Transformation Mechanics
One of the benefits of in-depth bible study, especially categorical studies, is that the mechanics begin to emerge as the pieces come together. It is one thing to tell a believer to change the way they live to be like Christ and quite another to give him/her the means of making the changes. The church today is not producing credible Christians for many reasons, one of which is that the clergy does not teach with any depth, providing the pews with enough insight into the process to succeed. These articles are intended to supplement the food that hopefully you are getting from your pastor-teacher. The following article is one of a series of discussions that will provide you with some of the “how to’s” of the Christian life. This article deals with the Old Man, how to recognize false beliefs in our souls and then what to do with them when we discover that we have believed a lie.
Eph 4:22-24 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old man, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new man, created to be like God in righteousness and holiness from the truth.
The next few articles will provide insights and exercises intended to help Christians discover their false Old Man beliefs that are hidden in their subconscious minds. These false beliefs are ideas we believed at some point in our lives as a reaction to a life event(s). After consistent use of these ideas over time, they became our natural, habitual viewpoint and way of reacting to similar life situations. A brief description of how/why these beliefs came to be programmed into our souls will help us understand the normal design of the soul and help us see other false ideas we hold.
Old Man Beliefs – An Example
The Old Man (OM) belief system contains false ideas that we adopted based on our human experience growing up through the stages of human development. The OM system contains positive ideas intended to give us pleasure and negative ideas intended to protect us from pain. The following example is an altered but true story of how and why a person known to me adopted a false belief(s) in reaction to a painful event(s) that occurred when he was 12 years old.
Joe’s Story
Joe was 12 when his parents divorced. This was the time of his life he describes as when “the world as I knew it came apart”. Joe was old enough to know what was happening when they began to fight all the time and when the arguments turned into bitter fights and he was not really surprised when the announcement came. He was a little surprised because he remembered that the fights stopped real sudden like and he had hoped for a moment that they had worked out their differences. When they sat him down though, he knew what was coming before they said a word. He saw his dad’s bags by the door and he knew. He had been dying a little inside every time he heard the hateful tone they used with each other but this was the moment when his heart just stopped and he stopped feeling anything for a long time. For half a second he considered begging them to reconsider but the look on his father’s face told him to “never mind”. As his mother sat beside him hugging him, telling him what was happening, he could feel himself growing cold inside, totally numb to anything. When she was through, he just nodded his head and went to his room, shutting the door quietly behind him. Joe’s heart was toast.
It was 18 years later that Joe recounted this event to me in a counseling session. He was there in a last ditch effort to save his own 4 year old marriage. He and his wife Sue had come together for the first session and now he had come by himself when they were both scheduled, not a good sign. Her complaint was that she no longer believed that Joe cared for her in any way, to any degree. She explained that her many tears shed in the first session and the many more before they came to me meant nothing to him. He does nothing when I am hurting she said, he says nothing, does nothing and he finally admitted the other day that he feels nothing when I try to tell him that I can’t live like this any more. He listens without offering a word, he just looks at me like he doesn’t care and then just walks off and turns on the TV.
He wasn’t like this when we dated, he was kind, caring and we used to pray together all the time. We met at church you know and I thought he was the most spiritual man I had ever met because he knew more about God than anyone I had ever met. He never was very expressive or emotional about his love or anything else for that matter she added, but I had no idea that he would be so distant and unfeeling. Joe sat, looking down at his hands folded in is lap, passive, unmoving, not a blink or show of any emotion on his face. Sue went on until her emotional complaint finally came to an end and she sat silent, looking at Joe, waiting for some sign that he had heard her, that he was alive. I had also sat silent looking at Joe, waiting on him to say something. He finally looked up at her, then at me and said, I tried to tell you that it wasn’t you, I don’t feel anything about anything, ever. I don’t know why, but I just don’t feel anything for anyone. He then lapsed back into his silent vigil, making sure his hands stayed attached. The first session ended soon after that and now Joe was here by himself because she had told him that she was at the end of trying and maybe they would both be better off not married to each other.
Joe sat across from me, trying to remain unemotional as he told me what she had said, but for the first time I could tell he was anything but numb. For just a split second when he was talking I could see the pain in is eyes and almost like a desperation showed through. I decided to use the time by trying to get Joe to open up a little. I asked him, Joe, do you know why you don’t feel anything for your wife’s pain or as you said, anything for anyone? No, he shook his head slowly, trying to keep his composure but I could tell he was close to breaking down. I wasn’t this way with her at first, he said, I was normal for awhile when we dated and then when we were first married. Normal for awhile I asked with sudden peaked interest? Hmm, I said to myself that is an odd way of expressing the situation. Yes, he said, normal for a time, not like I used to be. Ok Joe, you have my curiosity aroused, what do you mean, like you used to be? Well, Joe began, for as long as I can remember, I have felt numb inside, almost like God didn’t include feelings when He made me. It’s not that I don’t feel anything at all, but I don’t seem to have a wide range of feelings or very strong feelings about anything. I remember when we won the city championship in football and I was playing running back. I scored the winning touchdown and everyone else went nuts but not me. I was glad we won, but I just didn’t feel all that much about it or like I said, for anything else in my life either. How long have you been this way Joe? I asked. For as long as I can remember he said, way back into my childhood.
