Book Reflection: How We Love (2)

To follow up on yesterday's post, my major take-away from How We Love is that my coping mechanism of choice is avoidance.

It took me a while to come to this conclusion. But the fact is, I do a lot of avoiding! It's especially marked when I'm in conflict with my mom. But I do it all the time, which is why I don't have open conflicts with most people. For instance, I can't remember ever having a fight with a friend. A disagreement, sure, maybe a lively discussion--but not a fight. If it starts to look like a fight, I shut up or back down. The conflict just isn't usually worth it to me--the cure feels worse than the disease.

When I do get stuck in a conflict, when the tension can't just be ignored, the urge to get away is overwhelming. I want to walk out of the room, out of the house, spend the night somewhere else, not ever have to think about resolving the conflict or seeing the person whose words or actions are making me feel this way. I want to leave and never come back.

In actuality, though, the most I do is leave the room. And the next morning, things never feel as bleak.

If my tendency to avoid is so strong, why was it hard for me to identify myself as an avoider? I initially thought maybe I was a pleaser (seeking comfort through the approval of others), because I do care so much about making O. happy / meeting his expectations; then I thought I was a vacillator, because one of the markers is feeling, "My partner doesn't want to be as close to me as I want to be to them," and also because the book said vacillators tend to have a hard time identifying their own type. I knew I wasn't a Controller/Victim.

I also figured I couldn't be an avoider. Why? Partly because of the dynamics of my relationship with O., and partly because the portrayal of the avoider in How We Love was so extreme.

The dynamics of my relationship with O.
I recognized immediately I'd had a pattern of avoidance with O. during our dating. I wanted to take the whole relationship slowly, being on my guard against getting too close too soon. I wanted to protect myself by maintaining a degree of distance--after all, we were just dating, I reasoned. Friendship and school come first, then a boyfriend, because boys come and go but friends stay, and responsibilities don't go away just because they're inconvenient. O. on the other hand tended to take a "she loves me, she loves me not" view of the situation, and I believe he felt panicky when I pushed for more autonomy. (Pretty sure he's a vacillator!)

Since we got married, though, I've often been the one feeling too much distance, demanding more of O.'s attention, and pushing for greater togetherness. During our honeymoon, for instance, I felt ignored when O. would stop talking to me or looking at me to look things up on his shiny new smartphone, as if he had disappeared into this black box, into which I wasn't invited. This particular problem was quickly fixed when O. and I discussed it and he promised to be more mindful. Nonetheless, it's a good example of the small things that easily leave me feeling ignored, wanting more time together, better time together, better togetherness. These are not the characteristic feelings of the avoider but of the vacillator.

So I figured I wasn't an avoider anymore. But what I eventually figured out is that I am still an avoider, it's just that I'm not as extreme about it as the book's examples, probably because I had a fairly secure attachment to my parents. I just had to observe myself more carefully and more candidly, and think harder about the key ideas behind the book's somewhat extreme presentation.

The book's extreme examples:
My greatest criticism of How We Love is that it didn't make any concrete mention of less extreme cases. An early chapter discussed what it looks like to have a secure attachment style, but then secure attachment was hardly mentioned in the rest of the book, almost implying that if you are securely attached, you'll never employ the unhealthy strategies that mold the relationships of those who are insecurely attached. How We Love is packed with anecdotes and case studies that paint clear and vivid pictures of what each "love style" quintessentially looks like, but fails to give examples of these negative patterns working in more subtle ways, or to explain whether the securely attached can also fall into these traps. A greater range of examples, or at least some commentary on what a less extreme manifestation of each imprint might look like, would really have helped clarify the ideas for me. Precision! It's key!

Conclusions
I did eventually recognize my own pattern, though, and now it seems obvious. I seriously doubt I would have realized how often I feel like escaping or hiding without reading this book and thinking hard about which love style I tend to fall into. Equally important, I probably wouldn't have realized that not everyone feels that desire to escape in the midst of conflict.

In sum, How We Love has already been helpful to me in seeing myself more clearly and thinking in a new way about my important relationships, especially about my marriage. The greatest insight for me was recognizing my avoidance, but there are some other good take-away points too, such as the following:

• Comfort is key--we're all seeking comfort (in our different ways) and the provision of real comfort is what changes the dynamic.
• Comfort comes from being heard and being held.
• The ability to identify your feelings, to name them and talk about them, doesn't come naturally. I'm blessed to have parents who taught me "soul words," asked me about my emotions, talked me through difficult feelings, etc. O. on the other hand is from a family which, though loyal and loving, does not so much discuss feelings as act them out. I can't expect him to be in the same place as me with listening, asking questions, naming his feelings, etc., when I've had years more practice. That's just setting both of us up for frustration.
• O. doesn't have to figure out for himself what to ask and how to listen; there are resources--like the lists of questions and of emotions in this book--that can make learning so much easier.

