I Was Having Nightmares and They Scared Me

When I was a little girl, maybe five or six years old, I often had nightmares. They scared me. They were about bad people intending to hurt me or other people. A reoccurring dream was that there was a bad man climbing through my bedroom window. When I woke up in the middle of the night after having one of these dreams, I lay awake listening for a creeping in the house, too afraid to get out of bed and go to my parents for comfort. Because of this, I had a difficult time getting to sleep each night.

This problem continued throughout my childhood until one night, my mom taught me how to pray. She said I could ask Heavenly Father to help stop the bad dreams. Before this, I had participated in family prayers, prayers at meal time, and prayers at church, but I hadn’t learned to pray to Him personally. 

So that night, I said a very simple prayer and asked, Please don’t let me have any bad dreams. I lay back down on my pillow and felt safe. Safe.

The bad dreams decreased. They went from being very frequent to occasional. If I ever woke up in the middle of the night, I would whisper to Him, asking Him to protect me and help me to sleep. My fear would decrease and I would fall back to sleep. The problem never escalated into anything serious.

I remember this so well because from that night on, throughout my childhood, teen, and even young adult years, I said the same prayer. I added more to it as I encountered more things that were outside of my control. There were things that I wanted and conflicts that I couldn’t solve. When I prayed for them, He would help. Being young in experience and endurance, I didn’t always recognize when He answered or that He had actually answered. The way He answered was often so gradual that I wasn’t aware enough to notice. 

When I got older, I started to pay more attention to this asking/answering relationship. The more I recognized the patterns in our communication, the stronger my faith grew.

What About Love?

What even is love? For me, I’ve been attempting to figure it out. It seems like this is true for others as well. I just started using Spotify and made my first playlist out of some of my favorite 80s songs. I’ve been listening to Heart sing, “What about love? Don’t you want someone to care about you? What about love? Don’t let it slip away!” And Foreigner sings, “I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me.”

I know that most of the time these 80s songs as well as songs from other generations are singing about romantic love and physical affection. I know romance and physical affection are a part of love. And I do not discount them when considering the meaning of love. 

In the scriptures, Jesus Christ counsels us to love each other. To love each other as we would be loved and to love God with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. So he’s not only talking about romantic relationships. I believe he’s talking about a general way of interacting with each other that can be applied to all types of relationships – marriage, family, and community.

From all of my research and ponderings about what love is, I have concluded so far that it is a an action, a motive, and a state. 

Love Is An Action

As an action, I believe love is sacrifice. When I love someone, I give up my comfortable life to some degree for them. In marriage, I give up all other men to be with my husband. As a mother, I give up spending my time on other life projects that conflict with my ability to parent and nourish my children to the extent that I am able. In my relationships with members of my extended family and friends or others in my community, I share my specific abilities and talents, which hopefully lighten the loads they have to carry.

Right here, there is usually a bunch of judging each other. Who is sacrificing enough for others? Who is loving enough? Is my neighbor loving her kids enough? Is she sacrificing enough? Or does my neighbor see how much I’m really sacrificing for my relationships? 

Who cares?! This isn’t about who is sacrificing or loving better than someone else. That is so twisted. All we need to focus on here is if we are developing compatible relationships with the people right in front of us.

Love Is A Motive

As a motive, I don’t want to sacrifice for ascetic reasons, but for real reasons. I seriously want these other people in my life to be happy because that makes me happy. I guess it comes down to empathy. I literally feel pain when I see someone suffering. Once I was at Chris’ baseball game when he was like 13 years old and another little boy got hit in the head by the baseball. I felt it physically. My soul was affected and I wanted to help him. I wanted to take the pain away from him.

I have come to believe that love is about taking the pain away from others, if at all possible, but it is not taking ALL the pain away from them so they never have to sacrifice. Knowing when to allow others to sacrifice has always been a difficult thing for me. I just want to take all the stress, sorrow, and discomfort away from them. But since sacrifice is love, I would also be taking away their love by attempting to do this. Appreciating, empathizing, honoring, and respecting their sacrifice is what I have needed to learn to do.

I think the real reasons to sacrifice can be summarized into this one goal: to develop sustainable compatible relationships. Relationships that enable all members to live in sustainable joy. Relationship where all members attract the others instead of manipulating, forcing, or guilting them into meeting their needs or the needs of others.

This is one characteristic I have come to see in Jesus Christ as I’ve studied him and experienced his love: He doesn’t want to force, manipulate, or guilt me into sacrificing. In fact, he would rather not have me sacrifice at all for him if that is my only motivation. He wants me to voluntarily sacrifice because I love. And I love because he has loved me like this. He has been real with me. He seriously wants a sustainable compatible relationship with me. And I know he wants that for each of us. He’s willing to negotiate, work it out, figure things out, be flexible, give time and space, and consider ways of doing things that may not be the perfect and simple story-book solution.

Love Is A State

But there are also lines our Savior can’t cross. And the reason he can’t cross them is because of the state of love. The state of love is a result, a continuous relationship, a continuous feeling of love, a continuous attraction. 

