep feelings that you might only vaguely have been aware of before. As adults, those feelings may tap into a reservoir of long-neglected emotions from the past. Instead of burying them, talk them out with someone who understands you. In other words, do something different this time around to what you did in those developmental years.
Now, this isn’t easy. It’s alright to be immature as a child because you aren’t meant to be grown up! It’s not so good when you are an adult. Expectations are high. Self-worth issues quickly come into play. There is a massive temptation to bury the immature introvert at a greater depth and use your extrovert to defend yourself.
Go on a journey - one in which you discover the wonder of the missed introvert. Don’t hide. Don’t get knocked back. Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ If you are burying who you are then that is hardly loving who you are, and you won’t give that vital part of you into your relationships. Let love drive you to understand and grow.
Know who you really are
It is so important to know who we really are. That is true in two senses: firstly, that we are a child of God and therefore God regards us totally differently to how we will often feel about ourselves. Secondly, we can take on board a view of ourselves that is completely at odds with who we are. Recently, a friend blurted out a negative about themselves that simply wasn't true. That had come about because another person had tried to get their own way and had said negative things to my friend to put the pressure on. In the end, my very sensitive friend believed the negatives. That is how our view of ourselves forms and it can be way off the truth. Carrying that negative view does damage. It saps our energy and troubles our minds.
This Sunday we are singing the lovely song in church: 'Who you say I am' by Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan. Let the truth of these words sink in today and decide to go with God's view of who you are:
It is so important to know who we really are. That is true in two senses: firstly, that we are a child of God and therefore God regards us totally differently to how we will often feel about ourselves. Secondly, we can take on board a view of ourselves that is completely at odds with who we are. Recently, a friend blurted out a negative about themselves that simply wasn't true. That had come about because another person had tried to get their own way and had said negative things to my friend to put the pressure on. In the end, my very sensitive friend believed the negatives. That is how our view of ourselves forms and it can be way off the truth. Carrying that negative view does damage. It saps our energy and troubles our minds.
This Sunday we are singing the lovely song in church: 'Who you say I am' by Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan. Let the truth of these words sink in today and decide to go with God's view of who you are:
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Who You Say I Am
Who am I that the highest King Would welcome me I was lost but He brought me in Oh His love for me Oh His love for me Who the Son sets free Oh is free indeed I'm a child of God Yes I am |
Free at last He has ransomed me His grace runs deep While I was a slave to sin Jesus died for me Yes He died for me In my Father's house There's a place for me I'm a child of God Yes I am |
I am chosen not forsaken I am who You say I am You are for me not against me I am who You say I am |
If you would like to listen to the song, here is the link.
The vital choice
However complex or difficult a situation might prove to be we usually arrive at a simple and familiar junction. Do I live by what I feel or by what I know to be true? Few of us need convincing of the power and attraction of living in what we feel. All of creation constantly strives to create equilibrium. The wind blows as cold air rushes in to replace warm air. Lightning flashes as vastly different polarities seek equilibrium. To act out what we feel is the most natural, and sometimes the most destructive, path that we could follow. We feel like doing something – so we do it. We justify it because it gives us a pseudo-peace - yet we know it’s wrong. We get hurt so we sulk, go quiet or withdraw. We persist in an argument even when we suspect we are on thin ice because the argument is consistent with our powerful emotions.
How do we break that hold? Start by acknowledging that it does feel good. At least we are being real. Then ask where the emotion came from in the first place. Maybe your reading of the situation was wrong. Perhaps the other person was right, and you don’t need to feel sorry for yourself.
Perhaps the pressure is on and what you feel is perfectly understandable. It is right to acknowledge those emotions, but you will still have to make a choice. There always is a bigger picture with God. We don’t have to live by the negatives or by our own understandable desires. We are set free to choose to live by God’s bigger picture.
Like or love?
Do you think God likes you? Just pause there. We know he ‘loves’ us – but ‘like’ is different. It is easy to pick up the notion that we were so awful that God couldn’t stand the sight of us but in that moment of trusting in what Jesus did for us we became ‘alright.’ Is it really like that or is a more biblical view that God loved and liked us so much that he absolutely hated the idea of being separated from us so did everything in his power to get us back together again? His pain was that we foolishly thought we could manage our lives very well without him and we learnt our lesson the hard way.
