Ian Crohn, lecturer and teacher of the Enneagram has a famous line, “what helped you in the morning of life constricts and kills you in the afternoon of life.”
Everyone has a story…yours is still being written. True and enduring change can happen through your story and your personality and should your entire life and would your entire life if you got serious about “challenging” your childhood beliefs or better said, run everything through your adult filter of what is really true about what Jesus says about you and your life and not what others have told you out of rote or repetition or because that’s all they knew. I wrote about this subject in different detail in a prior blog here: https://shanecraven.blog/childish-adults/
There comes a time when your faith has to stand on its own and what that childhood Sunday School teacher told you has to be vetted. A good system is to drop the following filters into your daily life…
Why you think it…who told you that…why did they tell you that…what is their background…do they have credibility on this subject…are they emotionally mature or were they just protecting their reputation to get you to stay “good”…that’s not what Jesus taught…what did Jesus say about that subject…that worked for me until I got married…that doesn’t work anymore…maybe when I was single but not as a married couple…or most importantly, that teaching in my life has no basis in the scripture at all.
markers to use daily
If you are stubborn, you will stop right here and read no further because you are “done” changing in your own mind, and you are going to keep doing it the way you have always done it thus sacrificing becoming ALL God designed you to be…what if He has a person for you to become, that you cannot even envision yet of becoming but He would like to slowly introduce you to your new self? Would you want to become that person? It’s a difficult journey by which to arrive but you can do it, if you remain focused and open. Please do not feel it dishonors your upbringing. Please do not default to your preserving your rigid past versus looking for your future best self that God had in mind before sin infiltrated the garden and the foundation of the world. YOU CAN BECOME YOUR BEST VERSION OF THE SELF GOD MADE!
Ian says it this way: “Narrative Therapy teaches if you can know the story around which you have organized your life, then you can begin to play with it a little bit; you can’t change the facts of how you grew up (alcoholic father or rules-oriented religion), but you can change the way you interpret them. Your initial interpretation of your story is through the lens of a child and because children are narcissists developmentally, they think ‘I am as I am treated’ or ‘I am what you say I am.’ At a young age, we are Velcro for negative messages and Teflon for positive messages in our moldable lives. The problem is, most of our molding is just the negativity bias of human beings or the opinion bias of human beings, unless deeply founded on Jesus Christ. And, even then, some of that teaching was just rules, rituals, and religious law. Additionally, many times, but not in every situation, those people that helped shape our lives had zero attunement to emotions or managing their own emotions. So, for most of us, the story upon which we’ve based our lives, isn’t true.”
Stay with me…let that sink in for a minute.
Let’s try to make it even more clear: If you grew up believing that the world only values people for WHAT they do and not WHO they are…that then becomes the theme and premise of the story in your life. Because the message you heard growing up was, it’s not ok to have your own feelings or your own identity, it’s only ok for you to fulfill the role the important people told you to have in your life (this is what you picked up as a message) to become the person they wanted you to be in order to meet their needs.
Or, if a child is praised by a dad for being a good sports player, and the child can sense the disappointment from their mother for a bad grade, then the kid hears “If I want to be loved I must succeed at everything.” Then, this becomes the premise of the child’s story, FOREVER. Now, don’t discount that story because it helped that child survive growing up and gave them a sense of self, identity, achieving, and security…BUT, if you are carrying this all the way into adulthood and you are still playing this story at 25, 35, 45, 55…what helped you in the morning of life constricts and kills you in the afternoon of life. That story doesn’t work in adulthood.
Here are some messages and stories you may have received in childhood:
- It’s not ok to make mistakes. THAT story was never true. As a kid, it gave you something to work with, but it won’t work in adulthood.
- Meet the needs of others because it’s not ok to have your own needs. This is not a true story. It’s impossible. You will only become co-dependent on others, never becoming your true self. Yes, we are to serve and “love as Jesus loved” but in order to do so, you have to have compassion and love for yourself first. A person has to learn to “know” and “own” themselves and “experience” themselves. In order to win here, you must love yourself first, and you must tunnel through the age-old rock formations of childhood neurological beliefs that often are not what you really believe anymore and they are not what Jesus teaches in full. You have to get honest and serious about discovery. This is the hard work because we are deeply, deeply conditioned…just because you default a certain way doesn’t mean it’s God’s chosen way for you…what does Jesus say?
- It’s not ok to have your own identity. You have to become something for someone else and appear successful. That’s a dangerous message if you are still living that in adulthood. It’s a sad message. You can then become unethical to do anything to succeed.
- Don’t do, do this, don’t. That’s not entirely true. The danger here is that when you hard wire “don’t or do” day in and day out into the brain of a teenage girl or boy, it’s hard to unteach that in covenant marriage and what worked as a single young Christian teen will not be valuable to you in marriage. Therefore, to be frank, males and females then have a very difficult time re-programming sexually to what God taught in covenant marriage. This leads Christian couples to have a hard time exploring new, different, and what appears to be “taboo” avenues in their married life, but really are normal as described by God. This has the capacity to lead a marriage into boredom, laziness, mid-life crisis predicaments, and into a downward spiral of continual chaos and dissatisfaction. So, one has to learn to reprogram their childhood brain with new “pathways” for adulthood. Did you know that many couples have no idea what Song of Solomon really says, and they have never even heard one sermon from the book? Most pastors won’t touch it for fear of losing their job!
So, as an adult, you must learn what I’m teaching here in order to morph into the next season. It’s not that childhood teaching is wrong; it works in that season, but much of it has to be re-thought in adulthood for you to be successful.
James says, “The time comes when you have to let go of childish things.”
Stop making decisions in such ways as to please your original caretakers, family of origin, and your original family. God has a better way! It’s difficult because of brain wiring…it’s not disrespectful, it’s scriptural…”a man will leave his father and mother…” You now have a new family: the family of God. That childhood story you keep trying to live is a false story and if you don’t let go of this, you will always be a child in your thinking and you will make decisions as an adult that will paralyze your future, your career, where you move, following your dream, making hopes, dreams, and desires come true for you and your spouse, your marriage, and your relationships. More importantly, you will have become “molded in the image of your upbringing” verses “being molded into the image of God.” There must be a hard stop in this area.
Memories are great! Future memories of what you become will be even greater! The scripture teaches “the best is yet to come.” You have heard people say, “I am living my best life right now.” You should be!!!
When you find yourself living in the wrong story, LEAVE. You can’t be your TRUE SELF if you are living in a FALSE STORY!!!
This is what we call “Discipleship” – you then become the person that the person who hung on a cross designed you to be not what your grandmother thinks you should be. It takes a lifetime to evolve and morph into the best version of yourself and for that to happen, you need to set out on a course of learning, growth, and filtering in everything you believe through the correct scriptural filters. It takes time and it takes hard work, and it won’t please everyone…listen well, ask questions well, and absorb well, then change well. You may disappoint some, but make sure you please ONE…your Heavenly Father.
Eternity then becomes an earthly utopia less about “fire insurance” and more about living eternity now and today full of mindfulness, peace, presence, and joy, so that when we “graduate” to our eternal home, it is a very seamless transition…we then, in fact, did our best to become our best!
It’s okay for you to be different, new, fresh, and evolving into what looks like an entirely different person than you were at 16 or 25 or 42…it is!!! In fact, it’s God’s life mission for your life!!! You CAN Change. You should change. Not for the sake of just saying you did, but because you cannot arrive at the desired and unknown destination without it!!! It happens one day at a time!