It was then that I began to explore Joe’s past and discovered the event that had resulted in Joe numbing out his emotions. We could go on with the story but hopefully you are beginning to see why I have told you about Joe. At 12, when his “world as he knew it came apart”, he decided that the pain of his parents failed relationship was too great for him to bear and he had shut down his emotions, repressed them, so that he wouldn’t feel the agony of losing his world. He had shut them down even further after the divorce when he went to his dad’s house and had to hear him running his mother down and then several other life events that were difficult had motivated him to turn the dial on his emotions even further. Let me explain what happened to Joe, why it had hurt his marriage and how his story applies to our exercise using daydreams.
Joe had discovered what most of us counselors call defense mechanisms, a term coined by Freud. The term describes a range of instinctive behaviors that all humans use to avoid the pain that results when our life comes apart. The mechanism Joe used is called emotional repression or suppression which is simply where we tell our self to stop feeling our emotions because something in our life has hurt us deeply. When we are hurt like Joe was by a failed relationship and the loss of a primary relationship like his parents, all we know how to do as unbelievers is to make it stop hurting any way we can. Joe’s instinct to avoid the pain worked for him and he was able to stop thinking about the divorce so much and stop hurting so bad in his soul. When Joe saw how well numbing his emotions worked, he decided to believe in this mechanism as a good way to deal with all the pain in his life and he adopted it as his strategy for handling pain. He told himself that he couldn’t control people disappointing him and causing him pain but he could control whether he felt any pain from their failures. He discovered this mechanism by instinct but then he attached his faith to it and used it as a strategy to deal with the pain of life in the devil’s world. Joe had built a primary old man belief and had used it until it became so habitual that he no longer even remembered that he was doing it. Going numb had become so habitual and so automatic that every time pressure came to his life, he did his turtle act. Joe continued to numb his pain but discovered that this mechanism had a bad side effect. When he numbed his emotions to avoid pain, he found that it numbed all of his other feelings as well. He didn’t feel pain but he didn’t feel joy either, nor love, nor sympathy nor as Joe said, he didn’t feel anything for anyone, even for himself. This side effect of all his feelings going numb had hurt his marriage. Sue still felt her feelings but Joe couldn’t feel his and he couldn’t relate intimately with his wife, he couldn’t feel sympathy when she was hurting and he couldn’t feel passion when she felt loving toward him. Joe had made himself emotionally unavailable to the world and even to his wife.
Sue was a normal young woman who loved her husband and wanted his love and approval in return. Soon after the honeymoon year of marriage, Joe settled into his life and his numbed emotions began to reassert themselves. The first time they had a fight, he ducked into his shell a little, then a little more and by the time they came to me, Joe had placed Sue in the same category as every other person who had hurt him and he simply felt nothing to guard against being hurt by her even more. Sue for her part, not knowing what was wrong, pursued Joe every time he backed off from her. The more he backed off the more she felt like he didn’t love and approve of her and so she became critical and complaining toward him. She pushed him to give her love and he pushed back to protect himself from being abandoned and feeling criticized. At this point Joe’s use of self-protective mechanisms was so habitual he didn’t even know he was doing it. The two together created a vicious cycle where she pursued him with criticism but wanting love, feeling hurt at his withdrawal and he withdrew even more to avoid being hurt and out of fear of her leaving him.
Both of them as Christians were still dominated by their old way of thinking, feeling and acting. They related to one another using the strategies they had built in their life as unbelievers. They desperately needed to take off their old man beliefs, replace them with the mind of Christ and yield their hearts to the Spirit moment by moment. They needed to surrender to transformation, God’s process by which He causes believers to grow spiritually from babies at the new birth to mature adults able to shoulder adult Christian responsibilities. They needed to take off their old man beliefs, strategies and actions and put on the new man beliefs, strategies and actions so that they could believe, think, feel, speak and act like Jesus Christ.
It was during the sessions we spent discussing his life that this exercise was introduced to me. Joe said to me that during the first year after his parents divorced that he used to daydream about them getting back together all the time. He said, I daydreamed about them getting back together so much it began to interfere with my schoolwork. My teachers began to get on to me for zoning out. I asked him, what did you get out of daydreaming about them getting back together? Well he said, I would see them together in my mind and it would feel like it was real and I would feel like everything was all right for a moment. It was the only time I could feel anything, especially anything good. When I heard this, I realized the power of our daydreams as a window into the subconscious mind and as a tool to discover the hidden agendas in our old man belief system.
In the next article we will look at our daydreams and learn how to use them as a tool to discover what old man ideas you have programmed into your soul. Once you identify a false belief, then you can choose to reject it, to delete it from the program and replace it with the appropriate concept taught in the bible. This is how God designed the process of transformation to work.
