The Lies We Believe

by Dr. Chris Thurman

  Growthwork

  I have devised an Entitlement Quiz for you to take (it is a nonscientific quiz, meaning I came up with it just a few minutes ago and haven’t done anything to verify that it measures what it is supposed to measure). For each of the fifteen statements, mark a number from 1 to 7, which gauges your personal feelings about the statement. Answer as honestly as you can, not how you think you should answer. Avoid using 4 as your answer if at all possible.

  Entitlement Quiz

  Please respond to the statements using the following scale:

  _____ 1. I deserve respect from others.

  _____ 2. I demand good service in a restaurant.

  _____ 3. My closest friends owe me loyalty.

  _____ 4. I expect fairness from others.

  _____ 5. I’m owed a good-paying job given my education/abilities.

  _____ 6. People should treat me the way I treat them.

  _____ 7. When I do something nice for someone, I find that I secretly expect him to do something nice for me.

  _____ 8. I deserve a “thank you” when I hold a door open for someone or let someone ahead of me in traffic.

  _____ 9. People should listen to what I have to say.

  _____ 10. I often feel “owed” for things I have done.

  _____ 11. Other people have told me I demand too much.

  _____ 12. All in all, I deserve a good life.

  _____ 13. I am entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  _____ 14. I find myself getting angry inside when others don’t do things for me they should.

  _____ 15. My children owe me cooperation and obedience for all the sacrifices I have made for them.

  Add up all of your answers to get a grand total. If you scored from 15 to 44, you are low in entitlement thinking. This means you don’t tend to feel entitled to or owed things from people or life, and as such, you probably don’t tend to feel bitter or resentful when what you want doesn’t come through. If you scored from 45 to 74, you are moderate in entitlement thinking. This means you have a tendency to feel owed or entitled to things and probably carry around a fair amount of bitterness and resentment when things don’t go your way. If you scored from 75 to 105, you are high in entitlement thinking. This means you frequently feel owed certain things from people and life and are probably carrying around a great deal of bitterness and resentment in your soul. It means you need help.

  In your journal, I want you to take what you think you are entitled to and make an entry acknowledging that you are not entitled to it but that it is fine to want it. Let me show you what I mean:

  “I am not entitled to my spouse’s love, but it is fine to want it.”

  “I am not entitled to a good-paying job, but it is fine to want one.”

  “I am not entitled to physical health, but it is okay to want it.”

  “I am not owed appreciation when I do something nice for someone, but it is fine to want it.”

  “I am not entitled to obedient kids, but it is okay to want them to be obedient.”

  “I am not entitled to being happy, but it is fine to want to be happy.”

  McDonald’s was wrong—you don’t deserve a break today. You don’t deserve a break the rest of your life. But I hope you want a break and take one when you need one. Knowing the difference is critically important in achieving emotional and spiritual health.

  16

  EMOTIONAL PAIN IS GOOD

  One often learns more from ten days of agony than

  from ten years of contentment.

  —Merle Shain

  Back in Chapter 12 we spent time looking at the value of facing our problems directly, whether they involve difficult relationships, finances, or self-destructive habits. We learned that it was getting involved in the struggle—making the effort—that really counted, not the reward.

  Now that you’ve had time to let that become part of your new way of thinking, I want to take that line of thought to another level. I want to try to convince you that emotional pain is good.

  No one wants to be in emotional pain, and we often bemoan the times we are. We sometimes bitterly complain when we feel depressed or anxious or angry or guilty about something. Rarely, if ever, do we see the beneficial side of emotional pain. Most of us seem certain there isn’t a “good” side to it. But I want to try to convince you that emotional pain serves a very important function in our lives. To get you to agree with me, I want to take you into my home.

  We have smoke detectors installed in several places throughout our house. I don’t know all the ins and outs of how they actually detect smoke; I just know that they do. If a fire started in our home while we were asleep, the smoke detectors would sense it and would sound an alarm to let us know. By hearing the alarm, we would have a chance either to put out the fire or get out of the house. Without the smoke detectors, a fire could start undetected in our home while we were sleeping and spread so that by the time we were aware of it, it would be too late for us to get out of our home alive.

  Now, I very seriously doubt that anyone in his right mind would wake up to the sound of a smoke detector going off at 2:00 A.M. and say, “Dang that smoke alarm. I wish it hadn’t gone off!” No, that would be the height of stupidity. Instead, we would be saying, “Thank the Lord for that smoke alarm. We saved ourselves and the house because it went off!” Although we wouldn’t be happy about the fact that our house was on fire, we would be delighted that the smoke alarm let us know.

  The Soul’s “Smoke Alarm”

  We humans have a similar alarm system wired into our souls. When the soul has a psychological/spiritual problem, the “smoke detector” goes off in the form of painful emotions such as guilt, hurt, anger, depression, and anxiety. In a very real sense, our painful emotions are warning signals—alarms!—telling us that something is not right inside us. They seek to warn us that something needs attention. If the underlying psychological/spiritual “fire” causing the emotions to “sound off” is not attended to, the soul incurs more serious damage. Sometimes, our souls become damaged to the point that we lose who we are.

