Shame and the Intuitive Art of Footwashing

May 25, 2025 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend I went and got a manicure and pedicure…the deluxe version that takes 2 hours. This has become a regular self care activity for me thanks to a couple of my coworkers who totally got me hooked on it last year. Following the completion of a 50k trail race back in March, my feet were in TERRIBLE shape and missing a couple of toenails. I wasn’t sure there was going to be much coming back from that foot trauma for a while, but as usual, the nail tech at my favorite shop worked his magic and made my feet look good enough again to embrace sandal-wearing and barefoot walking in public this summer.

While I was sitting in the massage chair, being vehemently kneaded in the back and having warm, lavender-scented foot scrub rubbed into my feet and legs, I started thinking about the stories of Jesus and foot washing in the Gospels…you know, as one automatically does when getting a pedicure. In John 13, Jesus wrapped a towel around himself, a sign of meekness and submission that would be totally unexpected from a respected rabbi, much less the Son of Man, and began to wash the feet of his disciples. Simon, the feisty disciple out of Jesus’ 12 followers, initially adamantly refused to allow Jesus to wash his feet. To which Jesus tenderly rebuked him and explained to him that his (Jesus’) message was that we are to serve each other, even in the lowliest of things, like washing the mud and grime and who knows what else from dirty feet. None of us is worthier or more important than anyone else, no matter our privilege or status.

When I was growing up listening to sermons on this story, and then as a Bible major in college, emphasis was placed on the importance of humbling oneself, letting go of ego and sense of status, and being willing to serve the least among us…those in society who may be considered unworthy, or untouchables, or generally “other” and beneath us. This interpretation is certainly a good one, and obvious from reading the gospel text; we all need to learn the lesson that we are interconnected and equally deserving, and it is good for us to learn to set aside our personal preferences and sometimes embrace any “ick” we perceive in various situations so that we can offer love and service to others. But as I was getting my feet tuned up during my pedicure, I flipped the storyline in my head and for the first time viewed foot washing from the perspective of the person having their feet washed. Foot washing, both literally and metaphorically, is a humbling and helpful practice for the washer, especially if they come from a stance of privilege and status and wellbeing. But just as, or maybe even more important, is the ability of the person having their feet washed…to allow it. Which made me think that maybe the whole point of foot washing (or general service and outreach to others, moving beyond this metaphor) is not to just reach out for the feet all those who are brave enough to strut up and stick a foot out… Maybe foot washing is about humbling ourselves to not only serve others, but also to do the harder work of gently and carefully coaxing out the ones who desperately need their feet washed but are too ashamed and afraid to reach for that help.

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For a huge chunk of my life, I had major shame issues around my feet. It’s not really relevant to go into details about why, but let’s just say it significantly affected me for a long time. Decades. As an adult, I largely got over the shame issues because they were related to a bunch of other topics I addressed in years of therapy and shadow work. However, about the same time I started getting over those shame issues, I became interested into long distance running. My toes and toenails have never been quite the same since. It took me running several marathon-length distances, especially on trails, to realize how much my feet swell at certain distances, and that my running shoes need to be at least a 1/2 size to a full size larger than the shoe size I typically wear on a daily basis. Even with bigger shoes, long distance trail running, with repeated downhill stretches, cause one’s toes to slam repeatedly into the front of the shoebox. Inevitably, blood blisters develop underneath your toenails and eventually some of those toenails will just give up the ghost and fall off. Big toenails will half break off and then never grow back quite normally; instead, they grow out thicker and with ridges.

This loss of toenails from running used to really bother me; I mean, if you’re wearing sandals during the summer and you’re missing toenails, people might not instinctively ascertain that you’re a runner and you legit earned those toenail losses by pounding mile after mile of pavement and single track. But I’m getting over this, and learning to just suck it up and ask for help in making my feet presentable. I was reluctant to go in to the nail salon the other day because of two of my missing toenails, but I did anyway, and wouldn’t you know…my summer feet were salvaged.