If we struggle to use the word ‘like’ we are open to the idea that God loves us through gritted teeth – i.e. we might be useless, pathetic, worthless etc. but God’s grace means he still loves us. It is true that ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8) and it is true that love has its origins in the heart of God but that doesn’t stop us from being able to say that God likes us.
Do you like you? If you don’t think God likes you then you will struggle to like yourself. That would be a tragedy to not like the pinnacle of God’s creation. John explores these thoughts in more detail in the Sunday talk 'What is church?' on 12th May 2019 - click to listen to the talk.
I don’t understand
We can choose not to know. We all have at least two temperaments. Think of them as two rooms side by side. We can choose to just live in one of those rooms. We might be aware of the noise, or unpleasantness in the other room – but we can choose not to go there. We can deliberately block out what we don’t want to look at so we can genuinely say, ‘I don’t understand’ - but it is because we have chosen not to. I suspect that many of us are not as ignorant as we sometimes like to claim.
Robust
Parents – it is your responsibility to help your child live in the whole of both of their temperaments. It is especially important that your child is encouraged to healthily occupy their introvert. For example, don’t allow a Phlegmatic child to say, ‘I don’t know’ when it is a case of not looking or being too lazy to think. Don’t allow them to not engage or to have an unhealthy place of escape in which they protect themselves from the challenges of the real world. Encourage them to think things through, to engage with challenging issues – and people. Taking the easy route now stores up real problems for that child to face later in life. You could leave them with a lot of growing up to do.
What if that has happened to us? What if we know we were not connected with in our introvert and now we are struggling to healthily engage that part of us? What if we know that our responses are immature?
Recognise it as an issue that needs to be addressed. Work at it in your relationships. Make it a priority in your walk with God. Consciously choose to get in touch with what a situation, or person, caused you to feel. Talk it out until you know you have been understood.
Equally, when someone is telling you about something they have experienced, deliberately choose to use your introvert to connect with what has happened to the other person and how they felt. Be robust in the use of your introvert – and read Jen Burch’s excellent article, ‘Becoming robust in a fragile world.’
Be decisive
To be truly decisive, we must be incisive. To be incisive requires internal clarity. Internal clarity comes from walking with God and hearing his voice because ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10).
Melancholic insights
A Melancholic is like a doughnut. The outer ring contains those wonderful (sometimes impossible) standards that he sets for himself. Now imagine a cylinder running through the hole at the centre of the doughnut and this core represents how the Melancholic feels about himself – what he is worth.
It is the gap between his standards and how he values himself that causes the problems. With his Melancholic negativity about himself, he will feel that he cannot even keep his own standards let alone anyone else’s expectations of him. On a scale of 0 – 10, where 0 is no value and 10 excellent value, let’s imagine he feels his value to be about 4. The standards he sets for himself will always be high – and there is nothing wrong with that provided he doesn’t take it to an extreme. So, let’s say he sets his standards at 9. The missing 5 will condemn him – or, to be more accurate, he will use the missing 5 to condemn himself. It becomes proof of his negative convictions about himself.
This disparity between the two scores can produce a permanent state of disliking himself and all the consequent stress.
If the Sanguine sits on top of this struggling Melancholic then it gives the Sanguine a problem because he loves to present an image, a finished product in which all is well. That increases the pressure to fix the gap between who he feels he should be, even needs to be, and what he really feels about himself. This gap can lead to deep self-despising and reinforces the sense of worthlessness.
If a Choleric is joined to this Melancholic, then he will try and compensate mentally for the discord within. This can take the form of having to get everything right – hence OCD. This can be played out in his mind or in constantly trying to get his environment right.
The Choleric on top can increase the sense of negativity, worthlessness and failure with the Melancholic because of the Choleric’s dislike of any form of weakness.
