YOUR LIFE A-Z:PERCEPTION

WHAT EYES ARE YOU LOOKING THROUGH

PERCEPTION

PERCEPTION matters.  PERCEPTION is an amazing ability to sense a situation (any) through your senses, which also include your biography and biology.  For instance if you have a history of not being heard or understood, perhaps you have developed a PERCEPTION that what you have to say is very uninteresting and that you are not as smart as though around you.  That PERCEPTION is dangerous and harmful to your self-esteem and it hurts you.  Instead, maybe you have been around very self-absorbed people.  So, always question your PERCEPTIONS.  How did you come to believe certain things?  When did you come to believe certain things?  For instance if you were four years old when you PERCEIVED that the world was out to hurt you, and perhaps the age of four was very hurtful.  However, at the age of twenty-nine you will need to update your PERCEPTION.  You have many more options as a twenty-nine year old than you did as a four year old.  PERCEPTIONS really do affect your belief system and how you see the world and yourself.   Thus, it is important to examine your perceptions and update them based on the reality of your life as it exist today.  Facts and truth are always filtered through your internal belief system and it is best to compare the facts to what really exist in the world around you.  A four year inside of you should not be ruling your adult life.  Developmental stages make a difference to how you come to believe what you believe. 

YOUR LIFE A-Z:FAITH

ALL THINGS ARE SOLVED BY WALKING...

FAITH

FAITH is a word that often is tossed around in religious venues.  FAITH also implies a complete trust and confidence in a person you are in close relationship.   As the TWENTY-MINUTE COACH, I am going to introduce you to the James Fowler’s work, The Stages of FAITH.   Fowler outlines stages of FAITH just like Erik Erickson teaches about developmental stages of growing up.  Fowler contends that we grow up in our FAITH.   The six stages are:

Stage 0 (0-2) Primal –Undifferentiated where babies learn to trust or mistrust the environment

Stage I  (3-5) Intuitive-Projective struggles between imagination and logic

Stage II (school age) Mythic-Literal very concrete about justice and fairness

Stage III (12-adulthood) Synthetic- Conventional learning to be logical, deduct reason and understand abstract thought

Stage IV (20’s-30’s) Individual-Reflective marked with angst and struggle taking responsibility for FAITH beliefs.

Stage V (mid-life) Conjunctive often a look into the unconscious self

Stage VI (later stage) Universal Faith practicing compassion to all people

To read more about the stages go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler's_stages_of_faith_development

The point of investigating these stages is that often people become stuck in a certain stage and his/her FAITH becomes stagnated.   I experience many people stuck in Stage I where God is more like Santa Claus who is quite magical.  The goal of adulthood is to move toward a Universal FAITH and co-exist compassionately with all beings.  FAITH is progressive and healing when we allow ourselves to grow up.  Growing up is a part of becoming whole and embracing our FAITH by taking personal responsibility for our beliefs is part of being a healthy adult.

Shame and How it Can Effect Your Faith Negatively

Faith, spirituality, God, religion, church, dogma, and belief systems affect your life in many ways on a daily basis. Faith and religion can be unifying forces and they can also be the most divisive forces on the planet. Perhaps your family had a rule dictated that you never to talk about your religious beliefs because sometimes religious discussions can lead to many family misgivings. Do you have any of those stories in your family? On the other hand, perhaps your family was very committed to their religious system and felt a need and responsibility to share it with others, in order that they too could find the peace and solace your family enjoyed in their particular brand of faith. Perhaps, you had no particular belief system and wondered through-out your life why other people spent half of their weekends in church? Most people have stories about faith and growing up in your family of origin. It might be eye opening as you sit with your journal and list some of the memories and events that you experienced in your family about faith and religion.

Faith is a complex subject but can really assist you with shame reduction once you clear out some old scenes and scripts from your childhood belief system. However, in order to clear out the old faith scripts you really have to do some work on our own faith system.

James Fowler (1996) in his book Faithful Change: The Personal and Public Challenges of Postmodern Life echoes for us some of Erik Erickson’s work on developmental stages, but focuses on the stages of faith development. Fowler identifies seven stages of faith development as well as describes significant differences between faith and religion. He distinguishes between the two by recognizing religion as a cumulative collection of beliefs and actions practiced by groups of people who believe the same things. Faith is personal, inclusive of unconscious dynamics of formation of our individual values, morals, and beliefs. Fowler (pg.56) identifies personal faith as that which gives coherence and direction to individual lives, linking them to shared trusts and loyalties with others, and enabling the individual and/or the group to face and deal with the struggles of the daily difficulties of life.

It is the daily dealing with the difficulties of life where shame can wreak havoc with your emotional and intellectual self. If you have discovered, through my writings about shame that you suffer from large amounts of shame about whom and how you are in the world, you might view God as angry, hostile, and out to get you. Alternatively, you may believe that God has no interest in you because you are just bad to the core. Even if you grew up in a particular faith based religious group that taught you about a benevolent God who is trustworthy and on your side, it still might be a struggle for you to be able to make the emotional connection to a benevolent God because of your shame scripts. As a shame based individual that has internalized that there is something incredibly wrong with you, it may be difficult for you to tolerate positive affect in sufficient doses to believe that God could possibly love you and be on your side. Remembering that one of the positive affects is that of interest and the other of joy, a shame based individual often gives up on interest in God, faith, religion because even the idea of God being benevolent is too difficult to even entertain.



Writing exercises:

What is your first memory/thought about God?

Was there a time that God became more that just a word to you?

Was that time positive or negative?

How are your believes the same or different to those messages now?

If you were “nakedly” honest with yourself, does shame, shameful feeling, memories, or events in the past interfere with your faith in God?