Now, I know that no one reading this really cares about my toenails, their color, or what shape they are in. And that’s really not the point of this post. The overall premise that I want to explore is how shame keeps people from asking for help from the people who can give it to them. And, on the flipside, the foot washers…the people who are capable of offering help….must learn to see the offering of help as an artistic practice that must be guided by empathy and love, intuition, and really good boundaries.

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Shame is the greatest cause of debility and loss of a sense of self-agency in life, in my opinion. The worst part about it is that it is often hidden behind masks of the people who carry it. Behaviors that result from shame in one’s life are so frequently misread and misunderstood by others, often leading to the shame-filled person being labeled as angry, or frigid, or snobbish, or aloof, or bitchy, or weak. It’s all the worse when the person driven by shame doesn’t KNOW they are driven by shame. To top it off, we have unspoken rules within cultures that prescribe who is allowed to admit and express that they are filled with shame, and who are told to just suck up their emotions and insecurities and get on with life. Thanks for the good reminder, Brené.

Undealt-with shame can lead to depression and other mental health disorders, anger/rage, and physical un-wellness…both as a result of self neglect and because the body has stored up trauma and unprocessed emotions for so long that it is forced to eventually express itself in the form of illness or the general manifestation of negative external events. Think The Body Keeps The Score and When The Body Says No. Even with my short time working in healthcare as a nurse and now nurse practitioner, the link between childhood trauma, complex PTSD, and the presence of autoimmune disease is so strikingly clear and obvious to me on a daily basis. But even more than autoimmune process triggering by environmental and interpersonal influences from one’s past and current circumstances, I see people who are struggling with poor health (emotional, spiritual, and physical) because they didn’t know that help was available, didn’t know what questions to ask get the help they needed, or they felt so unworthy and ashamed to ask for help, that their health issues piled up over time, eventually resulting in major un-wellness and disease in their bodies.

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The first time I saw a truly diseased foot was when I was a brand new nurse working on an ortho/trauma unit. I was in my late 30s by then, but really had little idea at the time how devastating diabetes could be to people’s extremities, especially their feet and toes. One of my patients on that unit, in my first few months of nursing, had a foot with completely necrotic toes. They were black and leathery and I remember being horrified when I was told that the physician caring for the patient expected the toes to “auto-amputate”…basically fall off on their own. In the meantime, I was to apply betadine to the toes on a daily basis to help prevent infection…my own literal task of foot washing, if you will. I had that patient for several days and prayed each day that his toes would not “auto-amputate” during my shift. I also recall wondering how and why a person could let their feet get to that terrible of shape before seeking help.

Since those first few months as a nurse, I’ve seen a ton of foot and lower extremity disease. Now, working in Infectious Disease as a nurse practitioner, I see patients with foot infections everyday, mostly resulting from uncontrolled diabetes or poor vascular flow to their lower extremities. I recall one patient who initially came to the hospital with cardiac concerns; but due to an odd smell coming from the patient, the attending physician pulled off the patient’s socks to discover a foot that was over half necrotic….tar black in color….that ultimately required a below the knee amputation. The situation was really sad, because if healthcare providers had been aware of the problem and able to intervene much sooner, the patient probably could have had at least some blood flow restored to the foot and avoided such a significant amputation.

So many people intersect with the healthcare system far too late to prevent or reverse many of their health problems. And while the reasons for this are usually complicated and numerous, I have seen countless situations where intense shame and embarrassment and a lack of self agency prevented people from reaching out for help until they were desperate and had no other choice.

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So how exactly is the act of metaphorical foot washing, or serving others who are shame-filled and desperately in need of help, an art?

I think the primary answer is that humans cannot be approached through a reductionistic, mechanistic model and be expected to achieve sustainable wellness.. Based on what I can tell and have experienced in my life, humans are complex, nuanced, layered beings who are not just a bunch of parts and systems that function together, although unfortunately, much of Western medicine approaches the subject this way. Pardon my woefully lacking knowledge of quantum physics, but I like to think of humans in terms of quantum entanglement…both in how all of the aspects of their bodies work together as well as how humans interact with each other in relationship. Simply put, quantum entanglement is the idea that particles become interconnected, such that the state of one particle affects the state of another, regardless of the distance between them. This concept has been extrapolated by some scientists and spiritual seekers, including well thought of theoretical physicists, as applying to things like intuition, the collective unconscious, empathy, synchronicities, and the possibility that we are all part of a larger, more organized, whole. I’m currently reading Wholeness and the Implicate Order by the late physicist David Bohm, and having my mind blown.