For any of the temperament combinations, it isn’t the standards that need to change (unless they have been set unrealistically high). His awareness of his own value needs to catch up with those standards. Which leads to our next subject:
Identity
What do you feel you are worth? How do you see yourself? However well people might do, many are still plagued by feelings of failure and worthlessness.
The idea in the word ‘identity’ is ‘that which stays the same as under varying aspects or conditions.’ What we feel about ourselves sits at the core of our identity because it remains constant – unless we decide to consciously change it. For a Christian, we can choose between two identities – the one that belongs to the old kingdom, the old way of feeling and doing – or the new identity, the one we have in Christ. Once we have put our trust in him, we have a new identity. God looks at us and sees Jesus (Ephesians 1:5-6). If we accept that this is our new identity, then we can never allow ourselves to be defined by failure or ever doubt our value.
On 18/01/2019 Nicky wrote:
'Thank you John for this image of a doughnut, which I can really relate to as a Melancholic, feeling that I wasn't up to standard ("I should have done this", "I shouldn't have said that" or "That person reacted in a much better way than I did" and so on and so on). I know it's unkind to treat myself like that and yet the same old patterns seems to come back time after time.
The fact that God sees us as his son is a beautiful truth and I believe that if we can really live in this truth, we'll be freed from these self-destructive thoughts and therefore be free to fully reach out to others.'
Click here to add your own comments to John's Random thoughts,
However complex or difficult a situation might prove to be we usually arrive at a simple and familiar junction. Do I live by what I feel or by what I know to be true? Few of us need convincing of the power and attraction of living in what we feel. All of creation constantly strives to create equilibrium. The wind blows as cold air rushes in to replace warm air. Lightning flashes as vastly different polarities seek equilibrium. To act out what we feel is the most natural, and sometimes the most destructive, path that we could follow. We feel like doing something – so we do it. We justify it because it gives us a pseudo-peace - yet we know it’s wrong. We get hurt so we sulk, go quiet or withdraw. We persist in an argument even when we suspect we are on thin ice because the argument is consistent with our powerful emotions.
How do we break that hold? Start by acknowledging that it does feel good. At least we are being real. Then ask where the emotion came from in the first place. Maybe your reading of the situation was wrong. Perhaps the other person was right, and you don’t need to feel sorry for yourself.
Perhaps the pressure is on and what you feel is perfectly understandable. It is right to acknowledge those emotions, but you will still have to make a choice. There always is a bigger picture with God. We don’t have to live by the negatives or by our own understandable desires. We are set free to choose to live by God’s bigger picture.
Like or love?
Do you think God likes you? Just pause there. We know he ‘loves’ us – but ‘like’ is different. It is easy to pick up the notion that we were so awful that God couldn’t stand the sight of us but in that moment of trusting in what Jesus did for us we became ‘alright.’ Is it really like that or is a more biblical view that God loved and liked us so much that he absolutely hated the idea of being separated from us so did everything in his power to get us back together again? His pain was that we foolishly thought we could manage our lives very well without him and we learnt our lesson the hard way.
If we struggle to use the word ‘like’ we are open to the idea that God loves us through gritted teeth – i.e. we might be useless, pathetic, worthless etc. but God’s grace means he still loves us. It is true that ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8) and it is true that love has its origins in the heart of God but that doesn’t stop us from being able to say that God likes us.
Do you like you? If you don’t think God likes you then you will struggle to like yourself. That would be a tragedy to not like the pinnacle of God’s creation. John explores these thoughts in more detail in the Sunday talk 'What is church?' on 12th May 2019 - click to listen to the talk.
I don’t understand
We can choose not to know. We all have at least two temperaments. Think of them as two rooms side by side. We can choose to just live in one of those rooms. We might be aware of the noise, or unpleasantness in the other room – but we can choose not to go there. We can deliberately block out what we don’t want to look at so we can genuinely say, ‘I don’t understand’ - but it is because we have chosen not to. I suspect that many of us are not as ignorant as we sometimes like to claim.
