The Gift of Clarity
The Gifts Healing Brings to Ourselves and the World
The Gift of Clarity
See the note at the end for an explanation of this series!
The ability to perceive situations accurately
without distortion from extreme beliefs and emotions.
The ability to maintain objectivity about a situation in which one has a vested interest.
The ability to recognize one’s own bias or preconception and then seek a deeper understanding.
—IFS Source—
By the age of 60, I had a carefully ordered concept of myself and others. I also had a story of my life that I was to learn was not untrue, but certainly lacked most of the facts that would have helped me understand that there was nothing wrong with me. It has taken me ten years to fully understand that much of what I thought was wrong with me was the result of the bad things that happened to me. This was clarity.
In Trauma in the Pews, I lament that my therapy process was never looked upon as a spiritual practice in my faith community. As I wrote the chapter on the spiritual practice of meditation, I realized the gift I had been given.
In Celebration of Discipline, meditation is framed as a practice that, “Sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.” My therapy sessions fulfilled this description. It was a process that took me deep inside my memories with the assistance of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Then, with my adult ability to process, it was possible to reflect on what took place at the deepest levels of my emotional brain. Though it was difficult to sense at the time, I do not doubt that God was present. Many attest to deeply spiritual experiences during EMDR therapy sessions. These perspective-changing sessions fulfilled the purpose of meditation.
Why had I lost the gift of clarity that was my birthright and should have been mine? I have thought about that question often and decided it was a perfect storm of many factors. (Once again clarity is at work here.)
It was not socially acceptable to talk about your problems or bad things that happened to you. Sometimes it was due to family secrets—or church secrets—but it was also a spoken or unspoken rule of society as a whole.
Shame created first by the abuse and then in the petri dish of silence also kept me silent.
Believing that whatever was wrong with me was a spiritual problem increased the need to hide the symptoms of trauma—positive spirituality was a toxic silencer.
For all these reasons, I never received the nurturing care of wise adults, friends, or counselors who would have helped me unravel what happened to me from who I was created to be. Despite this, there was an inner sense of clarity deep inside of me that kept trying to make sense of myself (and others). When healing finally arrived, the clarity about who I was created to be rang true because some part of me had always known it was true.
While healing I found a ten-year-old girl who, when asked by a Sunday school teacher to think of one thing she would request of God, said. “I would ask for wisdom.” There are many words for clarity, wisdom being one of them. Discernment would be another.
We don’t often consider young children to have clarity or possess discernment and wisdom, yet we have all heard a child speak the truth in ways that stop adults in their tracks. One of my favorite examples of this occurred while living near Pikes Peak. Since almost every day was sunny, everyone depended on that mountain to orient themselves in a city filled with winding roads. One day, our pastor’s preschool-aged daughter said, “When it is foggy, I can’t see God.” I could not have expressed it any better.
Calmness was a birthright and so is clarity. The gift of clarity also needs assembling with the help of nurturing adults who lovingly guide the child through developmental stages and acknowledge when clarity shows up in remarkable ways. Jesus understood this:
He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:2-5
What Jesus was saying is that we have to open the gifts that were our birthright. We must un-layer all that has robbed us of the gift of clarity—all the ways we buried our knowing under the pressures to be silent and conform. The thoughtful child within us has the power to see things far more clearly than we can even imagine.
As I healed, I was surprised to find that deep inside of me was a remarkable human being. Shame and religion had taught me something entirely different. It taught me that I was unworthy, flawed, and some would say, wicked. When introduced to the “8 Cs of Self Leadership”—a core concept of Internal Family Systems (IFS)—I recognized a me that had always been there but often got buried underneath layers of pain and trauma-based coping strategies. Un-layering this me was a gift I gave to myself and it has enabled me to give hope to others. For the eight days leading up to and including Christmas, I will be writing about each of these gifts that I treasure every day: Calmness, Clarity, Curiosity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, and Connectedness. These gifts, handed to us at birth, were intended to be opened in safe, nurturing childhoods but it is never too late to open the gift.