Healing for Damaged Emotions

1) Super You or Real You?

Let's see where this tragic loss begins and how it takes place. Somewhere in the process of growing up, the child receives messages about himself, about God, about other people, and about relationships. These messages can be taught or caught.

They can come through what is directly said or done, or what is not said and not done. Usually it is a combination of many factors. Slowly but surely and quite unconsciously to the youngster, the messages come through. The child who has received negative messages then knows; I am not accepted and loved as I am. I've tried every way to get this approval by being the way I am. Now I can only be accepted and loved if I become something else and someone else.

This youngster doesn't sit down and figure this all out. He doesn't know what is happening in his life -- that he is not receiving fulfillment of deep, God-given needs which are basic to the development of a human being. Some very necessary feelings never come across to him, feelings like security, acceptance, belonging and value. His need to be loved and to learn to give love are not met. Instead there develops a growing deep anxiety, and feeling of insecurity, unworthiness, and undesirableness and the youngster begins to climb the long, torturous trail of trying to become someone else.

2) Super You or Real You?

What are super you and real you? Super you is a false idealized image you think you have to be in order to be loved and accepted. Super you is an imaginary picture of yourself. Since you have been programmed to believe that no one will love you if he gets to know the real you, you strive to become super you to gain love and acceptance. This distortion extends even to God who is absolute perfection, who demands perfections, and to whom you must somehow present only your good side. You must let God see only super you, not real you. Let me ask you a very personal question. When you come into the presence of God in meditation or prayer, which of the two do you present to Him? I asked that once of a successful woman of God who had come seeking help for some emotional and spiritual problems, I said to her, in your dealings with God, when you go to Him in prayer, which self do you present to Him? What's the picture of yourself in your imagination, that you are bringing to God. I said, don't answer quickly. Take your time. We'll just sit, and you think about it.

Well, she was silent for an unusually long time. Then she said to me, you know, I've never really thought of it that way before. But I've got to be honest with you, I'm afraid that I always get into the presence of God with my best spiritual foot forward and my finest halo on. I would have to say in all honesty, and admit that when I imagine myself in the presence of God, I'm always super me. I don't think I have ever gone as real me, just as I am. Then she shook her head and said, and I've sung that song a thousand times, Just As I Am, but I have never lived it out when I come to God.

3) Super You and Feelings

It's in the area of feelings that the perfectionist has his biggest problems, because the image of super self is a person who never admits to experiencing certain kinds of feelings. Usually he has an unbiblical mental picture of Jesus as "gentle Jesus, meek and mild." This Jesus is sissified, passive, a stoic person whose emotions are never expressed. He's under the tightest emotional control and usually doesn't express emotions at all. However, there are no such things as bad feelings and good feelings. Feelings are just feelings. They are consequences of a whole range of things that come out of your personality. No emotions are in themselves. Sinful. What you do with them will determine whether they are wrong or right. How you handle them will determine whether they lead you to righteousness or to sinfulness. The emotions themselves are a very important part of your God-given personality equipment. One emotion, that super you generally considers bad is anger. In Mark 3:5, we read that Jesus looked around at them in anger. While this is the only place in the New Testament that actually says Jesus gets angry, I think we can safely presume that Jesus was angry when He whipped the money changers out of the temple and when He called certain people "blind fools", "whitewashed tombs", "murderers", "serpents", and "miserable frauds" (Matt. 23) Never was Jesus more divine then at those moments when He was expressing white-hot anger. Many times, perfect love and anger go hand in hand; indeed, the anger is the result of perfect love.

We Christians have a semantic trick that sounds good but confuses people. "Oh, that's not anger; it's righteous indignation." Why don't we just come out and say that there is a right use of anger and that anger in itself is not a sinful emotion! It would be a lot less confusing. What matters is your use of anger -- how you express it and how you resolve it. But when you have this unreal, false image of super you who must never experience or never express any feelings of anger, you become a perfect setup for emotional wreckage and depression. Don't confuse anger and resentment, for they are entirely different. Anger, controlled and properly expressed, is one thing; out-of-control anger, improperly expressed, is another.

The Apostle Paul made a plain distinction between the right kind of anger and resentment. He carefully contrasted anger with hate, malice, bitterness, and all the rest of it. Interestingly enough, his statement, "Be ye angry, and sin not" (Eph. 4:26), is in the imperative. Paul didn't say, a brief visit to a mission station is a shock for the perfectionist, because it doesn't take him long to realize that the missionaries after, have more problems in getting along with one another than with the unbelievers they are trying to minister to. We see this in our own churches. But still the perfectionistic myth persists: "This is what I ought to be." Does such an idea come from scripture? Not even two greats like Paul and Barnabas could work together; very wisely they parted company, and very wisely the early church laid hands on them both, blessed them both, and sent them in opposite directions. God used their humanness to establish two mission works instead of one. God also used their disagreement to help John Mark to mature and become the event wirter of the Gospel of Mark.

While you can not work with everybody, that doesn't mean you have the right to resent anyone. That doesn't mean you have a right to hate or be bitter (Rom. 10:18). Real you faces real differences, real conflicts, and loves and cares enough to confront persons in a spirit of love.

4) Super You and Happiness

Super you believes the myth: "I've always got to be super-happy." But are you always happy? Never depressed? Bubbling over with "praise the Lord"? Is there never a time of struggle? Is there never a time when the heavens seem brass? When you do things out of sheer duty, without happy feelings? In the Garden of Gethsemene, our Lord said to His disciples, "my soul is exceedingly troubled, even unto death." He was writing on the ground; He was sweating profusely and undergoing a terrific struggle between His emotions and His will. His emotions were saying," Father, you can do everything; take the cup away from me if it's possible." But His will was as fixed as the magnet to the North Pole, and His will kept saying, "not my will, but yours." And sometimes that same kind of struggle gives us an exceedingly troubled soul. The word happiness has its roots in the word happenings. Happiness depends on happenings, on what happens to us, externals that we can't control. Joy is the right word for what we Christians are to expect. For joy is an internal word which has to do with relationships, not circumstances,or happenings. Joy is the inner calm at the eye of the storm; feelings can be stormy, but there can also be an inner sense of rightness to the will of God. But this does not mean that we have to go about with super self masks on, with smiling lips, sparking teeth, and a "praise the Lord."

5) Real You, Realism

As a Christian, you can be a realist. This means you don't need to be afraid to face the worst, the ugliest and the most painful. You don't have to be afraid to express your feelings of grief, sorrow, hurt, loneliness, struggle, even depression. Sometimes you may even experience depressive feelings like Elijah had after his greatest moment of triumph! "Oh, Lord, it is enough, let me die." There is a rugged honesty about the life of Jesus - every kind of emotion was so clearly recorded and freely expressed, without any sense of shame or guilt or imperfection. Take your pattern from Jesus, not from some mythical super self. You need never be afraid to express your real feelings and be your real self in Jesus Christ. When you waste time and energy trying to be super self, you rob yourself of growth and the friendship of God and you will never let God accept and love the real you for whom Christ died.

This is the only you that God really knows and sees. Super you is an illusion of your imagination, a false image, an idol. I'm not sure that God even sees super you. You can be yourself in Jesus, and you need not compare yourself to anyone else. He wants to heal you and to change you in order that the real you can grow up to be the person He intended you to be. Super self dies very hard, and the religious self dies the hardest of all. If you find that you cling to it tenaciously, I hope you will hear the Holy Spirit saying, "Abandon it!" Give It Up! Then you and I can start the whole healing process of making a Real You."

God Bless!

Rev. Millie M. Colon