Formulas don’t apply to human healing…physically or emotionally. Now, for sure, at some level, there are general principles of medical therapy that tend to produce similar results. We have evidence of this through well designed and executed scientific studies and research. As for psychological and spiritual healing, we have general archetypal patterns we can reference, as well as various therapy modalities that we can offer to people that appear to “work” and help them overcome personal struggles, traumatic events, move forward in personal growth, etc. Some psychotropic drugs appear to offer relief from anxiety, mood disorders, and depressive states, at least for a while. We have medical protools and treatment guidelines that often move patients in the general direction we want them to go as evidenced by labs, imaging, and their overall clinical pictures. But ultimately, healing…in all the ways it is needed, is not achieved through a one-size fits all approach. Even “alternative’ avenues like psychedelics, breathwork, Reiki, and other “non-medical” mind-body modalities offer dramatic change in some people while seeming to barely affect others.

The art of foot washing is not to just indiscriminately give out what we currently have to offer (or what we THINK we have to offer) to those in front of us who need help. This art, rather, involves some deep introspection on the part of the washer, to be able to read situations and intentions, perceive what may be needed or not needed in various settings, understand as best they can their own motivations, and be able to synthesize both analytical and intuitive knowledge in how they interact with the person whose “feet are being washed”. The idea of “intuitive art”, as described in this post’s title involves approaching service via a creative process that includes spontaneity, creativity, the ability to trust one’s “gut”, focusing on the journey and not just the final result, being open to experimentation (ethically, of course), and all of this done in a non-judgemental space….basically the exact opposite approach than that of interacting with others through a reductionist, mechanistic, black and white model. Whew…sorry for that really long sentence!

The following are a few considerations that came to mind that I think we must ask in order to creatively respond to and approach service to others, especially when shame is involved:

What do we, as the “foot washer” have to offer the person (or people) in front of us? What are we skilled at? What are we trained in? What are we absolutely not qualified to talk about or give advice about? How much time do we legitimately have to offer this person? Are we tapped into our intuition and do we trust ourselves and our instincts? Are we able to determine what role is ours to play in any specific situation?
Are we aware of the things that influence us personally and how we interact with others? Are we aware of our implicit biases? Are we aware of our own shadows? Do we have a history of specific traumas that might impact how we approach and interact with this person? Do we have any codependency issues? Are we aware of any lingering shame that WE carry and haven’t healed? Are we able to listen without judgements? Are we able to offer help without inappropriately becoming emotionally involved and overly invested in the situation? Do we approach life through a “right versus wrong” model or rules-based mindset? Have we every considered our attachment styles and how that might influence all of our relationships? Do we have healthy interpersonal boundaries and stick to them? Do we have a good sense of where we end and another person starts? Do we feel like it is our job to “fix” people?
Most important of all: has this person invited us or given permission for us to offer any level of help? Is the person we are aiming to help READY to receive help? Are they ready to receive help from US? Are we opinion-spewing all over them or have they asked us for our thoughts and insights? For those of us who engage in energy work and medical intuitive practices, have they given us clear permission to look within them and their energy patterns? Is the timing for helping right? Is the setting right? Are we inadvertently or unintentionally pressuring or manipulating the person to take help from us when they aren’t wanting it or aren’t ready for it? On the flip side, is the person asking for too much of us…beyond what we are capable of giving, wanting to give, or can appropriately give?

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So, clearly, that long list of questions implies that foot washing and service, as an art, is not necessarily easy. To do it well, we have to be good listeners and observers, to not be afraid to look deeply at our own “stuff”, and to be able to perceive what belongs to us and what belongs to others. Below are a couple of areas I want to extrapolate on related to the questions above – not all tied directly to each other, but definitely related, and not in any particular order. I’m not necessarily coming to any conclusions these extrapolations, but mostly thinking about how they might tie into the idea behind this whole post.

