The Broken Handmaid

Mosiah 3:19 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be forever and ever.  

Period.  For some reason the rest of the scripture didn’t seem to matter much.  The enemy must be annihilated, obliterated, and completely destroyed.  Right?  Isn’t that what you do with enemies?  The enemy of God must be completely and utterly defeated.  That was what I believed until my life came apart.  Now I see that there is a comma at the end of that phrase “forever and ever.”  There is a comma, and the words after it contradict my original interpretation.

In counseling, college classes, and personal reading, I’ve learned that very smart people have theorized about the natural man in social science.  There is the theory of the Id, the ego, and the superego that Sigmund Freud used to explain the conflict between conscious and subconscious impulses.  If I think of the natural man as split into these three parts, a lot of things make sense.  The id is the base instinct of man.  Think Tarzan.  No civilization, no manners, no concept of anything other than the drive for food and maybe for sex.  When I first learned the theory, I thought the Id was the natural man.  He is only a part.  He’s a rather pathetic character wholly ill equipped to survive in a social system.  Much more problematic is the superego.

The superego at first glance seems to be a much better character than his Id brother.  He wants to achieve.  The superego doesn’t want to sleep, eat, or do anything that might interrupt his drive for excellence.  To the superego, second place is the first loser.  To the superego, the drive for power is paramount.  The superego isn’t content with a hot fudge sundae, he wants to own the shop.  He doesn’t have time or patience for the Id who is an embarrassment to him.

The ego, much maligned in colloquial terms, is a more likeable character than his counterparts.  He is the pragmatist.  He is the one who tells the superego to chill out when he insists that he can run five miles in the morning, work all day, take classes in the evening, and then stay up all night studying.  The ego tells the Id that eating that second box of Oreos is a bad idea.  The ego has a tough job; somewhat like the exhausted mom wrangling two brothers determined to fight.  (Yes, I speak from experience here.)

Most of the child rearing in a society is consumed with subverting the Id.  The job of a caregiver is to provide the child with a superego and later with an ego.  Sometimes, as was the case in my childhood, the superego was encouraged and enlarged and the Id was shamed and banished.  The ego I formed was somewhat like a parent who shows blatant favoritism toward one of her children over the others.  The superego was the favorite and the Id was the red-headed stepchild.

So what is wrong with that situation?  Why shouldn’t a parent want their child to achieve?  Why shouldn’t that drive for perfection be encouraged?  Doesn’t that drive lead to success and happiness?  I think the facts speak for themselves when it comes to my life.    

An unrestrained superego leads to resentment, stress, and chronic health problems.  If someone has an unrestrained Id, society will step in.  Schools, jails, and social punishment will likely correct such a problem.  What about an unrestrained superego?  You will be hard pressed to find a teacher who criticises a student for trying too hard, caring too much, or being too conscientious.  Unfortunately, an unrestrained superego leads to misery with no apparent cause.  A superego driven person can achieve incredible things, have a beautiful life with everything anyone could ask for, and it will never be enough.  There will always be someone with more or some greater achievement to reach.  The unrestrained superego is never satisfied and endlessly full of entitlement.  When failure comes, as it always does, the superego cannot process it.  The rage of an out of control superego is incandescent.  He will take out his rage on whomever he deems responsible for the failure.  If he can find no one, or it is considered unacceptable to blame another, the ego and the id will take the blunt of his fury.

“I could have won the state championship if it hadn’t been for that idiot on my team who missed the final shot!”  “I could have gotten an A in that class if I had stayed up every night all night like I wanted to!  Why am I so lazy?”  “I could have been the CEO of this company if I had just tried harder!  What the heck is wrong with me?”  These are all the rantings of the bloated superego, convinced of his own omniscience and consumed with the belief that all things are within his personal control.

There are two problems with the super ego and the reasons why I believe him to be the more problematic part of the natural man rather than the humble and much abused Id.  First, the super ego has a warped sense of what perfection is.  Second, the super ego doesn’t want or think he needs a Savior.

First, the super ego has a warped sense of what perfection is that is based mostly on the  values adopted in childhood in the family of origin.  If his parents praised and idolized a pop star, the super ego will value pop music.  Even if the child is a genius at the piano, the superego may forever wish he had a different set of talents that had enabled him to sing with weird hair and strobe lights in front of a crowd of stoned fans.  If a child is raised in a family that shames nerds who love science and school, he may refuse to develop his intellectual gifts thanks to a warped superego who believes such gifts are worthless.  The superego believes that his perception of perfection is reality, but it isn’t.  It is the vain ambition of man, blind and doomed to fall into the ditch.  Rather than reflect on the values instilled in him in childhood, rather than question the validity of his own assumptions and perception, the super ego steams ahead into the folly of his own immature and unrealistic expectations into the failure he so desperately wants to avoid.

