I used to be really mean.
I used to be really mean.
Seriously, I was an unkind person. And I knew that I was. And it bothered me. But my meanness was not something I had the courage to fully surrender until recent years. What does courage have to do with being kind? Because worry, anxiety, and fear tend to make us unkind people… they, more often than not, lead to meanness. Anxious people are irritable. Chronically worried people are primarily concerned with survival, not the quality of their relationships. And they are usually just not very nice.
I’ve shared many times before, I lost my mother to cancer a couple months after I began my Kindergarten year. This obviously had a profound impact on my childhood and I remember always feeling as if I was different. I felt like my friends had something I didn’t and I remember feeling very different and even inadequate… not good enough because I was missing a very big and important part of my life.
Since becoming a mom myself, and knowing the extent of my relationship with my children, I understand on an even deeper level how losing my mom impacted me. My husband is a wonderful father, but moms and dads are different in the things they provide for their children. Mothers are, by nature, nurturers. We understand feelings and emotions in a way that most fathers cannot. And I think that is why when we think of unconditional love, mothers come to mind. Because there’s something about having someone that you know will love you along with all your very realest emotions that just feels safe… knowing that there is someone who you can tell anything to and they will find a way to understand. Fathers are providers and protectors, and mothers are compassionate and tend to focus on emotional well-being. And of course, this is typically… obviously every parent-child relationship is different.
Understanding this has helped me to understand my younger self better and has shed some light on my former meanness. Our brains develop around the environment and circumstances they are raised in. If the brain thinks that we are missing something, or something is a threat, it will attempt to compensate or work to protect us. Losing my mom at a young age left me with a fear of not belonging, not being accepted, and not being loved unconditionally, and I can understand that better now by understanding the extent of the unconditional love that I lost. So how did my brain learn to compensate for that? By being mean. Being so consumed with being accepted and needing to feel important that I was overly sensitive to a perception of rejection (I say perception because, most of the time, the “rejection” was not real at all). Shutting people out and cutting them off over small things that didn’t matter instead of working through conflict. Being entirely too concerned with what other people thought about me so that I was self-conscious and struggled with self-esteem… my whole self-worth was based on whether or not I thought other people approved. And when I thought they didn’t approve? Depression, anxiety… more cutting people off. Being someone I wasn’t just to try and fit in. Not really knowing who I was for a long time because I based my personality on being who I thought other people wanted me to be. Feeling depressed and then angry if I thought I was being left out. Not being able to accept help because I interpreted people trying to help me as thinking I’m not good enough. Always wanting recognition, attention for something, just to feel valid. Feeling overly competitive with other people so much so that I couldn’t be genuinely happy for others’ accomplishments because I was worried about being left behind, unimportant, and forgotten. The list goes on and on.
You see, we all have an innate need to be loved unconditionally. We are born needing to be loved just as much as needing to eat or sleep. Being loved unconditionally by our mother is our first taste of the unconditional love we have from our Heavenly Father. God created us to know how to love others by first receiving love. But sometimes this gets broken, and we don’t receive the love from our earthly parents that we were intended. As a result, we may have a very difficult time understanding and receiving that love from God. We know that we need unconditional love so, in a panic, we try to force it or compensate for not having it, just like I did. But, ironically, as I have learned, we end up becoming unkind people that just push others away. We then reinforce the internal belief that we are not wanted, and so the vicious cycle continues.
But when we know we are loved unconditionally by God, we can have peace. God is unchanging, He isn’t going anywhere, there is nothing we could do to make Him love us less, and we can be confident that He created us with PURPOSE… there is no need to compete with anyone because God has a plan for each and every one of us. We can walk with confidence when we KNOW we are loved.
We can have that knowledge, but many of us struggle with barriers that keep us from really accepting it. For me, I had to understand that my brain has been pre-wired to fear being left behind, left out, and inadequate because of experiences during my childhood. When I began to understand and realize why I’ve had such a difficult time being a kind person in the past, I could finally get to a place to where I was able to receive and believe in God’s unconditional love for me. Of course, I still struggle with this, but I can recognize when it’s happening. Could this realization have happened sooner? Of course.
But sometimes we get so focused on what we THINK is survival that we don’t realize we are actually contributing to our own destruction.
And this is why I’m so passionate about my work as a therapist and helping others to understand how they have been impacted by early life events. Many people still view mental health as nothing but making excuses. And some people may just use it as an excuse… but those people have likely not yet reached the point where they are ready to make a change.
In order to really change something, we have to understand it first. And I think God truly wants us to understand how we have been impacted by the things we’ve been through, because it ultimately teaches us more about the importance of love and the dangers of fear. Many mental health challenges can be traced back to a fear of not being loved, and it’s not easy for many people to believe that God loves them when they were not loved well as a child. Self-reflection and self-work aren’t easy.
Children have a natural draw to imagination and to believe in things that defy what we know of nature and logic… fairies, Santa Clause, mermaids… etc. C.S. Lewis said that “The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.” Luke 18:17 states, “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Because children have a natural inclination to just believe. Children also have a natural and innate desire to be loved. And just as their inclination toward imagination prepares them to have faith in a God they can’t see, being loved well prepares them to be able to believe and receive that they are unconditionally loved by God. So, what happens when the love isn’t there, as it should have been? It may be much more difficult for them to believe, later in life, that God loves them and, in turn, have a difficult time being a loving person to others. We have to first receive love to know how to give love.
I’ve believed in God for as long as I can remember but don’t think I’ve truly been a follower of Christ until recent years. Because fear kept me from submitting and from really believing. And that’s the real, vulnerable truth.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35
The way we treat other people, and how kind we are, says a lot about where we are in our faith. We all have moments when we may not be the nicest, because we’re human and imperfect. But, if you find that you are, in general, an unkind person, like I was, I challenge you to spend some time reflecting on what is keeping you from truly believing that you are loved. And I encourage you to find a pastor or a therapist to help you on that journey, because it’s not easy and it takes work.
If you’ve been the victim of someone being mean and unkind, I hope you find comfort in knowing it’s not about you. Unkind people are struggling with something. Our world needs kindness more than ever. And we need, more than ever, to really reflect on what it is that is keeping us from being kind ourselves.