Service to others, especially in working with others who are experiencing shame (or are in a position often considered “less than” by our society, such as minority status, poverty, etc), requires that we let go of our egos and what may make us as foot washers feel good. Little side story: I grew up in the church, got a Bible degree, have been on some mission trips to various places, and have generally experienced alot of American-flavored Christianity as a whole. Something that has been very popular for decades is for folks from the US to go on short-term mission trips around the world, whether it be medical, to hold revivals, to support local long term missionaries, etc. At my current age, looking back over my years active involved in churches and these kinds of activities, I have alot of thoughts about the usefulness of mission trips. There are some absolute benefits for sure….they often open the eyes of people about the way others around the world live, and the struggles they may have that differ from those in our country. I can say personally that short term mission trips changed me as a person for the better and had a direct influence on how I wanted to live my life. And, short term medical mission trips, for example, can offer some quality, concentrated medical care to needed areas and people groups that they might not have otherwise gotten. BUT…there is a danger in providing these kinds of “services”, especially when we don’t evaluate our motivations, understand the culture we are serving, or when we drop in for a week or two to a complicated situation and then easily fly back home without having to wrestle with long term implications of how our little trips might have affected the people we left behind. I kind of suspect that short term mission trips, church-based or not, have frequently done as much damage as they have good, largely because it is very easy for us to, even unconsciously, feel like saviors going to help those poor people less fortunate than us. These kinds of trips don’t always stop and look carefully at what is actually needed in a certain area by specific people at a given time, but enthusiastically bombard them with what WE THINK they need and want.
Trying to serve people who struggle with shame can be so complicated for so many reasons. As mentioned earlier, some people can hide their shame so well, because they are high functioning and so nobody on the periphery may ever know they need help. Mental health issues can also dramatically influence the “foot washing process”, especially if the shame filled person has a personality disorder like border-line, or is just really needy because of anxious or other fear-based attachments. As I look back on my 20s and early 30s, I can see that I, in some ways, was a pretty needy person. Which makes me cringe because I personally know how hard it can be to have needy people in your life. I think when people who are dealing with shame, like I did for so long, see others outside of them who might be able to help either carry the burden of the shame or actually help heal it (foot washers), we (those who need our feet washed) can really latch on tight and ask for too much of the foot washers.
- This is where really good boundaries are important. People who are healing from shame often take a while to learn that healing is an inside job: they can receive help and insight and advice from those around them, but they actually have to do the hard work of healing themselves. Shame makes us desperately want a savior, a white knight to come and fix things for us and take care of us. But that’s not the way life works. Nobody is coming to save us. We must be our own saviors. Someone who understands the intuitive art of foot washing knows this, and will keep boundaries in place…making sure that each party knows what is an isn’t theirs. Side note: when we actually learn we can save ourselves….self-agency and trust in ourselves just grows exponentially.
- I’ve frequently looked back over my own life and the healing journey from shame that I’ve been on. I recognized that the people that inspired me the most to grow and become the person I am now where not the people who were emotionally entangled with me and had terrible boundaries. Nor were they the people who were there any time I thought I needed them. Nor were they the people who tried to “fix” me. Nope…the people that prompted the biggest growth in my life were those that had solid boundaries: they knew who they were and what they had to offer; they also had alot of faith in me and what I could be come, but they were not so invested that their sense of wellbeing and satisfaction was at all a function of how I was doing emotionally or physically. The people that helped changed my life gave me help when I needed it, but then expected me to continue to do my own work and to go search out other resources. And most of all, I was inspired to change by them by how I saw them live their lives…secure in themselves, curious and open-minded about everything, with a strong trust in their own intuition and gut instincts and self-worth.
I think we all need to work on our perceptions of others, and remember that what we see on the outside of a person is not necessarily indicative of all that is going on on in the inside. This is where intuition is so key: tapping into unseen knowledge that is all around us in the universe that might not be explicitly measured, but it real nonetheless. I think about this alot when caring for patients. For some complicated patients, it would be easy to just write them off as lazy or non-compliant with medical recommendations and prescribed medications, or as people who just make really dumb decisions in life that caused them to end up where they currently are. I think this reductionistic way of thinking, even though I can also be prone to it myself at times, is a really unhelpful way to view humanity. I refuse to believe that people intentionally try to make bad decisions and make their lives more difficult. I am convinced that people generally do the best they know how at the time with the information they have with their perspectives on that information, and that un-dealt with shame can be a noose around people’s necks until others help them recognize and transform it.
- Intuitive foot washing, per my musing during my pedicure, is the idea of seeing the ‘thing behind the thing”, which requires tuning in to who you are serving, using more than just the five senses…and learning to recognize that your perception of a person’s reality may not at all be what they are experiencing. The “thing behind the thing” is the real deep-seated emotions and beliefs that drive behaviors and how one interacts with the world. In my experience, when one has deep shame about something, it can influence a variety of external behaviors and reactions to the environment around them, and we need to hold alot of grace for them for all of that.
  - When people claim to be angry about something, or afraid of something, or annoyed by something…there is almost always a “thing behind the thing” that is really bothering them. It is almost always related to a core wound or big area of shame that hasn’t healed, and even they might not be aware of that core wound “thing behind the thing” that is driving their emotions or actions or beliefs.
- And, going back to quantum physics from earlier: we as the observer of the person in front of us are not objective. We individually can’t ever claim to have a grasp on “true” reality or have an absolute understanding of what is going on with a person or their environment. This is because there is a ton of information about that person that we aren’t privy to, but also because reality is subjective and is based on the relationship between us (the observer) and the person we are observing.