  As such, emotional pain is good. It is the warning signal we need to become aware we have an internal problem and to make us motivated to face it now so that it won’t develop into a more serious problem later.

  Unfortunately, too many of us hear our emotional smoke alarms go off and ignore them. We may feel depressed for days, months, even years, and yet ignore it and act as if everything is fine. We may explode with rage at the smallest frustration, yet ignore it, even though we know it’s a warning signal that all is not well. We may feel chronically anxious, yet act as if it means nothing. The whole time our emotions are trying to tell us something, we may refuse to heed them. Many of us suffer much more damage to our souls than was necessary if we had just listened more attentively to what our emotions were saying.

  Sometimes we don’t just ignore our emotional pain; we make it go away through self-medication. Sometimes we react to being in emotional pain by doing things that create immediate pleasure, so we won’t feel our pain. For example, take a person who is anxious. Instead of looking at the personal issue that is causing him to feel anxious, he may choose to drink alcohol, overeat, or use drugs to make the pain go away. The truth of the matter is that turning to these pleasurable substances “works”: we feel better immediately, but we haven’t really dealt with what was making us anxious in the first place. Ultimately, we may end up with two serious problems—the original one that was causing us to be anxious and an addiction to something.

  Back to our analogy, seeking immediate relief from emotional pain via instant gratification/self-medication is like going up to the smoke detector in your home after it has gone off and clipping the wires. Then there is no noise to hear. I wonder if the function of addictions isn’t just that—a way to make sure we don’t feel our pain. But again, avoiding pain this way makes our pain ten times worse down the road when the addiction overtakes and cannibalizes
our lives.

  I find it rather amazing that an inanimate object such as an automobile can sometimes appear to have more common sense than a human being. If you purchase a brand-new car, it will have several computerized check systems built into it. If your car’s oil level gets too low, a red warning light will flash on the dashboard. The same happens when the antifreeze, gasoline, and brake and transmission fluids get low. The car senses a problem approaching, so it sends a warning signal for something to be done. If the warning is heeded, the car’s life is extended many extra miles. If not heeded, the car breaks down prematurely.

  Emotional pain functions in a similar way. It signals us that maintenance is needed: a reduction of work-related stress, more physical exercise, improvement in our way of thinking, more sleep, dealing with hurt, and so on. If we would heed these warnings and care for ourselves as well as we do our cars, we would enjoy life more and live a lot longer.

  When the Alarm Goes Off

  Keith fit the profile of a man who was ignoring his emotional warning signs. He had struggled with overwhelming feelings of anger and shame his whole life, yet he refused to let these feelings warn him that he needed help. So, Keith avoided facing the painful internal issues that were crying out for help, and in the process, he destroyed his marriage and lost a loving wife. His anger had become so uncontrollable, his wife felt threatened by his outbursts. For her safety, she finally chose to leave him.

  Keith felt quite broken by what happened. He came for counseling to sort things out.

  “I know my anger drove her away, but I just couldn’t handle her way of doing things,” Keith confessed to me. “It aggravated me to no end!”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I guess the biggest irritation was just how much of a pack rat she was. There were things all over the house all the time. It drove me nuts to come home and see all the piles of clutter everywhere. Sometimes I would just explode at her.”

  “Did you ever stop long enough to think about what your anger was telling you?” I asked.

  “Telling me? What do you mean?”

  “Well, it seems to me that painful emotions are signals to us that something isn’t right inside. Your anger kept trying to signal you, but you ignored it,” I explained.

  “I’ve never thought of it that way. My anger didn’t seem like a signal, though. It was more like a reaction to something that frustrated me.”

  “Our natural tendency is to see our emotions as a statement about someone else rather than as a statement about ourselves. Does that make sense to you?”

  Keith pondered that a moment.

  “Sure, it makes sense in a way,” he said. “I know that when I’m angry, I feel that it’s a statement about what a jerk the other person is who I’m angry at. Is that what you mean?”

  He looked surprised when I nodded my agreement.

  “Yes. You thought your anger was a statement about your wife, for example, when it really was a statement about you,” I said. “Your anger was trying to alert you to some problems inside you. You appear not to have used it that way, so this just created bigger problems in your life.”

  “You know, I used to be in the military, and I worked with radar. What you’re saying kind of relates to how we used a rotating beam to spot enemy planes before they got too close,” said Keith. “Without the radar, we would have been destroyed. With it, we could react appropriately and lessen the damage.”

  “That’s a good analogy,” I said. “Emotions—even the smallest versions of them—are often trying to warn us that something inside us is in trouble and needs to be attended to. In that sense, they are extremely helpful—even good—for us.”

  “I never thought I would call my anger good, but I can see your point. If I can just use it as a cue rather than always spew it all over the place, I might save myself a lot of trouble,” he decided.

  “Using your emotions this way is something that can be learned,” I encouraged him. “You can get much better at it with practice. Right now, you’re just learning to view your emotions this way. Getting better at it will come with time and effort.”