I think this could possibly be what the scriptures describe as Charity. It never fails. It can endure suffering for a long time. It’s totally kind. It doesn’t envy the success of others. It isn’t puffed up in fake flattery. It isn’t motivated to get more indulgent pleasure for itself. It’s motivated by sustainable joy. It isn’t easily provoked, it doesn’t think evil. It doesn’t strategize how to manipulate the variables to get what it wants at the expense of others so it has to sacrifice (love) as little as possible. It doesn’t receive any joy out of inequality and having more or less than others. It receives joy from figuring out the truth – how to make relationships work sustainably. It’s able to bear whatever adversity it has to deal with. It believes that sustainable compatible relationships with continuous attraction are possible. It is hopeful, not apathetic or obsessive. It troubleshoots instead of giving up or putting up with conditions and states that are not yet, but potentially can become happily ever after. It is able to endure whatever happens.

So if we want this Charity, there are rules to follow. It’s like a circle, a promise between two or more people, a covenant. There is mercy. But mercy is justice over time. Justice is about keeping our commitments to each other. I have rules that I need others to keep. My kids, family, and friends have rules they need me to keep. You have rules that you need your family and friends to keep. When other people break their commitment to us, they break the rules. 

In the situation where my rules have been broken, I’m the first person to advocate rules, laws, and order. But when I’m the one breaking my commitment to other people, am I the one complaining that there are rules, promises, and responsibilities? 

And WHAT ABOUT LOVE? When it comes to keeping the rules, this is sacrifice. Keeping each other’s rules is a sacrifice. If I complain about having to keep these rules or say that the rules are too demanding and constraining, what exactly am I saying about my love for the person whose rules they are?

Whatever my choice is about voluntarily sacrificing to keep God’s rules and to keep the rules of others, if I want the state of love – Charity – then there are general rules I need to follow. There are no if, ands, or buts. And these rules are usually all about giving, forgiving, repenting. They are about giving Mercy to the extent God has given it to me.

But where is the line? When do "if, ands, or buts" cross that line? I think we can know that when our motive and commitment is love, not asceticism, and not hedonism.

You Are My Hands

Each one of us has personal Saviors who act in behalf of our general Savior for us. It is most common that these Saviors are within our own family, ward, or community. It is a total blessing for us to have someone right before our eyes, face to face, talking and listening to us and imparting the Lord's word to us for our specific situations. When we can share our hopes, dreams, frustrations, and true feelings with another person who understands us, supports us, and guides us, this interaction makes life better and more manageable, not worse.  We have a place to "lay our head." We have a personal Savior who is operating through the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ who has our best interest in mind and heart.

“God does notice us, and he watches over us. But it is usually through another person that he meets our needs.” ~President Spencer W. Kimball

There is a statue of Christ that was damaged in a war with missing hands and a sign at its base that says, "You are my hands."

“A story is told that during the bombing of a city in World War II, a large statue of Jesus Christ was severely damaged. When the townspeople found the statue among the rubble, they mourned because it had been a beloved symbol of their faith and of God’s presence in their lives. Experts were able to repair most of the statue, but its hands had been damaged so severely that they could not be restored. Some suggested that they hire a sculptor to make new hands, but others wanted to leave it as it was—a permanent reminder of the tragedy of war. Ultimately, the statue remained without hands. However, the people of the city added on the base of the statue of Jesus Christ a sign with these words: ‘You are my hands.’” ~Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf

When God allows us to be his hands, he gives us the opportunity to develop sustainable relationship of Amae with our family, friends, and community. These are like the covalent bonds we learn about in chemistry. If we all relied directly upon God for all our needs, we would not be able to establish bonds with each other. We would all bond directly with God but not with each other.

Family Bonding
Because we are all separated from God and his immediate love to a certain degree, we all have the need for Amae. Our spirits need spiritual nourishment to live just as our bodies require physical nourishment to live. God designed families as the primary way we receive both physical and spiritual nourishment. Functional families successfully provide this nourishment and thus bond with each other. Dysfunctional families struggle with the ability to provide it and that bond can't be formed. Most families fall somewhere in between totally functional and totally dysfunctional. Because we may not be able to provide the level of nourishment our children need or because our parents may not be able to do that for us, God provides back-up resources. Back-up Redeemers. 

The Fall
Sometimes the inability to provide Amae may be ascribed to purposeful negligence and abuse but other times it may be ascribed to objective random reality. The imbalanced relationship that results in dysfunction may only be a result of random circumstances. In other words, we can probably safely attribute the overall cause of dysfunctional conditions to the conditions of the Fall. Sickness, death, natural disasters, lack of maturity, generational neglect and abuse. The list of inherent weaknesses and misfortunes goes on! All of it can be categorized under the Fall. One dysfunctional condition causes another dysfunctional condition and like dominoes we all go down.   The Atonement of Jesus Christ redeems our AGENCY. It gives us the power to overcome the conditions of a dysfunctional upbringing. It provides us with Amae where we didn't have it. If choose him (and his back-up resources) as our Redeemer these Fallen imbalanced conditions can be corrected.