Second, the super ego has no need for or desire to have a Savior.  He cringes at the thought of God’s first born son.  Why wasn’t he the favored one?  He wants to prove that he can achieve just as well as that humble son of God who gave his life for us.  “It isn’t so hard to live a sinless life!” he reasons.  When he does sin, as he inevitably will, he can justify his behavior and insist that next time, he won’t fail.  And he does fail.  Again.  Whether or not he will humble himself depends on how robust his super ego is.  How adept is he at rationalization, at blaming others, at shaming the other parts of himself?  How resistant is he to self reflection?  How long before he realizes that he isn’t in control?  That he doesn’t have all the answers?  That he needs help?

That is when I finally come to the other half of the natural man scripture.  …unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

It isn’t the Id, the Ego, or the Superego that saves us.  They are the warring parts within us that need to learn to love one another and live in peace.  The superego needs to see the Id as worthy of love and compassion.  The Id needs to let go of the resentment he has stored up.  The ego, the most mature and sensible of the trio, must make the choice to learn, reflect, humble himself, and adopt a more realistic view of himself and the measure of his creation.  He must entice, not force the compliance of his other parts.  He must allow the spirit to enlighten the mind and enlarge the experience.  Only then can the natural man become a friend to God.

So what can I take away from this?  As a parent?  As someone who is learning to love herself?  As a person who wants to become more like the Savior?  As a parent, I can see my sons as having three parts to their natural men.  The key to effective parenting isn’t to drive my children to achievement, but to help those boys create harmony and cooperation between their three parts.  I will model self reflection and personal growth and change.  I can confess my sins before my children and share my gratitude for a Savior who shows me a better way.  When my superego screams at me that, “When there’s no pain, there’s no gain,” I can pat him on the head and eat an Oreo.  I can also recognize that I have ego needs.  Sometimes I need to post that humble brag on Facebook.  Sometimes I need to celebrate my achievements and give myself a pat on the back for the extra effort I made.  In the end, if I am going to be saved, it will be all of me.  All three parts.

“Maybe there shouldn’t be forgiveness!!” he shouted at me with righteous indignation that only a teenager can pull off without seeming over the top.  I had to stop and think about that.  All my life I was taught to forgive.  Even before processing the sins of others and their full impact on me, I was supposed to forgive them.  Maybe my son was on to something.

We had been talking about the shooting in Atlanta of six women at spas and massage parlors.  They were all women of Asian ethnicity.  The intersection of race and sex and gun violence had obsessed the collective psyche of our society in ways not seen since the Donald Trump was banned from social media.  My oldest son took the tragedy especially hard.  When he’s not at school, he’s watching anime shows on his phone.  He won’t watch them with English translations.  He insists on listening to the original Japanese voice actors because he thinks they are better.  He doesn’t understand Japanese, so he has to read the English subtitles; impressive since he has dyslexia and that means significant extra effort on his part.  One of his best friends at school is Vietnamese.  We watches a lot of “woke” Tic Tok videos, that are heavy on societal judgement. He was angry at the world and had no patience for nuance.

We were a racist country and we always had been and nothing had changed.  Looking back I think I was a little scared of his intensity.  I tried to inject some calming dialogue into his raging tirade.  “Things have gotten better,” I insisted.  “We still have a long way to go, but it isn’t as bad as it once was.”  I told him the stories my dad had told me about how it was after World War II and how people loathed the “Japs.”  He gleefully leaped from the topic of World War II to the containment camps calling them “concentration camps.”  I continued my futile efforts to quell my son’s righteous rage against the nation he was born into as he trashed the police officer/spokesperson who minimized the attacks by saying the perpetrator “had a bad day.” 

I had mixed feelings toward that officer.  He was the target of a torrent of social media driven societal judgement and fury that I felt was disproportionate to his crime.  He had been insensitive.  He had posted a racist Facebook post about the coronavirus and China.  He was wrong and he used some bad judgement. His decisions were harmful and hurtful to the victims and the nation. I disagreed with the idea that somehow this man should become a pariah for all time as a deterrent to racists.  That was where I unwisely decided to plant my flag. 