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I’ve kind of gone all over the place with this post, so will start wrapping it up now, but may come back with more thoughts on this topic in the future. I’ve really only scratched the surface of all I want to talk about here. In my nerd-ery, I like to think of these kinds of posts that I sometimes write as another form of quantum entanglement: I go to do something mundane and everyday, like getting. a pedicure, and then suddenly my thought process jets off into what might initially seem to be completely un-related, and I am ultimately reminded that all things are interconnected, no matter how distant they might appear at the macroscopic level.

I am incredibly grateful to all of the people in my own life who have helped me identify my past shame and heal from it, all while maintaining their own strong boundaries and showing me what it means to trust oneself, develop securely attached relationships, and learn to ask for help in healthy, appropriate ways when it is most needed.

And I am super grateful nail techs who can make my feet pretty again after I’ve beaten them bloody doing the things I love to do.

To grow exponentially, shame absolutely needs three things: secrecy, silence, and judgment. Shame cannot survive two things: being spoken and being met with empathy.” -Brené Brown

I’m Pretty Sure I’m Harder On Myself Than You Could Ever Be…

May 22, 2018May 22, 2018 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

Photo credit: Frankieleon

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

-Brené Brown

You know how Jesus famously told his followers in Matthew 7:1 not to judge? And then how we have only taken that half seriously? Because we often give others tremendous grace and then lash our own backs with a cat-o-nine tails whip of shame, self-deprecation, self-loathing, and repeated mantras of how unworthy, stupid, and ridiculous we are.

OK, maybe YOU personally don’t do this, but trust me, I’m not the only one out there who judges themselves more harshly than the rest of the world could ever possibly. I meet people on a very regular basis who fight a constant battle against demons within their own minds about their self-worth. I once thought that Satan was a real being. But now I know what the Accuser really is: it is all the lies that we’ve been told about ourselves, and all the traumas we’ve experienced and were never counseled through; it is all of our internalized fears and failures that have never had an avenue for expression and the chance for the light of truth to be shed on them…all of these tangle together into a dark web of, dare I say, evil?, in our minds that taunt us and judge us and hinder us from grasping on to the divine within us.

Some days, like yesterday, I sink into a state of despair where all I can see when I look back on my life is failure upon failure upon failure. It’s the kind of despair that paralyzes your breathing and your mind plays a non-stop reel of memory after memory where you could have done better, acted more kindly, been more patient. And after the reel slows, you teeter on the edge of panic, knowing that you won’t get a do-over. Your kids won’t get younger; you can’t undo the decisions you made that have lingering consequences; you can’t ask the questions of your dead loved ones that you should have asked years ago. As far as we can tell on this side of death, we only get this one shot at this life. (Who knows, maybe there are parallel universes where we’re living the same lives but making different choices…I find that doubtful.)

