The Secrets I Have Learned

I remember a morning when I was five years old. My mom wanted me to wear a dress to kindergarten. But I didn’t want to. So, there arose a conflict between us. I was vehemently screaming, “I don’t want to wear a dress!” when I saw my stepdad coming up the basement stairs. I thought he had gone to work already. He usually wasn’t there at this time of the morning. But there he was, an angry look on his face that I recognized all too well. I stopped screaming immediately and I turned around and ran back up the stairs. He came after me…

Above Image: Guiding Light by Annie Henrie Nader

This is part 5 of "I Have a Tale to Tell"

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

What followed was extreme NW parenting. I won’t describe the details. They don’t matter now. What matters is what I learned AND did not learn from this and many subsequent interactions with him between the ages of 4 and 10.

In evaluating this story and my stepdad, I want to address the semantic concept of Evaluation, which is on the Southern side of the Compass. It has been important for me to know and be careful about the way I evaluate relationships, people, events, feelings, and results. This is because the way I evaluate others is the way I evaluate myself.

"With what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged." -Matthew 7:1-5

The Southern Balance

The South is the ideal way of evaluating the past and present things that happen. We divide these results into two categories: successes and failures. Of course, on the Compass, there are degrees between total success and total failures. In semantics, every concept has incremental degrees between the two extreme points like the degrees between light and darkness that make up the Zone.

So, the South represents the ideal way to evaluate success. Ideally, when we achieve success, we acknowledge that we have been a contributor. Our choices, our actions, our words, our thoughts, our sacrifices. We also acknowledge that there were others who played a significant role in achieving it. Others include God, our parents, teachers, friends, children, extended family, spouses, or other community members. 

We need to remember that there are so many people who have come before us and who have contributed to our present privileges and resources. Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Fathers, whoever invented plumping, automobiles, and computers. There are so many more. Seriously, we cannot forget that we stand on their shoulders. It is important to acknowledge that it is always a team effort to accomplish our goals.

It is also important to evaluate accurately because when we go into the next goal achievement process, we won’t try to do it in an extreme NW/NE way, in which we think that some things ride on our effort and sacrifice alone (when they don't) AND at the same time leave other more crucial things undone. When we evaluate in Extreme Imbalance and the going gets tough or when the going gets super boring, we are likely to abuse and neglect ourselves and others. It is not a sustainable evaluation process.

If we evaluate in the South, we are very aware that in our next goal achievement process, we need to find the balance in the team effort. When we engage in this type of process, we will achieve a greater degree of success together.

Evaluating Failure through the Southern Balance

The South also represents the ideal way to evaluate failure. We acknowledge that we have contributed to the problem. Our choices, actions, words, thoughts, and NW/NE ways of doing things were most likely partly responsible for a failed outcome. We also acknowledge that there were others who played a significant role in causing the problem. Others include God, our parents, teachers, friends, family, spouses, and other community members. 

We all are falling together because of this bumper-car-state we are in. And we need to experience this Fallen state in order to develop REAL sustainable compatible relationships. The bottom line is that sacrificing for each other enables us to develop bonds of love that cannot be developed in any other way. If there were not REAL opportunities to sacrifice, these bonds could not form.

Southeast Evaluation - Pride & Shame

The Southeast (SE) way of evaluating is when we take too much credit for successes or too much responsibility for failures. 

Taking too much credit is pride. It is thinking that we have obtained our privileges and resources by the strength of our own arm without any help from anyone else. We think we deserve all the credit. That’s the extreme. But it is still an incompatible way of evaluating when we don’t attribute enough of the credit to others. 

Taking too much of the responsibility for a failure is Toxic Shame. Shame and guilt are within the Zone between the South and extreme SE. Sometimes that kind of evaluation is helpful and contributes to our motivation to change. Changing is about developing better relationship skills that bring us Sustainable Joy. But Toxic Shame will result in the opposite. It will lock a person up and ruin people and relationships. 

Southwest Evaluation - Inhibition & Blame

The Southwest (SW) way of evaluating is when we take too little credit for successes or too little responsibility for failures. 

The semantics behind taking too little credit for successes is somewhat hidden in our society. It is vague and squashed out because so many of us are attempting to avoid the extreme imbalanced evaluation of pride. But when we take too little credit for the actual contributions we have made to a success we end up with low self-esteem or low confidence. We are inhibited, hesitant, doubtful, nervous, insecure, unsure, and wavering. We might think it is the saintly thing to do to attribute the success completely to God or to others. But where does that end us up when we go into the next goal achievement process? In the NE. In a NE goal achievement process, we think God or others will do everything for us to accomplish the goal. And if it doesn’t happen, then what? Should we blame them for the failure? 