Robust
Parents – it is your responsibility to help your child live in the whole of both of their temperaments. It is especially important that your child is encouraged to healthily occupy their introvert. For example, don’t allow a Phlegmatic child to say, ‘I don’t know’ when it is a case of not looking or being too lazy to think. Don’t allow them to not engage or to have an unhealthy place of escape in which they protect themselves from the challenges of the real world. Encourage them to think things through, to engage with challenging issues – and people. Taking the easy route now stores up real problems for that child to face later in life. You could leave them with a lot of growing up to do.
What if that has happened to us? What if we know we were not connected with in our introvert and now we are struggling to healthily engage that part of us? What if we know that our responses are immature?
Recognise it as an issue that needs to be addressed. Work at it in your relationships. Make it a priority in your walk with God. Consciously choose to get in touch with what a situation, or person, caused you to feel. Talk it out until you know you have been understood.
Equally, when someone is telling you about something they have experienced, deliberately choose to use your introvert to connect with what has happened to the other person and how they felt. Be robust in the use of your introvert – and read Jen Burch’s excellent article, ‘Becoming robust in a fragile world.’
Be decisive
To be truly decisive, we must be incisive. To be incisive requires internal clarity. Internal clarity comes from walking with God and hearing his voice because ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10).
Melancholic insights
A Melancholic is like a doughnut. The outer ring contains those wonderful (sometimes impossible) standards that he sets for himself. Now imagine a cylinder running through the hole at the centre of the doughnut and this core represents how the Melancholic feels about himself – what he is worth.
It is the gap between his standards and how he values himself that causes the problems. With his Melancholic negativity about himself, he will feel that he cannot even keep his own standards let alone anyone else’s expectations of him. On a scale of 0 – 10, where 0 is no value and 10 excellent value, let’s imagine he feels his value to be about 4. The standards he sets for himself will always be high – and there is nothing wrong with that provided he doesn’t take it to an extreme. So, let’s say he sets his standards at 9. The missing 5 will condemn him – or, to be more accurate, he will use the missing 5 to condemn himself. It becomes proof of his negative convictions about himself.
This disparity between the two scores can produce a permanent state of disliking himself and all the consequent stress.
If the Sanguine sits on top of this struggling Melancholic then it gives the Sanguine a problem because he loves to present an image, a finished product in which all is well. That increases the pressure to fix the gap between who he feels he should be, even needs to be, and what he really feels about himself. This gap can lead to deep self-despising and reinforces the sense of worthlessness.
If a Choleric is joined to this Melancholic, then he will try and compensate mentally for the discord within. This can take the form of having to get everything right – hence OCD. This can be played out in his mind or in constantly trying to get his environment right.
The Choleric on top can increase the sense of negativity, worthlessness and failure with the Melancholic because of the Choleric’s dislike of any form of weakness.
For any of the temperament combinations, it isn’t the standards that need to change (unless they have been set unrealistically high). His awareness of his own value needs to catch up with those standards. Which leads to our next subject:
Identity
What do you feel you are worth? How do you see yourself? However well people might do, many are still plagued by feelings of failure and worthlessness.
The idea in the word ‘identity’ is ‘that which stays the same as under varying aspects or conditions.’ What we feel about ourselves sits at the core of our identity because it remains constant – unless we decide to consciously change it. For a Christian, we can choose between two identities – the one that belongs to the old kingdom, the old way of feeling and doing – or the new identity, the one we have in Christ. Once we have put our trust in him, we have a new identity. God looks at us and sees Jesus (Ephesians 1:5-6). If we accept that this is our new identity, then we can never allow ourselves to be defined by failure or ever doubt our value.
On 18/01/2019 Nicky wrote:
'Thank you John for this image of a doughnut, which I can really relate to as a Melancholic, feeling that I wasn't up to standard ("I should have done this", "I shouldn't have said that" or "That person reacted in a much better way than I did" and so on and so on). I know it's unkind to treat myself like that and yet the same old patterns seems to come back time after time.
The fact that God sees us as his son is a beautiful truth and I believe that if we can really live in this truth, we'll be freed from these self-destructive thoughts and therefore be free to fully reach out to others.'
Click here to add your own comments to John's Random thoughts,
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