I called my best friend for help; she is brilliant, is a therapist, and knows these places of despair intimately. She reminded me using the rational mindset she always takes when dealing with my life drama, that my despair and self-judging of myself to be a failure is a learned behavior. The reason my mind can only remember my mistakes and failures in the past is because that is what it was trained to do. The neural grooves of my brain have been firmly set over the years, and so the paths of self-hatred and judgment are much easier trails for electrical signals to travel down then trying to forge new paths of self-acceptance, and reframing, and learning to focus on the things I’ve done right and well.

I am getting better over the years at being easier on myself, and not sitting in self-judgment for as long as I used to. But I still face the same triggers again and again and know that only by being aware of the pain and discomfort that comes with them will I be able to rise against the shadow monster in my mind.

Here’s an example, maybe you can relate:

This last week I had a nursing clinical to attend based on a varying schedule. On the day of the clinical I looked at the schedule twice, but somehow managed to misread it twice, and thus retained incorrect information about where I was supposed to be and when. I’ve prided myself on the fact that so far in this program, barring ice storms with resulting standstill traffic, I haven’t been late or missed any school or clinical events.

On this particular clinical day I made my way to my afternoon session only to find that I was 45 minutes late – and all the while I had thought I was 15 minutes early. I made a quick explanation to my preceptor, who I don’t think was particularly thrilled with me….and the self-judgment commenced.

For the next hour and a half I struggled against the lies and self-deprecating thoughts that came flooding down my brain’s pipeline: “Julie, how could you be so stupid; Julie only horrible people are late for clinicals (this is a stupid thought from the start because I don’t generally judge other people for being late to clinicals); Julie, you’ve just defined your character to your preceptor – you’re irresponsible, have substandard morals, and possess poor character.”

It’s totally like the “devil on one shoulder and angel on the other” image. My brain projects an untruth out in front of me, and the little bit of me that is learning to discern my true-self musters up the courage to refute those accusing comments. And it really seems like a battle…I have to force those signals in my brain to go off-road from their traditionally laid paths and forge new connections that are based in new beliefs. I can almost feel my brain heating up in exertion when I do this. Anyone feeling me here? Know that I”m talking about?

The good news is, this struggle is getting easier over time. If the above scenario had happened to me a couple of years ago, I would have shamed myself for the next three days before finally feeling some relief. But that particular day I was able to let go of my self-judgment after only two hours, accepting that I had made a mistake but that it offered no real reflection of my true character and intentions. I simply needed to apologize and make corrections for the future to try to make sure similar things don’t happen again. And my preceptor – she may or may not have formed a poor opinion of me for the rest of my life, but that’s really out of my control.

For the population of we people who are cruel and harsh with ourselves…it’s because we’ve never learned to question our thoughts. We think we ARE OUR THOUGHTS. But there is a real YOU, and a real ME, that reside beneath our thoughts, separate from them. Our thoughts are simply streams of consciousness that pass through our minds, random lava flows of miscellany from all the stored up memories, knowledge, and experiences bound up in synapses. And all of those stored bits and pieces are there in particular forms because of how we perceive the outside world and what happens to us – they aren’t definitive truth and reality.

Back to Jesus and judging…the end of his statement is “lest you be judged.” I really don’t think here that he means God will judge you. And I don’t necessarily think he means that you will be judged based on a one to one ratio for every time you judge. I really think it’s all about attitude and perspective on life. Even though it may sound a bit woo-wooey, I believe on some level we manifest stuff in our lives. Or maybe, as a different way to frame it, we unconsciously seek out those things that align with the way we understand the world.