Toxic Blame is the other side of the SW coin. The Lord has trained me to think of this constructively. If we blame too much of a failure on someone else, we miss opportunities to turn failures into successes. We get so hung up on something that has happened to us and we think the solution is to talk about what others have done to us over and over again. There is a time and space to talk about it. And we need to do that. But when that is our eternal resolution process, we are not understanding the power that the Atonement of Jesus Christ gives us to make lemonade out of lemons!

The opportunity to change things is made possible by his Atonement. He comes in as an opposing power to the Fall. The Fall causes the bumper-car experience. When something bad is done to us, we inadvertently are forced to do something bad to someone else. Bumper cars. Or you could think of it like dominoes. When one falls, it hits the next one in line, and before you know it, everyone is down.

The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the Space between Stimulus and Response

Jesus Christ creates that space between the bumper cars or between the dominoes. He can help us create that space in ourselves. Even though something bad has been done to us, we can be trained to use our choice, our will, our strength to refrain from passing it along. Instead, we turn to Christ with the pain and sorrow. We turn to him to receive his comfort, peace, and strength. And we turn to him for retraining. I have found that process completely healing and satisfying. More on that later.

But let’s get back to evaluating my stepdad. The Lord has taught me how to evaluate in the Southern Zone. He has given me time to talk about what was done to me and what it subsequently caused me to do. There were many times that I needed to vent. He was there to allow me to do that. I needed that space and time. To force me or guilt me into forgiving others before I was actually ready to do it from my heart is not a sustainable process. To objectively evaluate the pain and sorrow that I experienced throughout my childhood and into adulthood because of the way I was raised has also been important. I used to perpetually evaluate my past from both the SE and SW extremes. Learning how to evaluate in the South has freed me from many of the chains of bondage that have kept me down for so many years. 

My stepdad parented me from the extreme NW/NE. Too much discipline, too soon, and not enough patient training. But he did this because his parents disciplined him in the same way. Before he married my mom, he turned to the Lord to change some of the dysfunctional behaviors he had learned from his upbringing. For example, he didn’t pass on alcoholism to me or my siblings. I am thankful to him for that. 

But it is difficult to absorb the full force of the impact from previous generations and completely stop it from passing on to the next. Some of it usually squeezes through. I know this because I experienced it myself. 

When I became a parent, I had no idea there were dormant dominos inside of me. I mean, I knew what had happened growing up, but I thought that just knowing that it was not a good way to parent was enough. It wasn’t enough. The dormant dominos woke up when I was faced with the challenges of parenthood. I also parented in the extreme NW/NE at times. In one of my previous posts on Paradoxical Parenting, I referred to this as Survival Parenting.

Read more details about my parenting experiences in these posts: 

It's My Party

Before & After

Children Need to be Disciplined

The fact is that children need to be disciplined. They don’t have compatible relationship skills yet. They are focused on getting their own needs met. They scream and yell. They throw tantrums. They kick, hit, punch, push, and bite in their attempts to resolve conflict and obtain their desires. They aren’t always the little angels that many people like to portray them as. But they do have that angel side. They are a dichotomy of angel and devil (think Jack Jack). And parents have to figure out how to deal with them. 

The Lord showed me that the key to remember is that we all have desires and conflicts. It is not wrong to desire something. It was not wrong that my stepdad wanted me to learn how to resolve my conflicts in a more reasonable way than screaming. We all would prefer that our children did not scream their heads off when things didn’t go their way. But I did not learn a more functional way of resolving my conflicts when my stepdad responded to me with extreme NW/NE discipline.

I didn’t learn the following principles from these interactions: 

1. When things don’t go your way, stay calm and try to patiently discuss the pros and cons of each viewpoint. 
2. Use gentleness and intelligent conversations to persuade other people if you seriously believe (or know) that your viewpoint is the better choice. 
3. Evaluate who has the final say on what should be done. Children have the right to choose many things, and it is good to give them as many chances to choose for themselves within the NW/NE boundaries as you can. 
4. Parents should let children experience consequences instead of resorting to Extreme NW/NE parenting to prevent them from happening.
5. Parents should give children appropriate consequences within the Northern Zone to train children before they go out into the world and suffer harsher consequences because they didn't know better.
6. Developing compatible relationships between parent and child and obtaining these Balanced Northern Relationship Skills are more valuable results than getting your way using brute force in the moment.

The Secrets I Have Learned

I have spent years being ashamed of disciplining in extreme NW/NE  during my early parenting years. Even though I too absorbed much of the force of the impact and did not pass along much of what I experienced to my children, there was still some that squeezed out of me during the toughest moments. I have cried many tears of regret and shame. I knew better but I did not know HOW to discipline in the Northern Zone until the Lord came for me and rescued me. Literally rescued me. He gave me the power to absorb much more than I was able to do alone.