[Tuesday is Fireday in Japanese]

One unfortunate word, and a handful of ill-starred incidents; one frightened girl, and a hundred conversations that burst into flames when her eyes were closed. She doesn't dare blink anymore, and her eyes are drying out.

But eventually, she has to sleep, and when she does, she dreams.

She sees the wildfires through her eyelids. Before she even wakes up, she is running. Before the spark is even struck, she is running: all it takes is the tinderbox, the flint. The grass on the golden hills is dry. It rustles and cracks as she passes through. She sprints across the slope, staggers, sobs. The heat of the sun is strong on her skin. Summer is stuck here, caught in the long grass. The sun is a hole burnt through the hard blue sky.

She doesn't look back, the girl who keeps running and tumbling, squeezing her eyes shut. She doesn't want to see. She hears the roaring of the conflagration in her ears, though she's not sure: is it her blood pounding, her heart crackling? The merciless sky doesn't soften. She feels it glare down on her, and she won't meet its gaze. This is another reason she keeps her eyes closed, when she can.

Finally she falls. Scraped palms, scratched knees, lungs grabbing the air, she finally opens her eyes. Heat waves squiggle over the hills behind her, and a haze of cloud drifts there. She is too far away now to see if the cloud is smoke, if heat is streaming up from licking flames. She is too far away to tell if the fire she saw with her eyes closed ever burned through her skin to set the hills ablaze.

She blinks, and the flames kiss her again, and she vows never to sleep anymore, or at least not to dream. But you can only watch for so long. The spark will fly in her mind again soon, and she will wear her feet out running.

Star-Gazing [Rough poem]

[There is supposed to be some indentation in this poem, but I am not in the mood to struggle with html and blogger over it. Whatever.]

I need to go out and meet
the placid stares of the frozen stars.
But each time I step into the night,
the streetlamps glare at me.

I cast my eyes earthward, seek safety in shadows,
but there the flickers of fireflies
and the flashes of photographs
and the travelers' swinging lanterns
and the swooping headlights of cars
that zoom across the world (like ungraspable ghosts,
like angels on unknowable missions)

distract me

from those distant, distinct pinpricks,
from those burning worlds whose flames rage
unseen for millions of years before
I begin to distinguish their millenarian gaze.

You, Stars, not the streetlamps, hold
my destiny, my soul's seeds.
Yet the earthly lights shout in my ears
while the heavenly lights only whisper--Why
do the constellations of my own experience
glow so gently, when every other person's lights
dazzle my eyes, blinding me
to the Stars I seek?

Open my eyes, Starlight!

Sing to me, shine on me. Turn me inside-
out, and let your brilliance drown every false flicker.
Then I'll breathe

in

the truth of my existence: Let there be

Light.

Adventure v. Tranquility [Question from 1/4/10]

As a gateway into everything that's on my mind, Monday's question:

Which would you choose right now: adventure or tranquility? Which would you choose for the long run: adventure or tranquility?

In one sense I'm choosing tranquility right now, because I've consciously chosen a quiet January. For the next 20 days, I have no schedule. These 3 weeks will be fluid, and like any liquid I know they will slip through my fingers, uncontainable, passing by so quickly. They will pass by quietly too, I think. The apartment is nearly silent these days, because I am the only one here, as though I owned my own house. I haven't been locking my bedroom door, since I am the only one who even comes into the common room. No one else is using the bathroom, no one leaving dishes in the sink, no one cranking the heater up to 80 degrees, no one forgetting to lock the door into the apartment.

No one is making noise in the building, either. The first morning I was back, I was surprised to see footprints in the fresh snow by the back door to the building, because the whole place is so silent. The heater whirs and the wind sighs, but no human voices speak in the hallway, and no doors slam closed. The building is sleeping, and the warm air murmuring out of the heaters is its tranquil snoring, its steady breathing.

Yes, I am tranquil now, in this quiet building, with the pale sunlight pouring in the window, and the snow frozen in patterns on the ground outside.

But I haven't been tranquil for all of these recent days, and my apartment hasn't been empty this whole time, and I haven't been silent this whole week. On New Year's Eve, I was in St. Louis, at the Urbana conference, singing and shouting and dancing with 17,000 other Jesus-followers, and my ears were ringing. On the first day of the new year, I was on the clattering Metrolink, and on a roaring Delta plane, and on the whooshing Airtrain out of JFK, and on the rumbling LIRR to come back here. My sister was with me, to sing and chatter and cry and giggle and screech and guffaw. Urbana was an adventure. Traveling in the snow was an adventure. Sisterhood is an adventure.