  Keith began to see his emotions in a new light, and not just anger but also fear, joy, depression, and hurt. He had an especially tough time acknowledging his hurt and using it as a cue that something important was happening inside him. Keith had been raised to believe that hurt was a sign of weakness and that he shouldn’t feel it at all. Yet he did learn to see that even hurt was a feeling that was trying to cue him to some important issues that needed to be faced in his life.

  Keith learned to pay attention to the type of emotions he was feeling as a way of gauging the stresses and challenges he was dealing with in his life. He learned to recognize the signs.

  Detecting the Signals

  Maury Wills of the Los Angeles Dodgers was one of baseball’s greatest players. His specialty was stealing bases. One evening, after Maury had stolen his hundredth base of the season, a television sports commentator interviewed him. The interviewer noted that Maury had great physical strength, great agility, and great speed. The interviewer asked Maury if these were the secrets of being a great base stealer.

  “They help,” said Maury, “but the real secret is in mastering the art of telegraph detection.”

  “What’s that?” asked the broadcaster.

  “I make it a point to study the players on the other team,” said Maury. “Every person has a set of special quirks and habits, and I try to pick up on them. Usually, these physical signs will telegraph a message to me about what a player is about to do.”

  “Telegraph?” asked the announcer.

  “Right,” said Maury. “For example, there’s one pitcher who has the habit of pulling the visor of his cap before he tries to pick me off base. There’s a second baseman who takes two steps sideways as the pitcher goes into his windup if it’s going to be a pitchout and a throw down to second base. Dozens of these motions and gestures telegraph messages to me about when it’s safe or risky to try to steal a base. If I watch the signs closely enough, I never get tagged out when I try to steal a base.”

  Just as Maury Wills was alert to “messages telegraphed” to him by his opponents, so, too, people like my client Keith have learned to recognize the emotional warnings telegraphed to them. When a client can go from viewing emotional pain as a problem to viewing it as a plus, he is on his way to health and maturity that will make his life much better.

  Pain Motivates

  Another reason emotional problems are good has to do with the simple fact that the pain involved in them often motivates us to change. Change is painful, and most of us would rather not change unless we have to. Painful emotions often serve as the “have to.” You know what I’m talking about if you have ever been so miserable that you would do almost anything to stop hurting. The two great motivators seem to be misery and desire. Emotional pain is often the “misery” that motivates us to try to move beyond the status quo.

  I see evidence of this truth all the time in the counseling I do. The majority of my clients come for help because their pain level got so bad that they “either had to come in or not make it.” This tendency to wait until things are so bad that it becomes “do or die” is unfortunate because much misery could have been avoided with a more preventative outlook. It is like the person who gains a few pounds but refuses to exercise until those few pounds have turned into twenty or thirty. A small molehill of a problem turns into a huge mountain of one because people do not use the early, smaller levels of pain as the motivation to do something.

  There is an important medical parallel to what I’m suggesting in this chapter. We have all run into it. We will on occasion develop a physical symptom, such as a fever, and we’ll go to a physician to find out what is causing it. The misery the fever causes not only alerts us to the fact that something is wrong physically, but it also motivates us to find out what it is.

  Recently, for example, I developed a severe sore throat, one of those kinds wh
ere each time you swallow your whole body yells, “Ouch!” I usually ignore such painful symptoms, choosing instead to be macho and just tough it out. But in this instance, the pain only became worse. The sore throat was both a cue and a motivation to do something. I went to our family physician and found out I had bronchitis and pharyngitis. He put me on antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling better.

  But what if my throat had never become sore or the pain become severe? I would never have known something was “ill” inside me. The disease could have become much worse. As much as I moaned and complained about the sore throat, it was actually a blessing. It “blessed” me by saying, “Hey, Thurman, you have a problem, and it’s going to keep hurting you until you fix it.”

  In a perfect world you would never have any medical symptoms because there would be no viruses or bacteria. In the real world there are both. Similarly, in an ideal world you would never see depression, anxiety, anger, sadness, or hurt because there would be no problems to cause them. But in the real world we suffer emotional pain. As strange as it may sound, I am convinced that this pain is a blessing.

  A final example of what I am talking about in this chapter can be found in the life of Kate Jackson, the dark-haired actress who has starred in such TV shows as The Rookies, Charlie’s Angels, and Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

  To look at Kate Jackson, you would have always assumed that she had the world on a string. She was successful (three hit TV series); she was pretty (her face had appeared on the covers of dozens of national magazines); she was wealthy (her Beverly Hills mansion cost $2.4 million); and she was famous (her fan mail arrived by the truckloads). Internally, however, she was a bundle of nerves. Emotional and physical signals began to telegraph messages to her, but Kate ignored them. She had flashes of anger; she had days of listlessness; she had bouts with self-doubt.

  Although the signals were warning her that she was in a “danger” mode, she continued to work and drive and push herself beyond her limits. Then one night she had a bizarre experience. Kate had a nightmare in which she dreamed that something was terribly wrong with her physically. The nightmare was even specific enough to make her think that the problem was breast cancer.