I told my son that when we shame people for making stupid choices like that officer did, that we create a backlash.  Millions of people have posted racist crap on social media.  Millions of people have said racially insensitive things.  Does that say something about our culture?  Yes.  Do we need to be better?  Yes.  Do we need to make it clear to that officer that he needs to do some introspection?  Yes.  Does it help to create a martyr out of a police officer that many people know and love and can relate to by publicly shaming him and disregarding anything good he has ever done in his life?  No.  My son wasn’t having it.  That was when he unloaded on me.

I was just as bad as everyone else.  Would I be defending that shooter if he wasn’t white?  (Incidentally I did not defend the shooter, nor will I ever defend such acts.)   Why was I so quick to jump to my forgiveness line?  Why did I feel compelled to defend racist behavior?  That was when he said the statement that has echoed in my mind ever since.  “Maybe there shouldn’t be forgiveness.”

I’ve pondered on that sentence for a while. Maybe there shouldn’t be forgiveness. Yesterday I got a text from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that suggested that a good thing to do before Easter is to forgive someone. I’ve pondered on my own tortured relationship with the concept of forgiveness. The way some devout members talk about forgiveness is seems like they are mistaking it with Easter candy, something we can pass out to everyone without thought or concern. It’s like in their world lives are never shattered, abuse is never a problem, and we are all carrying around petty grievances that we can choose to set aside and everything will be roses again. Maybe some people live like that. My perspective is different.

The first time I chose not to forgive someone was in fourth grade. I had been in a tortured and toxic relationship with another girl for two years. She was bad for me on so many levels. She was spiteful and vindictive and treated me like dirt. Once we were playing a game of pickup sticks and she insisted that I had moved a stick when I hadn’t. Usually I would just let her have her way, but this time, I held my ground. The game ended in a rage and I knew that she would be expecting my groveling apology so we could make up. She might take a week or so to punish me before she accepted. That was our usual pattern. This time I was mad. I was tired of her games. I didn’t apologize. Weeks went by and I stood by myself on the playground fighting the urge to go and fix our broken relationship. When eventually she came to me to make things right I told her I didn’t want to be friends anymore.

Of course, I was living in a small town. She ended up in my ward when my family moved and we had to be friends since all of our friends were mutual. Still, she never got to treat me like dirt again. I refused to forgive. Sometimes I think its worth resisting that urge to make everything pretty again. Its so hard to do though. Like a whitened sepulchre, its compelling to continue making the outside of a rotten relationship look good. You can’t change the smell though. Time only makes it worse. Sometimes you just need to move on.

“Move on.” If I had a dime for every time I had told myself to do that I would be a wealthy woman. What makes moving on so hard to do is that you’ve invested so much time and effort into the relationship that you don’t have anything else. Toxic relationships suck everything into them like a black hole. I didn’t have any other friends in fourth grade. I spent recess alone. There was that girl or there was nothing for me. I chose nothing. If I had it to do again I would chose nothing again. I’ve chose nothing again and again rather than have the comfort of dysfunction.

“Maybe there shouldn’t be forgiveness!!” My son’s rage at me the other day revealed what both of us know.  I want to jump to forgiveness with racial injustice. I want to make things pretty.  I want to think that we as a society are making progress on race.  I want to give grace and I want others to give grace.  I want everyone to get along and sing together in the songs of brotherhood and sisterhood.  The fact is, sometimes there shouldn’t be forgiveness.  Sometimes we have to sit in the uncomfortable mess that we have created in this world and feel the pain of it. 

There needs to be individual accountability, and society is pretty united on that.  If some POS goes out with a rifle and shoots a bunch of women, he should go to prison for the rest of his life.  If some officer says some stupid sh*t that makes a painful societal wound hurt even more, he needs to be reprimanded and never made a spokesperson for the department again.  Society understands that people need to be held accountable for their sins.  But what about collective accountability?  That’s where things get hairy.

What about the person who sold the guy the weapon he used to commit the shooting?  What about the friend that noticed he was becoming unstable? (Assuming someone knew.)  What about the attitudes within the police department that made that officer feel like it would be okay to minimize the horrific crime against a marginalized population?  What about the creator of the meme that the officer posted that made fun of the coronavirus and its origins in China?  What about the former President of the United States who regularly stokes the flames of Asian American racism?  What about the people who voted for him or ignored him or even agreed with him as he spouted his hatred and mockery?  What about systemic racism?  What about societal sins?  

Individual sins are relatively easy.  A person breaks the law.  He runs a stop sign.  The law is enforced by the traffic cop who issues a ticket.  The perpetrator is punished by having to pay a fine or take a class.  They are forced to confess and forsake their crime by the society before they are able to drive again.  If they continue to engage in unsafe driving, their license is suspended.  Nothing controversial about this process.  Systemic problems are much more thorny and controversial. Sometimes healing and forgiveness can’t happen because wounds keep getting ripped open. Collective sin spreads like a pandemic.

Systemic problems run in families. Families can become dysfunctional in a heartbeat. Old unhealthy patterns and coping strategies get passed on and it seems like there is no way to change. Taking mental illness seriously and getting treatment is hard especially when families don’t want to change. Being a cycle breaker takes work and leadership. There’s not a lot of companionship when you’re blazing a trail. That’s okay. I’m with you.

There is a difference between forgiveness and healing. Sometimes moving on isn’t going to be comfortable and sometimes you have to end or drastically change relationships to do it. Moving on can be painful and lonely. Healing might seem like an etherical dream that comes to other people. It can happen. Forgiveness is harder. I’m not there yet, but I see the finish line. Someday I’ll savor that sweet draft of forgiveness. For now, I’ll sweat it out and keep moving on.

Sunday again.  I didn’t dread it quite so much this week.  Ben and I agreed that we would go on a bike ride this afternoon.  That will give me something to think about when my soul gets sucked into the grief.  I woke up to primary music.  That is the hardest music for me.  So simple, so direct, so unlike the feelings and thoughts inside me. My endless mental pacing is exhausting, and on Sunday it ramps up. I’m desperate to fix it; to make me whole again.

The truth will be paid for with confusion and suffering; searching and withholding judgement; patient waiting on the Lord until I am prepared to receive his truth. Patience.  Long-suffering.  Charity.  Hope.  Faith.  I have to hold to those things.  Tears came to my eyes again as I watched my boys leave the house with Ben dressed for church.  I put on my make up and my dress today. 

I started a drawing I had been planning for a few weeks.  It’s a picture of two dried roses.  I wanted to paint it in water colors, but I decided to just do a sketch first.  I used my new light board to do the preliminary sketch.  It was helpful, especially with roses since they are so complex.  They make my artist brain hurt.

I thought about Eve and her decision to take the fruit.  She did it because she wanted to have children.  She knew what she had to do and that it would have consequences.  She knew she would suffer.  She knew it would be hard.  She also knew there was no other way. As I drove to the church to pick up my sons, I wanted to turn around. I didn’t want to drive through the parking lot and remember who I used to be. But there was no other way.

They were beautiful playing in the sunshine under the battered and bare trees.  I smiled and asked them how church was as they loaded into the minivan.  They said Daddy spoke and that he was sad.  I had forgotten it was fast Sunday.  I thought of my tears and his.  It’s so sad.  I wondered again, as I have a thousand times if I should start going again.  Then the words of the Savior came.  “If ye are not one, ye are not mine.”  

We are not one.  We are not his.  I am not one.  I am not His.  Trying to make sense of the schisms that exist right now in my nation and my church I feel a tearing inside.  Somehow I have to keep my integrity in the midst of unprecedented pressure.  To hold grief and gratitude in equal measure.  I bury my weapons of social media war deep within the Earth.  The battles of men don’t work the will of God.  Nothing I can do will fix the broken outside myself.

God gave me responsibility for one person and that’s me.  So I walk my path and submit to his will.  I don’t know his design, but I know He hasn’t forgotten me.  We walk together and he will give me what I need.  My grief is balanced with my gratitude.  In equal measure. The church isn’t a safe place for me. Maybe it never was. Maybe there is no safe place for me in this world. Still, my Savior gives me what I need. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

I have my children and my husband. I have my home and my art. I have so many blessings. Gratitude. Grief. In equal measure.

The other day I was reading about whole object relations.  Mentally and emotionally healthy people are able to see others as they are and resist the urge to either idealize them or demonize them.  That has been a skill that I continue to struggle with.  Black and white thinking was all I knew for half of my life and too often it is encouraged within church society.  Some people are socially savvy enough to pick up whole object relations, but many like me, have to learn it the hard way.