So I've been choosing those adventures. And even more, I'm choosing the adventure of letting go. Emotions are spirited creatures, which shriek and soar and scatter more often than they curl up and sleep. I'm letting my emotions out to run, instead of trying to keep them in stalls in a static stable. I'm letting someone into my life, into the unswept and badly lit corners, into the rooms visitors never touch. He is asking about the cabinets whose contents I don't show people. I find myself unlocking doors, taking out boxes to show him old pictures, opening notebooks I wrote in as a child.

Opening, opening: I am opening my mind and my heart and my arms, and isn't that the essence of an adventure? When you are all out in the open, there is no telling what might fall in or out, what you might gain or lose. When I let my emotions go galloping through the fields, I don't know when or how they'll come back. But I am trying to learn how to ride them. I will risk the bruises and brokenness, so I can feel the wind sweep across my skin, see the sun paint the mountains. I will risk falling because I want to go places, and isn't that the meaning of adventure, too? Exploring new spaces, from which you might not find your way home.

And I want to choose adventure for the rest of my life, too. Tranquility appeals to me, enchants me. Tranquility entrances me into a sleep of self-absorption. Comfort promises peace. But real peace comes in the midst of storms. Real peace comes not from hiding indoors but from knowing the world God created. Instead of folding in on myself, I want to be unfolded, unfurled. I want to have a greater surface area--the better to absorb the light of life.

I'm afraid of that light, I confess. I want the security of staying still. I want to settle in a quiet neighborhood and live next door to my sister and to my best friends, and raise our children like one big bunch of cousins. I want to shut my eyes to the brokenness of the world and focus on packaging myself in cotton and bubble-wrap so nothing can shatter me. I'm afraid of being hurt, of dying.

But the real reason I don't want to die is that I want to live. Life comes from engagement, not isolation. So I want the adventure that pries me open, that tears away my delusions, that unwraps me. I want the adventure that tosses me into God's capable hands, where I've belonged this whole time.

That's what I heard at Urbana, I believe. God confronted me with the fact that my real objection to going into missions is not that I'm uncertain of His will (though I am) but that I'm too certain of my own will. The problem is that I dream this little dream, colored in pastels, of the perfect suburban life with the neat picket fence, when I could be--should be--am called to be--dreaming God's almighty dream of redemption for the whole world, in painted in bold brushstrokes across a canvas as wide as creation. The problem is that I keep seeking tranquility instead of adventure: the adventure of trust. I'm afraid to trust God.

I'm afraid to trust myself, too. I want an instruction manual for my life, step by step instructions on how to solve these equations, algebra in the spirit of the Gauss-Jordan method. I'm afraid to step out and trust that God wants me to explore, that He wants be to really become myself (since after all He made me who I am). In my effort to rely on Him, I sometimes try to make myself an automaton, but that's not what He wants. "I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full," Jesus said.

And isn't that the essence of adventure?

Crucified, Died, Buried, _____

Tonight was Intervarsity's last meeting of the semester, and we spent it in prayer and worship, which was definitely good. The leaders had good things to say about letting go of all the things that may come between us and God, and focusing on Him, and trusting Him. And of course, praising God always does my heart good. "How good and fitting it is to sing praises to God," we heard (Ps. 147). Amen.

But something later on confused and troubled me. The night was split into times B. titled "focus," "reflection," "worship" and "love." Focus and reflection were so on target. To start the worship section, B. read Phil. 2:9-11 and Isaiah 53: also good. But then B. launched into a graphic and painful description of the physical agony of the cross. The nails, the blood, the suffocation, the splints, the scourging. I began to feel sick.

I don't watch zombie movies or suspense movies, and I do not know if I will ever bring myself to watch "The Passion." There is a reason for this: I have a very low gore and distress tolerance. Granted, a 3 minute verbal description is nowhere near as intense as a 3 hour movie. But still, it's disturbing. And I was disturbed, partly on a gut level, that twisting sensation. But partly also because I felt bad that I was feeling sick hearing about the crucifixion, that I wanted to get up and leave, that I wanted him to stop talking about this, stop! This was the "real worship"? I had this interior debate--

"I don't want to hear about these details. I know them. It's not good to meditate on disturbing and wrong things."
"But what about the Good Friday service? That's all about the crucifixion."
"But... that's different."
"Is it?"
"I don't know! ...I don't want to hear this."

I didn't get up. I agonized in my seat and waited for B. to talk about the triumph at the end: that Christ suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried; but that on the third day he rose again! I waited for the good news.

