Paying Attention To What’s Happening Within You

I've been asked a lot lately to reflect on the three year anniversary of When Narcissism Comes to Church. What has come of the conversation? Am I more hopeful or heartbroken today than I was then? Where do we go from here? What would I say next about it?

I may return to more of these questions in future newsletters, but for now I'd like to offer you an observation.

We can't heal from what happened to us until we attend to what's happening within us.

I don't often talk about my own story, but I'm writing these days for a next book and at 52, it's the most honest I've ever been. I begin with a painful experience I didn't even talk about in the narcissism book - being fired from my job as a pastor after six years. After one awful meeting, I was done. Clear your desk. Take your pictures off the wall. Leave. There was hardly a mention of me being gone the next Sunday. Sara and I have never experienced anything quite as painful and humiliating.

I'd offered so much of myself during those years, forming deep relationships, baptizing and burying, sitting with countless people in crisis and confusion. And after a deep disagreement with the senior pastor that could've and should've been stewarded with much more care, I was cast out. I was ashamed and angry...brokenhearted.

I'm actually quite glad it happened 20 years ago. If I had access to social media, I may have said things I can't take back. When things like this occur, we become fixated on what happened, and I did. I fought for a time, at least for some severance. For months, even years, I quietly fumed, hoping there might be justice of some kind. But in my fixation with what happened to me, I ignored what was happening within me.

Within, a festering wound. A storm of anxiety. Chronic hyper-arousal, as we name it today, a state of persistent flight-or-flight that took a massive toll on my body, eventually manifesting in significant health concerns. Five years later I finally got good, trauma-informed therapeutic care. And while I wanted to go back in time to plead my case before my therapist, he turned my gaze toward what was happening within me. And the healing work began.

If I could update the narcissism book, I'd add invite people to attend to the wound within. Indeed, there is a lot you might have to do related to what happened to you. The abuse you experienced in childhood. The rejection that still stings. The injustice that remains unremedied. Often times, we need to keep engaged in these kinds of hard conversations about what happened and what can be done.

But the deepest healing occurs when we turn to what's happening within. There, the wounds fester and linger, draining us of vitality, eroding hope, breeding cynicism. But as we turn our gaze inward, we realize that there is One who is already "more near to us than we are to ourselves" (St. Augustine), a God who is curious and compassionate, who longs for us to heal, who reminds that in "returning and rest is our salvation" (Isa.30:15).

In three years since the narcissism book came out, I’d say that I’m grateful that many, many people experienced it as healing, that so many have walked away feeling less crazy, that for the first time people have words for what happened to them. Today, I’d say - let the healing continue by turning your gaze within to where the wounds are festering. You may not be able to change what happened to you or control what’s happening around you, but you can heal what’s happening within you.