For example, if we believe the universe to be stingy and stacked against us, we will project that onto everything we come across and thus truly experience it as stingy and mean. But, if we perceive life to be one of abundance and the universe as good, then we will see those qualities in everything we encounter. The same is true in our interactions with people: if we view ourselves or others through a lens of judgment, we will see whatever comes to us through that same judgment lens. So ultimately, Jesus isn’t just giving us another injunction to govern our external behavior. He is trying to teach us that how we see the world and approach the world is how we will perceive the world is treating us.

So, if you’re anything like me…if you berate yourself regularly, if you are harder on yourself than any other person has ever been with you, if all you can see are your mistakes and not your wins…you need to commence with some hard questioning of all that comes down the thought pipeline that you grab onto without thinking. A huge help to me with this has been The Work of Byron Katie. This systematic inquiry practice has shown me that if you relentlessly question everything that happens to you, it is easier to see what is really true and what is just the story we believe about ourselves and the world around us.

Shaming Yourself Over Past Decisions

April 30, 2018May 4, 2018 ~ juliemonroe1980 ~ Leave a comment

Photo credit: Morgan Thompson

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”
— Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)

I went for lunch after church yesterday with a good friend. It was finally warm enough to eat outside, and so we did, but still sat as close to the outdoor fire pit as possible.

I always appreciate it, when you get to the point in friendships where you can bypass small talk and get straight at what you really want to discuss, what is really pressing and feels most important at the time -when you don’t have to lay groundwork to have meaningful conversation. Besides, there’s been more than enough conversation about the weather over the last few months to cover the rest of the year.

As my friend and I ate, we talked about the things that are currently giving us anxiety – the unforeseen things that lay out of ahead of us that we can’t control. We looked back at decisions we made months and years ago and ask if they were the right decisions. Did they set us up for the unsettlement we feel right now, or will they one day prove to be the right decisions all along?

When people ask me why I did certain things throughout my life, I respond that they seemed like good ideas at the time. And this is true. I don’t tend to make a habit of willingly making stupid decisions that I know will precipitate unfavorable consequences, at least not regarding decisions that carry alot of weight. Even so, in the attempt to make good decisions, I’ve made some really bad ones.

One of my great struggles in life is shaming myself for past decisions that didn’t turn out so well. The old adage says that hindsight is 20/20, but that’s not entirely true in my case. I have much stronger vision for pinpointing every single mistake I made and beating myself up over them year after year after year. My memory occludes the good choices I have made – the places where I stopped going in an unhelpful direction and purposely turned and started walking on a better path, or the times when I actually exhibited some stellar parenting skills, or the times when I really loved people unselfishly.

Nope, in my mind I can only see where I failed my kids, my friends, and myself. If only I had done this thing… If only I had said this instead of that… If only I had just walked away….or come closer.

I recognize that alot of my self-shaming and anxiety come about because of beliefs I internalized at a young age. For one, I believed for years that God had a narrowly defined path for each of us to take in life, and it was our job to find and stay on that path, lest we risk screwing everything up. I also grew up in a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” culture that offered little grace for mistakes and fumbling around trying to find one’s path. This kind of worldview only served to help me continue to fail. How could I ever stay on that one narrow path? How could I suck it up and gut my way through life when I didn’t understand how life works?

Fortunately for me, my understanding of God and failure and bad decisions has morphed over time. I’m gradually beginning to see those poor decisions of the past to be good things, in the sense that they have become my teachers. I still sometimes doubt myself, and wonder if certain choices I made are going to cause everything to blow up in my face at some point. But when I’m at my best, I look at those “mistakes” through the following lenses.

I did the best I could with the information I had at the time.

I know I’m not the only person that does this – looking back on something we did or a choice we made and berating ourselves for not having taken some important fact or piece of information into consideration. What I usually discover, though, is that particular fact usually isn’t available until after we’ve made out decision. In essence, we shame ourselves for not making decisions based on information that we either don’t know or doesn’t exist yet. That is just lunacy, really.

I think this kind of shaming is made worse considering how much information we have readily available at our fingertips these days with technology and The Google. I know that I often unconsciously think that I just put in the right search phrase, or read the right book or website, or listen to the right person, I’ll find the answer I need for a particular decision. I conclude, if I can’t find that answer, it’s because I didn’t search hard enough.

