Personal Worth 3: A Comment on Cost and Grace and Forgiveness

            As I asked in the first of these blogs, so I ask again: How did I get here? How is it that this high-achieving and relatively well-loved dude was at the same time dying inside? Is it my parent’s fault? Is it mine? Is it no one’s “fault” and just circumstantially developed? Is Christianity inherently inclined to damage the children of its ministers? Is it just the life a missionary that puts the children at risk of developing hidden self-worth and mental health issues?

            I’m not sure that I will exactly answer all of these questions, but they naturally come up when I consider my case.

            I have a desire to absolve my parents of fault with an explication of my condition. Somewhere along the line I developed what Trevor Walters calls External Affirmation Syndrome. EAS involves being unusually inclined to experience relational dynamics as traumatic or hurtful on a self-worth level. I think indeed that that is the case. I was overtly inclined to interpret relational dynamics, including behaviours of my parents, as personally diminishing. So, perhaps my parents can be excused, because their behaviours toward me were relatively normal; I just interpreted them as affronts to my self-worth because of my emotional pathology.

            I note, however, that Trevor Walters says that a child gets there, because of their parents. He reports on neglect, abuse, with-holding of affirmation – all these constitute the formative forces of External Affirmation Syndrome (which might also be called, or associated with, low self-worth, and attachment insecurity). Again, I desire to absolve my parents, this time citing the circumstances of our lives as the reason that they were unable to care for me in the way that I needed. And this is also true. Our life circumstances were legitimately brutal sometimes and other times overwhelming (as a child you don’t know this. It’s all just a matter of course, and you adapt as you can). My parents were Christian missionaries in tribal ministry, a job which has an absurd level of stress to it. So certainly, we may excuse the parents for not attending to the hidden wound that the child could not articulate.

           A parent in normal circumstances might have trouble seeing the signs. I was, remember, relatively high achieving. High performance and people-pleasing secured a counterfeit image of health and flourishing which was enough to convince others and my parents that I was thriving. I got accolade after accolade at school and excelled in both academics and art. When I talked to my Dad about this recently, he said that he at my mom saw this and were like, “Well I guess he’s fine.” Lol. I can laugh about it now but not then! And not even last year when I was still untangling and grieving a lot of this.

            So, it was the circumstances which disabled my parents from intervening to halt the growing EAS, or self-worth wound, which was festering and becoming the lens through which I interpreted reality. We absolve my parents. But perhaps they can be blamed for going to the mission field? Or for not leaving when the child was hurting? Or perhaps there’s something systemically wrong with the way Christian ministry is carried out? There’s quite a few children of missionaries who are pretty wrecked, and some who lose their faith.

            As it is, I do think my parents are at fault for some things, and my mission field for other things but what’s more important for me than assigning blame, is simply recognizing cost. For me, for whatever reason, the missionary kid life had a cost – a cost my parents never knew would, or could, accrue in a child who seemed to be doing alright. I think that I forgive them and forgive the missionary sphere and forgive Christianity. I think that I have been enabled to do so by the grace of God.

            I do at the same time affirm I needed help and that I did not receive it. I needed affirmation of worth that I did not receive. I needed it with the urgency of an intervention on account of my worth being injured by some of the realities of my youth. I think that some of my parent’s behaviors did not help and exacerbated the issue. I needed them to help me make meaning of my grief and pain and self-doubt in a way that disarmed shame. Instead, shame festered and eroded my self-worth, and wrecked my mental health. How much of the responsibility of this lands on my parents? I’m not wholly sure. I just recognize that it all happened. I experienced neglect in the sense that the care I needed, emergency level-care, really, was not forthcoming.

              True forgiveness depends on a naming and validation of the grievance. True forgiveness depends on a recognition of the cost. I recognize a cost accrued because of some of my parents’ choices and I forgive them. I also recognize a degree of that cost being amassed by forces that were beyond them. I recognize also the interplay of my own sin and pride in the construction of my personal prisons. I’m fortunate to have had the chance to talk vulnerably about these things with my father and reach a real sense of resolution and understanding. His validation assisted me greatly in my healing process. It’s difficult to heal and forgive and when the other never validates what you felt or feel. I’ve been gifted with time and a great deal of help, including the kindness, validation, and care of my father. I have been given a few years to heal.

            I don’t, now, feel enormously threatened by the destitution of my past anymore, which is pretty cool. I still feel grief for it in moments of memory, but I don’t feel my worth attacked by it constantly. I don’t feel like it’s the end of my life’s worth to be destroyed, as I kind of was, twice. Rather, I believe that I belong to the resurrection and that ultimately, beyond it all, my life is fused to that of Christ and that there is a security to the worth given me that cannot be taken from me.

            This is how I forgive. Real forgiveness depends on a personal security of worth that is invincible to the harm done by the other. My worth is secure by the grace of God, therefore nothing done to me, and nothing done by me, can steal it from me. I therefore say, though they/it hurt me, and though there was a real cost on me, I nonetheless am not diminished. I am not diminished, for where Christ is, there I am also. I am not destroyed because as deep as I have ever been taken, there Christ has found me.

            I might also say of the ignorant harmers, “They know not what they are doing. Father forgive them.”

            A gift and mystery of the last few years is that I have been empowered to believe that though Jesus, obviously, doesn’t have depression, he knows my depression on the level of intimate empathy. I never really could believe that before.

            I’m grateful for having been destroyed because in the ruin Christ walked me through my demons in a way that disempowered them. I’m grateful for the ruin even more because I found, there, Christ express his solidarity with the suffering. “This also is within my experience, and within my power to redeem,” he seemed to say. Ruination, then, can be antecedent and preparatory for a resurrection, for healing into impossible freedom. I somehow feel privileged to have lost everything including myself, in terrifying way – I’m glad that I lost everything because God somehow gave me back myself without the consuming shame. Though I do have spells of anxiety and shame still, I’m not dominated by them and I have long stretches of relative clarity and happiness.

            I needed something from my parents that I did not receive. I forgive them. I find in the end, that I’m better for having known the darkness and then having also been raised from it into health and freedom.

            Furthermore, I don’t actually assume that my life would have been any better had we been “mono-cultural,” had we stayed in Canada. I see that children who grow up without the pressures and griefs that I had – I see that these kids have securities that weren’t available to me, but I also see that so many of them are just as desperately broken as I am.  

            Further fortifying my soul, I see that all the people that I most respect are people who have been ruined themselves. The safest, most compassionate, most authentic people are those who have been broken, and then healed by the grace of God. So, I count myself among the privileged sufferers, and I feel that I do see myself more clearly than I ever could have, had I not suffered in this way. I feel that in a mysterious way, I carried a cross after Christ and participated in his death that I might also participate in his resurrection. This may sound pretentious, but I honestly think that this is the gift of the Christian life, to find yourself by losing yourself. It’s an ongoing process. I haven’t arrived – but an episode of the resurrection has occurred within me.

            All this to say, while I have known ruin, I am not myself a ruin, but a citadel of Christ, and have a confidence and assurance now that cannot be taken from me. I have everything because I have Christ. Perhaps my parents can celebrate that, in the end, I was where I needed to be – In an existential crucifixion, and also in the hands of God.