What helps me to evaluate my past-self appropriately is the following variables:

1. I was consistently praying for help throughout those years
2. When he came for me (or I finally had enough, and came to him with a heart sufficiently broken) and showed me the HOW, I changed

The semantic secrets that he shared with me stopped the domino effect in me. That doesn’t mean I was a perfect parent, but I became very functional. With the Lord, I parented my kids within the Northern Zone. We teamed up together. I asked to know his secrets. I devoted my time to studying them. When he showed me what he was and taught me his relationship skills I didn’t just write them down and try to publish them. I applied them. I had questions. I asked him. He answered them. My knowledge increased. My accountability increased. That accountability led me to change my dysfunctional ways of resolving conflicts and obtaining desires to more functional ways. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. A better way of saying that is that I couldn’t live with myself living with the Lord if I didn’t. I’m not talking about Toxic Shame. I’m talking about admiration and love. He is what I respect. He is what I see. I am not happy unless I can see him. And I am not happy unless I am continually striving to balance myself in the North as he balances himself.

I Have a Tale to Tell

The tale I have been trying to tell is not about the Imbalanced things that have been done to me. Yet they do play a part in the story. How could I possibly value the freedom and the Sustainable Joy I experience now if I had never experienced the sorrow? 

My focus and my complete joy is the tale of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. I'm telling the story of how he came for me and in doing so I hope to propagate the news that he has the power to come for everyone. This is the secret: If you have sorrow, thank your lucky stars! You now have the capacity to experience joy to that same level of intensity that you have experienced sorrow. But you need to ask and choose to listen and commit. 

If you have a tale to tell like mine - of how He has already come for you, I encourage you to share it to strengthen others' faith in Christ. 

If you're still in the middle of your story and are experiencing extreme pain and sorrow, I hope this story I am sharing will strengthen your faith in Christ and give you hope!

Listen: Live to Tell by Madonna (clean)

Shake It Off!

After getting married in December 1990, I experienced one of my first long-term episodes of depression. I had thought that once my dream of marriage came true, happily ever after would then occur. But that didn’t happen. I could not figure out what was wrong with me. I chastised myself in my journal. I wrote that I should feel happy and felt ashamed for not being able to be more grateful and positive. But I couldn’t Shake It Off. 

Toxic Shame

In essence, I was blaming myself. Blaming myself is an evaluation process. Blaming myself too much is taking too much responsibility for a failure* and not recognizing that there are also other causes involved. Blaming myself too much results in Toxic Shame. 

*Failure - I use this term to represent when anything is going wrong or is not where I want it to be regardless of who or what is to blame. I’m not saying I am a failure because I experienced depression. I use the term objectively.

My motivation behind attributing the cause of failure to myself is that I like to be in control of things, especially over how I feel. If I can find the cause of failure in my choices, that’s easy for me to change. I just have to figure out what it is and then work to change it. Success, then, replaces the failure. And I have to admit that I am a success junky. Toxic Shame isn’t about taking upon myself the responsibility to change. That’s actually a good thing. Toxic Shame is when:

• I take on more of the burden than I can handle 
• I try to change things about myself that shouldn’t be changed
• I try to change things about myself that I don’t yet (and in some cases will never) have the ability to change.

Toxic Blame

Blaming others or attributing the cause of the failure to sources outside of my control is also an evaluation process. And objectively it is true that most failures have multiple causes. Blaming other sources too much as the cause of failure and not recognizing that there are things that I have control over is Toxic Blame. I am motivated to engage in Toxic Blame evaluation about specific failed events or relationships that:

• Are in the past and I can do nothing about now
• I don’t know how to resolve the conflict
• I have worked hard and long to resolve a conflict and it’s still not resolving. 

Attributing too much of the cause to sources outside of my control leads to missed opportunities for growth, change, and personal development.

I now believe that when I blamed myself for my state of depression as a newlywed, I was diverging into Toxic Shame. Because I didn’t know then what I do now, this is understandable. But how I was evaluating the cause of my depression reminds me of an incident in high school.  

My coach told me to Shake It Off!

It was my sophomore year and I was on the softball team. At one of my home games at Santa Teresa High School, I was a runner on third base. My coach gave me the sign to steal home base if the pitcher tried to catch the runner at first from stealing second. She did and I took off for home. The other team recovered the ball and threw it home. From the sidelines, my coach shouted, “Down!” This meant to slide. We had practiced sliding for several weeks so I knew what to do, and I loved doing it. I slid into home base just as the catcher caught the ball. “Safe!” the umpire called. I got up and walked off the field, my coach patting me on the back. 