In many ways, this ‘information at your fingertips in less than 10 seconds” has not served us well because it keeps us frantically searching…or, at least it does this to me. We need to be able to offer ourselves the grace to stop the information search at some point, make the necessary decision, and go with it, come whatever may. To qutoe Theodore Roosevelt (and I haven’t fact-checked that he actually said, but it’s still true): “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” That’s all we can do. We humans are not omniscient.

2. My mistakes and “bad” decisions are my teachers because they show me what doesn’t work.

I read somewhere a long time ago that Thomas Edison said something about not viewing his invention failures as real problems because they taught him what doesn’t work. Putting a positive framing on these kinds of things can really make all the difference, especially if you have the right end goal in mind.

The goal of life is not to be perfect, at least not in the traditional sense of the word where we only do things the right way, offering up beautiful, always up to standard, results. This is entirely unrealistic, and misses the whole point of being human…or divine, for that matter. A much more helpful way to look at perfection is the idea of completeness. The goal in life, I think, is to become complete, integrated, and whole. This takes some work and alot of grace, and it certainly doesn’t happen through getting everything “right” all the time. We become complete and whole by doing shadow work (see Carl Jung) and wrestling with the sides of ourselves that we don’t always want to see or acknowledge. When we face our “bad” decisions, we are at a wonderful gateway to begin facing and uncovering the aspects of ourselves that are in pain and need healing and integration.

“It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

3. Who are we to say with certainty what is good, or what is bad?

I’ve quoted him a billion times, but my favorite saying of Richard Rohr is “Everything belongs.” If this is true, and I believe it is, it means that there is nothing that is not redeemable. God wastes nothing. How, then, can anything be completely, and eternally, bad? OK, all of you people that are immediately wanting to ask me questions about the bad-ness of rape, and war, and the Holocaust…I saw that coming. And I ask the same myself – how can those not be bad? At some level, they are horrible, un-excusable, evil, wretched. But I firmly believe, that somehow, God can envelop them, hold them, and incorporate them into goodness. I don’t know how; it’s a mystery. After reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, written about the Holocaust, I’m convinced that deeper meaning and good can be found when you push through the horrors that appear on the surface of life.

I also look to the idea of yin and yang from the Tao. Now, I”m certainly not a Taoist, or expert in Eastern thought, but it holds meaning for me. This is what I can see from the little I understand:

Opposites, or the dual nature of things, balance each other out. They create wholeness when brought together
There are no absolutes in life, everything is interconnected. It would be difficult to say that something is completely all bad, or all good, especially when we have a limited understanding of life and can only see one little piece of the proverbial elephant, as it were. We judge good and bad through our own filters.
Everything is changing and is in a state of process – what is now may be something different later.

And to end this point I’m attaching a famous Buddhist story I’ve heard many times from various people that makes the point quite well, I think. I stole this exact version from David Allen.

One day a man’s horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is clearly terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.

But the horse comes back the next day and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.

And this story can go on and on like that. Good. Bad. Who knows?

Moral of this post? We need to stop shaming ourselves over our perceived mistakes. We’re OK, and if we’re wise we’ll know to learn from everything that happens to us. And for all of us that worry that our choices might ruin our kids lives (and I”m preaching to myself here):

God (Life, the Universe, whatever you call it) is working harder for our children than we are
We don’t know everything; there is no way we can completely predict what will hurt our children or make them stronger. Those little guys are amazingly resilient.
Apologize frequently, ask for feedback, praise them often, and teach them how to contact a therapist when they are adults.

Back to lunch with my friend. We are usually much harder on ourselves than others are. My friend beats herself up over choices and worries about how she will handle certain circumstances that the future might bring. I, as a somewhat objective outsider, am wicked impressed with so many of the hard, difficult decisions she’s made…who cares if they turn out perfectly or not. I’m inspired by her bravery to step out and do life, and be creative, and love others.

Yes, there will be people who will love to point out our flaws and where we royally screwed up in life. But to quote the wonderful Brené Brown:

“UnMarketing: “Don’t try to win over the haters; you’re not the jackass whisperer.” And.. “Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead