by Beth Moore
Because of deep insecurity and shame, I said no to marrying my very best friend and the most godly man I have ever known. Fifteen years later I am often caught off guard with memories that reveal that I still miss him and his friendship dearly.
I remember breaking up with a really great guy in high school who actually had enough respect for me not to maul me by the third date. (If you had seen how I dressed—what I called subtly sensual so I could keep that innocent front going—you’d know it wasn’t all their fault.) I was so sure that he would break up with me, I beat him to the punch. I regretted it for years.
Insecurity can make us panic and act like freaks when we can’t get in touch with our significant other:
I have driven three hours to go and “check” on a guy I was dating because he wasn’t answering his phone. I probably called a hundred times, and no, that’s not an exaggeration. Of course there were points leading up to this. I felt I had reason to be suspicious. Another time with that same guy (after I moved closer)—again over him not answering the phone—I parked down the road and snuck up behind his house and stayed there watching for an hour or so. I once even went so far as to go in his house when he wasn’t home and go through all his stuff. I used to do the occasional drive-by to “check.” I almost got caught and tried to do a turn in an unpaved driveway—ended up getting stuck! Had to go and enlist some of the people who lived nearby to shovel out my car. Talk about embarrassing.
Beloved, let me pause here a moment because she just pegged the goal of this entire book: we need to let God shovel us out of insecurity, because without Him, we’re stuck. This one’s about to hit a familiar nail right on the embarrassing head:
We are so insecure about our men. We would never tell them this, so we feel like such fools to God. This doesn’t happen every day but often enough to bother us. If the men do not accept our calls or don’t call us, we immediately start the wheels of disaster, torment, crushing agony, stomachaches, panic, etc. So much so that it stops everything we are doing, and we obsess until we reach them. And we are seriously praying they are okay and they will call, text, something. We feel like foolish freaks! Where does this insecurity come from? Is this the enemy, or do we have underlying stuff to deal with? It feels like total rejection! Then the enemy starts with lies! Such terrible lies. He must be mad at me! What did I say? Who is he with? And the best: What in the world could he be doing that is better than talking to me? So after listening to the lies, the freak show really starts to take place: I will call his mobile again; e-mail him—no answer; text him—no answer; call his work desk phone—no answer. Yikes! Panic, anxiety!
We desperately need to learn a different response when we’re tempted to panic and overcommunicate with people. Except in an understandable emergency, leaving ten voice mails and twenty-five texts makes even the people who love us think we’re bizarre. Remember, no one is endeared by hysteria. How many of us have tried to figure out how to erase a voice mail we already left or retrieve an e-mail we already sent? As the writer of Proverbs suggests, it’s better to stay quiet and be thought a fool than to speak rashly and remove all doubt.
One more:
My high school sweetheart and I were having a fight, and I wanted to talk to him to convince him not to break up with me, but I couldn’t find him. I went over to his house and begged and pleaded, and yes, got into that “ugly cry” for his dad to tell me where he was, but he wouldn’t. I even ended up going to his grandparents’ house.
Don’t you just hate the times insecurity has caused you to do the ugly cry in front of somebody who thought you were nuts? And if not before, after? I have a memory of something similar in college, and every time it comes back to me, I sit and shake my head in self-disgust.
Insecurity can make us give an entirely wrong impression.
I am a pastor’s wife. My insecurity can definitely get the best of me. I’m not real good at small talk and tend to be standoffish because I don’t think people will like me or want to get to know me. Therefore I give off the wrong impression to the other women at church. They see me as being a snob. Oh, if they only knew I’m scared to death of them. I feel so intimidated by them because I don’t feel like I have much to contribute to their lives or even the conversation. I am trying to work on this, and it isn’t as if it consumes me night and day. It has been this way for so long, it is just who I am: Hi, my name is ___________________, and I’m insecure.
Me, too. But I’m getting over it. You, too?
Insecurity can make us overcompensate.
I grew up with a serious overbite. My mouth was smaller than the set of teeth that grew in. I couldn’t close my mouth at all. I was teased constantly. I would sit in my room for hours looking in the mirror with a bent-up paper clip over my teeth, picturing what I would look like with braces. I did everything I could to take the focus off my mouth. My hair always had to be perfect, and so did my eye makeup. The clothes I wore over my petite frame had to make my body look appealing as well. Anything to make people notice something other than those teeth. I joked around a lot, and I was such a pushover. I just wanted to be normal. It didn’t help that I was living in California, where the “beautiful people” lived. I did the dumbest things to try to get people to like me. They would say, “Are you getting braces? You would look so pretty with your teeth fixed.” I’ll never forget how differently I was treated after I finally had straight teeth. I almost bawled when a waiter in a restaurant told me I had the most beautiful smile. I had never heard those words in my life. I used to say, “If only I could get my teeth fixed, then I wouldn’t care about anything else about my appearance.” Satan has a field day with me on that when he can. I have to keep reminding myself and other women that God thinks we are beautiful no matter what. He is enthralled with our beauty.
Insecurity can keep us from accepting compliments and, far worse, from accepting love.
I feel like a fool every time my husband tells me he loves me or that I am beautiful (which happens a lot). I desperately want and need to believe him, but my heart just can’t because of his ten-year struggle with pornography and the insecurity it has caused in me. Then I feel like a fool because I am a Christian and can’t seem to “break free” and live in freedom. Insecurity has crippled me to where I doubted if God loves me anymore.
Insecurity explodes with rejection and can twist our perceptions.
Nine years ago my husband left me for another woman. I was beside myself with grief and humiliation and hurt. I begged him to come back. I told him I would change; I would make things better; I would make him happy. Hello? He was the main one who needed to change and make things better, not me, and he was responsible for his happiness. He came back, and I tried. I did everything I thought I could do to make him happy. I did wrong things to spice up our marital relations. He left again. And I begged some more. He came back, and I knew things wouldn’t work, but I so foolishly thought I could do this. I was afraid to let him go out the door to work because he worked with her. He left again for the final time after a couple of months. I was so broken. So humiliated. So angry. So bitter because I had failed. I took him back and forgave him, and he left me again. I compromised who I was and who I was in Christ to please a man who couldn’t be happy no matter what because he didn’t have a personal relationship with God. Wow! I see now that he was the one with the primary problem, not me. The whole divorce was pretty bad, but I wasn’t secure enough at the beginning to be able to tell my husband that he had crossed a line. Forgiveness is one thing, but allowing ongoing abuse and deception is quite another.
Another one:
My insecurities have plagued me for the past twenty-five years, yet the majority of that time I did not identify insecurity as the culprit in my “adventures” and “disasters.” My husband left me for another woman after fifteen years of marriage, and I was totally unprepared for dealing with the pain and rejection that his decision brought. I had always been my father’s pride and joy, and I thought my husband adored me
in that way as well. We had married extremely young, so after the divorce I decided to live any way I wanted, and also to prove the great mistake my husband made in leaving me. I became (in my mind) the funniest, sexiest, smartest woman in any room. I managed to do all this in a way that attracted most people and didn’t repel them. I am sure God was repelled, and I know that by following my lead and direction, many men (and women) joined me in behaviors that were immoral and damaging. I was involved in affairs with married men, and the relationships I had with single men were invariably doomed by my incessant jealousy of their time and attention. Knowing what a “nice” person like myself was capable of and knowing what my ex-husband and numerous others had done to me led me to distrust any man (and most women) I met.
You would not have guessed I had all these issues if you met me. I appeared the most functional person in the room. My insecurity was this thing that I hid even from myself. I am now married to a wonderful guy, but this insecurity still rears its ugly head after twenty-five years and much repentance on my part. I question my husband too much and feel an icy grip of jealousy on my heart too often. Thank God he and I are talking about this. (It is really annoying to him that Satan has such sway with my mind and I have such unwarranted doubts.) With God’s help and immersion in the Word, my insecurity and anxiety are subsiding. I still have much ground to recover, though. And even now, very few people recognize my brokenness.
Insecurity can make a fool out of you by making a liar out of you.
I grew up very insecure because we were poor, my parents were divorced, we lived in the projects, and I wore clothes that were given to me by others. Because of my not fitting in, I lied to make myself and my life better. My lies soon found me out, and I realized I had a habit (lying) that was hard to kick. I took all that lying into adulthood, and it continued to find me out. God truly saved me, and I am now a miracle of His.
Another:
As a child, I remember wanting attention from adults, and when I was a fifth grader, somehow my teacher (who I adored) thought I had been on the receiving end of a brand-new haircut—even though I hadn’t. I am unclear how she thought that, but as I was wearing a hat at the time, I just let her think that was the case. I was the center of attention for a few moments, as everyone wanted to see the new do. Never thinking of the consequences, I just went along with it, and then when the big reveal happened, I remember feeling so bad that I had lied the whole time. I was willing to lie for a few minutes of attention.
And another:
Insecurity has caused me to lie more times than I can count. I don’t know what it is, but if someone asks me if I’ve read a book or seen a movie or even know where a certain road is, often I’ll lie and say I know exactly what they’re talking about. Obviously, if they ask for my opinion I feel like a fool, because I’ve dug myself into a stupid, ugly pit. I don’t know what it is about me that refuses to acknowledge that I don’t know something or haven’t experienced it myself, but that has often led to me feeling like a fool later on.
Lying has a titanic link to insecurity. Incidentally, research shows that one mark of insecurity is the urge to lie when someone asks us if we know someone we don’t, remember something we can’t, or have ever heard of something we haven’t. We deceive people out of fear that they will think us ignorant or out of the loop.
Insecurity can make you wear weird stuff to school.
When I was a freshman in high school, my dad took me shopping for a new pair of shoes and saw a pair of Nike Aqua Socks (you know, the shoes you wear on the beach or out on the boat to keep from slipping or stepping on shells). They were aqua blue and black, but I didn’t know they were for water. My dad said they were cool and I would start a new trend (I’m laughing so hard at myself right now I can barely type). So I believed him and I wore those shoes to school every day. In the ’80s we did not wear ankle socks but big puffy socks that reached mid-calf, and we tucked our jeans into our socks or rolled them up above our socks. To make it worse, a guy I had a crush on even picked on me for wearing them, but I was sure he was just jealous that he hadn’t gotten some first.