But B. never got to that part. The entire "worship" section focused on the crucifixion with absolutely no mention of the resurrection.

Is it just me, or is that screwy somehow?

Moreover, B. only invited us to meditate on the physical suffering of Christ. But the physical suffering and death of the crucifixion were nothing special. Hundreds or maybe thousands of criminals experienced that torture. Christ's suffering is different because of its spiritual dimension: the devastation of being separated from the Father with Whom Christ had been in perfect union for all eternity.

And even more important, Christ's death matters because He was innocent. Unlike all the other people who experienced the nails, the whip, the blood, the cross, Christ did not deserve his punishment. He bore our punishment. "The chastisement for our peace fell on him. And by his stripes, we are healed." Our healing: that's the point of the cross. "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, [...] if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." The torment of cross was not good. But forgiveness and reconciliation to God certainly are! Think about these things--who Christ is, why He died, what His death accomplished.

Right?

Or am I just shrinking away from the pain of truly contemplating Christ's pain? Am I citing Phil. 4:8 just for my own ends, to block a difficult emotional encounter with God?

Or maybe it's both. I need to die to myself and be willing to experience emotional turmoil. I need to be willing to be in pain for the right reasons. But B. also should have placed the focus elsewhere. Most of all, B. shouldn't have left us at the cross, Christ's blood dripping on us as we stare in horror. He should have led us down from Calvary and taken us to the empty tomb, or to the closed room into which Jesus appeared, or to the road to Emmaeus--or back to Phil. 2:9-11. Christians are supposed to be a joyful people (not that we can't or shouldn't mourn, but that Jesus came "that your joy may be full") because we rejoice over God's triumph. God is the victor in any and every circumstance, and my mind should be fixed on Who God is, more than anything else.

What do you think about B.'s focus / message / section title? What would you say a Good Friday service is for?

Avoidance Strategy

I never want to deal with the cup of pain. When I've taken a sip and recognized the sour taste, I put it down on the table straightaway. (Its bottom clanks against the solid wood. The collision shakes the table, just enough.) Instead of thinking about the nuances of its flavor, the way it flowed through my mouth, in the crevices of teeth and tongue; instead of tasting its residue and pondering the places this brew must have come from, the barrel it was brewed in; instead of remembering the micronutrients this cup contains, remembering that it's good for me: instead of pursuing any of those paths of thought, I launch myself into demanding, to the empty room, who gave me this. Who poured me this cup? How did it get into my hands? Why is there pain in my kitchen in the first place? Where did the bottle (if it came from a bottle) even come from?

I should know at least how the cup came into my hand, but mostly I don't ever remember that much. As in a dream, I simply look down at my hand and find it there.

Having set the glass down, I am loathe to pick it up. If I leave it on the table long enough, all the liquid will evaporate. The cup will be empty. (Nevermind the stains and stickiness that will remain inside.) I should drink this, drain this cup, I know.

And so I sit at the table, pondering, in the vacant room, staring into the cup, trying to see my reflection in the pain inside.

Baking

In these moments when the fragile tangle of our love unravels, I retreat from your pain. I continue the patterns that began before we tore ourselves apart. You, you are crying in bed. My words of comfort run dry, and I run away, back to the kitchen where life follows a recipe. The ingredients are combined already, so I have only to stir, and stir. Butter and sugar and egg and flour, cocoa and vanilla and leavening, they combine into this sweet dough. It clings to the metal bowl and licks my fingers, leaving them greasy. The pressure of the fork forces dry and wet together. Dusty dry ingredients try to escape the mixture, but this is my mission, a task I can actually accomplish: I will leave nothing out, allow no imperfection. Stirring is simple, the same gestures over and over.

And you, meanwhile, are asking me questions I cannot answer, those questions that pivot on "should" and "why." I keep stirring. My fingers are only equipped to grasp spoon and fork, not to reknot these tangled threads. Besides, I can only see them when the sun shines just so. How can you ask me to tie things back together?

And you, you ask the dog if she wants to go out, you finish cooking the rice balls, you wash your dishes. Your silence: it is the wish that this web were not so fragile.

The oven finishes preheating, the balls of dough are arranged on the cookie sheets in orderly rows. I know the cookies will come out in perfect circles. The dough melts uniformly, and solidifies where it sank. The cranberries and pecans stand out like boulders in the sea. But cooking proceeds as prescribed, and no one can complain about these circles of sweetness, right? If I do the dishes now, maybe I at least will have played my role right. I wash everything. Watching the soap and sugar swirl down the sink, I wait for the kitchen to be restored to order.