My Specific Adversity: What Happened?
What exactly happened to me as a child? As is the case for all of us, God primarily provided that needed spiritual nourishment through my family. That was my first-line resource growing up. Because that was dysfunctional to a given degree, I also had dysfunctional behavior before I learned to turn to my Redeemer for re-functionalization. Thankfully, part of the Atonement of Jesus Christ includes giving each of us Time to find Him and recognize how to turn to and rely upon his Redeeming love.

My parents divorced when I was really little. I barely even remember my dad. He thought it was best to completely sever ties with us so I didn't grow up knowing him. In my teenage years I had some positive interaction with him. He was very kind. But I never had that father/daughter belonging relationship with him that would fulfill the purpose of family for me.

I’m not sure why my biological father did what he did so I don’t want to go into that. I’m only sure that it was a combination of the Fall and his own choices. So he left our family early on. He left us to the care of my mom and eventually to my step-dad. My step-dad was born and raised in an abusive culture. I know he was verbally and physically knocked around a lot by his parents and siblings. So that was passed along to him and then to me and my siblings. 

From his family line, he learned that the solution to get children to obey was to force them to obey through physical pain or threat of it. The imbalanced character trait went like this: If children do not do what you say, you should increase their physical pain. In Behavioral Psychology--Operant Conditioning--this would be called Positive Punishment. Increasing or adding an undesirable stimulus like whipping a horse to get him to run faster. It is hitting a child after she has done something wrong in efforts to create a fear in her to not repeat that behavior again. If you consistently train a child like this she is going to assimilate those character traits, whether she would choose it or not.

These imbalanced methods of training children can indirectly promote other imbalanced character traits in a child when they are the primary methods by which she learns to make her choices. If she did not know she was doing wrong in the first place, punishment was used as a teaching method, and if this training was repeated throughout her childhood, what would be the consequence? What would she learn? I know what I learned—a fear that whatever I did could possibly be wrong. No space for trial and error. No time to make mistakes without the hammer of swift and painful judgment coming down on my head. It was not okay for me to be imperfect in any way. I developed an ultra-self-correction mechanism almost like an auto-immune disease and a major self-defensiveness against anyone who attempted to correct me. I will correct myself before anyone has a chance to punish me. That was my unconscious attitude. As I grew older, I grew angry. And this is probably the same process that put such intense and virulent anger into my step-dad before me. The results of the Fall--generational abuse and neglect. Lack of Amae.

Neglecting to Protect
The problem is not just in passing on dysfunctional love and character traits but it’s also in NOT passing on functional Amae and character traits. What does a child become when she is not protected by her parents? What happens if the very ones she should go to for safety, comfort, guidance, and support are the ones she has to hide from? How does she develop faith in the Atonement of Jesus Christ? Where does the vital nourishing love come from? How can a child learn how to be merciful if she never was given it? The answer is that she doesn't. Instead she learns to protect herself. She learns that no one has her back. She believes there are no Back-up Redeemers. She learns to Turn and Revile Again.

I share this story knowing that almost everyone has experienced generational abuse and neglect to some degree. And if we see it in ourselves, we may be tempted to evaluate ourselves in Toxic Shame or to evaluate our parents in Toxic Blame. My goal is to objectively see these things as the product of ignorance and the Fall. There may also be sin involved in the mix but it is not my business to be the judge between sin and ignorance. All that I need to understand in reviewing these facts is the objective fact that these specific conditions are the result of the Fall. When I recognize them as such, I can get to a place where I understand how the Atonement of Jesus Christ can be implemented to resolve the conflicts that the dysfunctional relationships have created for me. These are the resultant conflicts that I may still be struggling with today. Therefore, to resolve my present conflicts becomes my purpose for seeking to understand the past.

Back-up Redeemers
When the level of love and training our parents provide for us is not enough, the Atonement of Jesus Christ operates on our behalf. God knows what is going on. He works to put into place subsequent levels of resources that redeem us--compensate us. Our siblings may step in to help us because of their mercy and God-given abilities. They can be a resource for us especially when our parents are not. But since they are usually still learning and growing, as we are, and are receiving the same level of dysfunctional training, they often are not capable of playing this role for us. Yet mine did to a certain degree. My older sister was a beacon of light for me. She consistently read her scriptures, prayed, and went to church, which gave me a clue that these resources might be valuable to me as well.

We are all only required to do what we are willing and able to do. Love and Amae are about voluntary sacrifice, not forced sacrifice. We can't force people to love us. If we are willing, we can increase our ability to sacrifice over time in order to provide Amae for others through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. But if a parent is not aware of this chance to improve or is not willing to develop his ability to sacrifice for his children, our Savior knows about our situation and will send alternative resources. Others are called into action. Those others can be extended family members, friends, and members of our church. 

I had a few other Back-up Redeemers growing up. My grandparents, my best friend and her family, and my church, its programs, and many of its members. These resources retrained me in important ways to learn how to obtain my desires and resolve my conflicts using higher skills than I was raised with. I discovered for myself that the prophets, scriptures and personal prayers were a vital resource for me. But it wasn't until I developed the faith to really depend upon these resources, and specifically upon Jesus Christ who my church and the scriptures were pointing to, that my Amae needs have been completely redeemed.