If in order to be cool, you are wearing Aqua Socks to school, work, or even to the movies, you have earned the right to be insecure. There is help.
Insecurity can turn you into a public fool.
Most of the time my insecurity comes out as raging anger. In the early years of our marriage, my husband struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine. He is what I call a binger (sober for months, and then he would rent a hotel room and “binge” on it for about a week). During one of his binges, his sister called me and wanted to go looking for him, so I agreed. We got to a hotel, and while we were standing at the registration desk checking to see if he was there, his face popped up on the surveillance monitor in the elevator. We ran down the hall toward the elevator and got there just as it opened. I was so angry and insecure about our relationship that I jumped in the elevator and started just swinging at him—my sister-in-law later described it as the scene from When Animals Attack of a deer attacking a hunter. Anyway, he ran out of the elevator and out the back door with me in hot pursuit. He ran (with me chasing him) into the woods behind the hotel, through a car dealership’s service bays (it was a weekday, and yes they were busy) and back into the woods, where he finally collapsed from exhaustion. His only defense was a dead tree limb he grabbed to try to ward me off. We laugh about it now. I mean, can you imagine seeing a man come running through a car dealership, into the service bays, and all the while with a woman running about ten feet behind him yelling her head off? We wound up having to call an ambulance to come get him out of the woods.
Insecurity can turn us into posers.
As a single girl on the lookout, and one who is highly insecure around boys, I find myself in these “fake” situations all the time. Normally when I know I am going to be meeting a guy or even if I am around a bunch of single guys, I automatically think that one of them could potentially be my husband. Big fat mistake. The thing is, I can’t look at them like that, because then I feel the need to act perfect or act how I think would make them attracted to me, instead of just being me. It’s awful, because I always, without fail, get all caught up in what I say and how I say it, what words I am using, how I carry myself, and blah, blah, blah. I walk away kicking myself every time, because I wasn’t secure in who I really am. Bottom line, I need to act like me so they’ll like me, not some made-up girl. But those boys bring out the biggest insecurities in me. I need to stop looking at them as potential mates and start looking at them as just friends. Then it’s not such a big deal.
Insecurity can make a girl act like a guy.
When I was in elementary school, my mother sent me in with a haircut that was a wee bit shorter than I was used to. Apparently my classmates agreed, because all day I heard, “You look like a boy!” and it’s the only comment I remember. After a few hours, I believed it. So when we got to our physical education class at the end of the day and the coach told the girls to skip to the back wall and sit down, I wavered. I knew he would instruct the boys to gallop to the back wall next. Yup, you guessed it. I galloped. And you should have seen the look on Coach’s face.
I’m using a silly example to take a little heat off a serious situation so we can stand to discuss it. Countless women are so insecure about their womanhood that they act like men. Sometimes, because a male failed to protect them, they wrap themselves in a masculine exterior to protect their own femininity. I’m not talking about tomboys. I’m not talking about women athletes. I’m talking about women who hide themselves behind a masculine exterior so no one can get to their vulnerable female interior. I pray with all my heart that when this journey ends, we can each find the security to be the women God created us to be.
Speaking of acting like a guy, guys can make fools of themselves out of insecurity too. Oh, to have that list! Another time, another book. Here are a couple I have to pitch into the mix now, however, so that we’ll feel better knowing
we’re not the only gender with insecurity issues:
Okay, this one is about my husband, and we still laugh about it. When we were in college (not married at that point), my husband, Andrew, made an appointment to get a haircut. When he got there, the guy cutting his hair kept accidentally calling him “Ian.” Well, Andrew was too shy/embarrassed/insecure to correct the guy, but he really liked how he cut his hair. So from then on, whenever Andrew made haircut appointments with that certain barber, he made the appointment under the name “Ian” just to avoid correcting the man. He even made a point to always pay with cash so the barber wouldn’t see his real name on a check or credit card. It was so ridiculous! It sounds to me like something straight out of a Seinfeld episode.
Insecurity can keep you from . . . from . . . well, from expressing yourself.
I’ll just go and say it—I can’t pee if anyone can hear. You want specifics? At work I used to go to the restroom sometimes three or four times before I found one empty so I could go. One day when I was heading for the bathroom, I heard a flush inside, so I turned around before I got to the door. A guy was coming that way and said, “Change your mind?”
Many women have exactly the same hang-up in public restrooms. Isn’t it interesting that insecurity can make a person unable to naturally do what is perfectly natural?
Insecurity can be a relentless robber.
I have had so many foolish situations due to insecurity. Insecurity led me to make bad choices sexually and relationally, bad choices with food and in how I’ve dressed. But the greatest regret I have is that insecurity has kept me from so many things. It has kept me from instigating friendships that I desperately needed, kept me from pursuing career goals that I know God planted in my heart, and kept me from trying new things that would have been good for me.