How to Hug What We've Hidden

All healing, wholing, and humaning cycles through these three stages of growth: awareness, tenderness, and openness.

My family is gathered in the kitchen one morning as I enter and see a large Amazon package sitting on the table. I’d come and gone from the house several times the day before, each time seeing the package sitting on the front steps, and each time forgetting to bring it into the house. That’s unlike me.

“Wow,” I say, “I saw that package yesterday and forgot to bring it in. I must be really busy right now.”

A moment passes, before my wife offers her own interpretation.

“You’re not busy. You’re selfish. You knew you hadn’t ordered anything, so it wasn’t important to you.”

My wife—in my ego’s opinion—is sometimes too smart for her own good. We’ve been married twenty-two years, and her comment is classic kindling for some crackling conflict. In the next part of the script, I tell her how she doesn’t appreciate all the things I do for the family and then take my metaphorical ball and go home from the marriage for a little while.

This time, something different happens.

“You got me,” I say, with a sheepish smile. “It’s nice to be known.”

She plants a kiss on my cheek—a token of gratitude to me for owning it.

A week of conflict (based upon historical estimates) was transformed into some authentic connection, because of what happened inside of me in the moment between what I said and what my wife said.

Learn to Love What’s Within You

You’re not busy, I’d thought immediately after saying it, you’re selfish. You knew there wasn’t anything in it for you, so you didn’t really care about it.

This kind of self-awareness, as Anju Joy points out, is the easy part, because it often happens on its own. It’s what we do with the awareness that matters. In this case, my awareness was quickly followed by another thought-feeling-experience-ish kind of thing that, if translated into words, would manifest as something like this:

I see my selfishness, and I love even my selfishness. My selfishness looks a lot like a ten-year-old boy who is, in some ways, trying to raise himself. I feel a great affection for him—his fear and confusion and desperation and self-centeredness. I wish I could give him a hug. Oh, I sort of can. Right now. With this tenderness.

Tenderness may be the highest expression of love: it does nothing to change the object of its love—it merely softens to it. And you no longer have to lie about the things which you’ve learned to love within you. Rather, you can be open about them.

All healing, wholing, and humaning cycles through these three stages of growth: awareness, tenderness, and openness.

Awareness, Tenderness, and Openness

Carl Jung writes:

“By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions…If you get rid of qualities you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.”

The problem, of course, is that when something from our shadow enters our awareness, it does feel like a bit of a devil at first. After all, we pushed it into our shadow for a reason: we didn’t like it.

So our first reaction is often either to push it back into our shadow or to plump it up further with hate and harshness, self-rejection and self-criticism. The only way to truly transform it into something you can keep in awareness is to try some tenderness toward it. To learn to love it a little.

To hug this thing you’ve hidden even from yourself.

The Book in the Box

When my wife opened the box, a book I’d pre-ordered two months earlier by one of my favorite authors—Anne Lamott—was in it.

That tested the tenderness.

See, a voice in my head said, selfishness never pays off. You need to eliminate that part of you.

This time, though, I was able to see that voice as the selfish voice itself. It was saying, “If you quit acting selfish, you’ll get good things,” which is actually selfishness in clever disguise. So I softened to it once more, and with that softening came an old awareness—a passage of Scripture—made new once again:

God sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.

The book in the box was rain for the unjust, because even as we are working our way toward becoming more just creatures—one moment of awareness, tenderness, and openness at a time—we are loved and cared for by That which is in everything and around everything, at the center of everything and beyond everything.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But when I opened to the first page of the Anne Lamott book and saw this poem by Rumi, it felt less like a wishful thinking and more like a wise guess…

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

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I wrote a novel about this process of awareness, tenderness, and openness, which award-winning author Cheryl Grey Bostrom says “hits the bull's-eye of psychological and spiritual relevance.” Fiction can be more than just fun, it can also be formational. As long as you have room in your beach bag for some tissues, get your copy of The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell now and add it to your summer stack. Or it’s currently free with an Audible subscription!

How do these concepts of awareness, tenderness, and openness speak to you? Which one are you most “succeeding” at? Which one are you most struggling with? I’d love to connect with you in the comments, and you can spread the tenderness by Liking or Restacking this post. Just tap one or more of those three buttons below.