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.
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.
Hmm, I don't know exactly how I want to respond. In keeping with the "welcoming" of first thoughts I'll say the house analogy didn't sit well in my mind.
Two other house analogies hold a stronger value to me. In Joshua 24 is a classic phrase, ".. as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord..." Then there is a video produced for kids back when I was a kid in seminary called "The Body is a.Temple" which depicts a home where inviting different types of people has different effects on the environment in the home. Even though the video is about keeping the body and mind "clean" I cannot help but relate its contrast to the poem by Rumi.
I guess my trouble is figuring out what it means to invite the shadows and to be accepting of them. I understand acknowledging weakness, but my religious background is also all about repenting of weakness.
I looked up the Hebrew explanation of repent (teshuva) and the explanation I found was it is more of a return. Essentially turning all actions, thoughts and beliefs back toward God. Less of a modern remorse and pain context and more of a decision to do better.
So, as I continue to ponder, maybe I'll find a way to accept that I have "shady" elements and turn from dwelling on those shadows to face the light? Maybe as I look to be in the light I'll see the shadows shrink. In science we know that when your shadow is gone it's because you are directly under the light. The shadow never really "leaves" its just under your feet until the angle of the light changes. (Now I'm thinking of Peter Pan trying to reattach his shadow)
Still, I'm not sure where to go in my thinking. I will have to do more.
This is a perfect illustration of something Terry Real talks about in training therapists to work with couples, and also in his books aimed at couples trying to work on their marriages. The softening, the tenderness, the aiming to react without defensiveness. You’ve beautifully transformed a moment that could have gone to hardness into something revelatory. I love this so much. And also synchronicity, since you quote Jung, of then finding that pre-ordered book inside the package! :) The Rumi poem is perfect too.