Standing on the sidelines at the end of the batting order, I felt a pain in my right knee. I walked around, stretching and flexing. My coach noticed and asked if I was okay. I said, “yeah.” He told me to Shake It Off. So, I tried. After the inning, I grabbed my glove and went back out to my position in left field. The pain was increasing, rather than decreasing. “What was wrong?” I wondered. “Why couldn’t I just Shake It Off?” There was no apparent injury – no cut, no blood, no bones sticking out. And I could walk. Usually, when I had collisions in softball, soccer, or hide-and-go-seek, my body hurt at first but then the pain would go away after a few minutes. But this wasn’t going away. Finally, my coach saw I was struggling and took me out of the game. 

A little while later, my mom picked me up from the school parking lot and brought me to the emergency room. The x-rays showed that I had not broken anything but had strained the ligaments in my right knee pretty badly. I had to wear a brace and use crutches for the next six weeks.

Trying to Shake Off spiritual strains

So back to the newlywed story I started with: After I was married in 1990 and was in my senior year at BYU, I felt like something had been spiritually strained, but I didn’t know what. Nothing bad had apparently happened. Only good. I just got married, for heaven’s sake! It’s only in retrospect as I have analyzed my past experiences with wiser eyes that I have been able to more accurately evaluate what was going on. 

And as I said, in my journal I tried to write happy thoughts, express my gratitude for my husband and my life, and think of some things about me that I could change to make things better. This was my attempt to Shake It Off. In the past, I might have felt sad about something specific that happened. Usually, I would understand why I was sad because the reasons were apparent. And the subsequent sad feelings were normally fleeting. I would rebalance after a short period of time. This time, however, there didn’t seem to be any cause for the sad feelings. I didn’t know what to change and I couldn’t Shake It Off.

All I could do was pray for help. And help did come in time. It wasn’t much longer before we moved from our first apartment to a little blue house next door to a family in our ward – Dennis and Susie Shaver and their four children. They were the ones who told us about the house and encouraged us to move in. We developed a close friendship with them. I interacted with Susie a lot and loved babysitting or just hanging out with her kids who were always coming over to our house.

Our relationship with this family made a big difference for me. The depression significantly decreased. I never imagined additional good relationships were what I needed. Note: I didn’t need toxic relationships with people who treated me like crap. I needed relationships with people who were examples and who were compassionate, patient, and kind. Susie and Dennis were.

The influence of attainable goals on depression

After I had Aaron, my first baby in October 1992, I started walking with Susie early mornings. This got me up, out of the house, and back to exercising. When the weather turned cold that Fall, we walked along the indoor track in the Smith Field House at BYU. That’s when I first saw and heard the intramural aerobics classes. The music was loud and dance-inducing. I wanted to join in, but I felt intimidated. I didn’t think I could do it because of memories of awkward, uncoordinated, failed dance lessons when I was a teen. But after listening to the music for a few weeks, I decided that it had to be done. And I thought that if I started at the beginning of the semester, it might be easier to learn.

After the new year - January 1993, I started on the back row with 2-month-old Aaron in his mint-green car seat right behind me. I was nervous about being able to keep up with what I thought would be a complicated routine. But I soon found out that while it was hard, it was doable. I realized that I actually craved the challenge to get the steps down flawlessly while keeping up with the instructor and the beat. She taught us in a way that enabled our success. The music was so fun and motivating. I absolutely loved it! I went 3-4 nights a week. Over time I was able to leave Aaron home with my husband and go on my own. Over a six-month period, I graduated from the back row to the front. I told some of my friends at church about it and soon I had a car full of women coming with me. With this activity and a healthier diet, I lost all of my pregnancy weight.

Healed from my first episode of depression 

I didn’t realize at the time but looking back I can see that the depression decreased and then entirely went away because of the Shavers, the aerobics instructor, my fellow aerobic-eers, and the successful achievement of my goals. Reflecting upon these people enables me to see the atonement of Jesus Christ in action for me. They were answers to my prayers. They brought light, excitement, motivation, and joy back into my life.

Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge

Knowing this about myself, I am able to troubleshoot other persistent incidents of depression that come up in my present life. I believe applying things that are known, seen, and apparent to other situations where things are presently unknown, unseen, and not apparent is what the following scripture on faith means:

“Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” ~Book of Mormon, Alma 32:21

I have learned that these things are true:

• I need loving and compatible relationships that give me enough of an opportunity to serve and be served. If I am too much alone or that opportunity is not great enough, I experience depression.
• I need to have goals that challenge me enough to develop the skills and talents I value. Even if I’m very busy, if I’m not working on developing a talent I value or one that I sense the Lord wants me to work on, I get bored and depressed.

My specific life circumstances have changed since then. My relationships have changed. But the principles I learned about myself are still applicable. If I’m experiencing depression and can’t Shake It Off, I know what I need to do and what I need to ask for.