Donald Trump has been a particularly polarizing figure in part because people want to simply paint him as black or white.  He is the savior of democracy and America or he is the devil sent to destroy it.  The truth is naturally more complex.  Donald Trump, in my mind, is a seriously flawed individual with a fragile self-esteem who didn’t have the skills to lead and couldn’t cope with that reality.  The fact of his defeat in the election was simply something his mind could not deal with.    His inability to accept and acknowledge defeat was obvious to those who understand his psychology.  They predicted this outcome.  His former lawyer and fixer Micheal Cohen warned us in his congressional testimony.  His niece Mary Trump also warned that the transition of power would not go well.  They were right.

His psychology is fairly straight forward.  The national psychology is more difficult to understand.  Why did so many identify in a personal way with the former President?  Why did they project virtues on him that he clearly didn’t possess? Why do they vehemently protect him from any consequences he has earned including poor press coverage during his term and the impeachments that resulted from his irresponsible and dangerous behavior.  Why?  I assume that the lies they tell themselves about Donald Trump are similar to the lies they tell themselves about who they are.  The hardest lies we face are the ones we tell ourselves.

This world is inhabited by imperfect broken people.  We hurt one another and ourselves.  At best, we have social structures that encourage and reward pro-social behaviors and punish anti-social ones.  These structures are never perfect, but as they erode, we find that we miss them.  At worst, those structures fail us and complete chaos and brutality prevail.  I fear our once great nation is dissolving.  It started slowly, but it is accelerating.  Like the pandemic that rages across the land, the chaos, cynicism, and hopelessness are spreading exponentially.  We lack the mental resources to cope.  

As I posted on Facebook, I made the decision to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  For now.  I feel like God is calling my spirit to wander for a while.  I need to embrace the fact that I am a pilgrim in a strange land and my heart yearns for a homeland that doesn’t exist on this planet.  I keep going back to the same church and hoping my experience will be different, but sometimes the answer lies outside the box we place ourselves in. God is everywhere. He is in the stream and the mountains. He is in the wind. He can find me in my closet and sit beside me as I comfort a friend. He doesn’t live in buildings built with hands.

It has been tempting to see the church as evil; a deceptive organization that has hurt my recovery and shattered my illusions about God.  There are times I feel that way.  But when I try to conceptualize the church with whole object relations, a much more complex image immerges.  

My depression accelerated when I was newly married and starting a demanding Elementary Education program, I was unable to afford treatment.  My mom gave me some pills through my gynecologist at home so that I could manage my suicidal ideation.  I tried to get counselling, but the student counseling center hours conflicted with my schedule as a student teacher.  As I explained my plight to my bishop, he said, “I will be your counsellor.”  We visited weekly.  Looking back, it was a miracle that he was able to help me as much as he did.  The Lord provided support for me when I desperately needed it.  And he did it with a bishop who had little to no training in mental health.

After I graduated and I was able to go to counseling, I went to an LDS family therapist.  He became like a second father to me.  He helped me in ways I don’t think anyone else could have.  When I needed to change counselors to someone closer to home, there were no LDS therapists nearby. Even though my new counselor was not LDS, my bishop still paid for my sessions when we ran out of money to pay for them.  He made an effort to understand and I appreciate that.  The church invested in my mental health and I will never forget that.  If I can ever give back to the leadership or the members of the church, I will gladly do it.

On the other hand, I’ve seen in the members and some leaders an irrational and impenetrable resistance to the reality of mental health and what they don’t know.  As the Savior said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  They hurt people like me.  They think they are helping.  They want to help, but they refuse to see.  I pray that God will open their eyes that they might be better ministers to the increasing number of suffering people.

The prophet and his apostles are trying to help us.  They have provided the resources in handbooks, websites, youtube videos and manuals.  Unfortunately, there are political and social trends more powerful than church leadership that have alienated members from the truths that could set us free from mental and emotional ignorance and the catastrophic consequences.  There are none so blind as they who will not see.

As I look back to my pioneer ancestors for inspiration I see that they chose to build, not to tear down.  They chose to serve, not to demand entitlements.  They chose to get better, not to get bitter.  That’s the path I want to take.  I hope that someday the church is a safe and healthy place for me to be.  Until then, I will go where He wants me to go.  I will serve where he wants me to serve.  I will be what he wants me to be.  I will give judgement to the Lord who sees with perfect whole object relations.  He is ever merciful to me as I plead for His forgiveness.  Can I fail to give it?  No.  I will forgive to seventy times seven as my Lord has instructed.  His grace is enough for me and for thee.